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Passion for fashion
My review of the Hagen & Simone/TONGUE double-header is now up on Voice of Dance:
“ODC Theater manager Rob Bailis has a flair for provocative programming. Last weekend he paired San Francisco’s Hagen & Simone with Los Angeles’s TONGUE. Hagen & Simone’s Future Perfect played up the duo’s shared obsession for fashion; TONGUE’s Tertium Quid began with a bass-pounding fashion show. One work showed moments of surprising emotional depth but needed more theatrical slickness; the other was all surface style. But the promise of each was compelling, and the shortcomings worth pondering.”
Hagen & Simone
On Hagen & Simone:
There was little of movement interest in Future Perfect—almost the only dancing consisted of Jenkinson performing ballet class moments, occasionally violated with modernist upper body (breaking the "rules" of classicism, natch). But the script, though in need of trimming, was often strong, and flashes of personal drama and thematic complexity hinted at the heart of the work waiting to be discovered through focused revision. In the most gripping section, Clarke told of throwing his grandfather’s vest away after a heckler called him "queer." And in that moment it was clear that Future Perfect was fundamentally about insecurity. Do the dictums of fashion make us insecure or do we turn to fashion to mask deeper insecurities? That question charged the show with pathos even as the ambiguously rebellious conclusion rang half-hearted.”
And on TONGUE:
“Southern California is not known as a hospitable locale to dance, and that alone makes TONGUE a success story. The eight dancers (Peter Volk also appeared as a guest) are toned, tanned, and tenacious, and choreographer Stephanie Gilliland’s aesthetic is quintessentially Los Angelean. The movement base is contact-improv inspired, but as tough as an action movie hero and as teasing as a Hollywood pole dancer. The men are brawny and bare-chested; the scantily clad women are of all shapes, some strikingly curvaceous. They roll over one another and slice the air like tomahawks and pause in muscular headstands. In one favorite and overused move, the dancers kick both legs into the air in a sideways stag, as though the rug had been pulled out from under them, then drop like bricks to the floor.”
August 31, 2004 · 12:57 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
The Season Ahead
Anita Amirrezvani, in what one hopes is not her final article on dance for the San Jose Mercury News, starts her roundup of fall’s dance events on a downbeat note:
“Fall brings with it the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area dance season, often said to be second only to New York's in size and scope. But despite the many local and touring shows on their way, the season also will reflect the sad results of ongoing cuts in government, corporate and private support for the arts.”
Meanwhile, arts and culture critic Steve Winn compiles the fall dance preview in the Chronicle, and Rita Felciano surveys the scene for the Bay Guardian.
August 29, 2004 · 11:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
It’s true: The San Jose Mercury News’ dance critic Anita Amirrezvani (click here for a taste of her thoughtful work) has been reassigned from the dance beat to the copy desk. She tells me there are no plans she knows of afoot to hire a replacement dance writer. Bay Area dance lovers will surely miss her voice in the critical conversation. Sadly, the news may not surprise readers who watched Anita’s reviews shrink to 150 word bites which the paper called “Rapid.” How you cover a company like Ballett Frankfurt in haiku form is beyond me, but Anita valiantly attempted it. Here’s hoping she finds a new outlet for her observations on dance. Dance scenes thrive on a diversity of critical opinion, and the Bay Area is poorer for the loss of her reviews.
August 28, 2004 · 12:17 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Recommended this week
--ODC Theater has a promising double feature running tonight through Saturday. Hagen and Simone, AKA the ever theatrical and fashion-minded Kevin Clarke and Monique Jenkinson, present “Future Perfect,” pairing Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” and the writings of legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. And visiting from L.A., Stephanie Gilliland’s TONGUE performs “Tertium Quid.” They also danced an excerpt from this in the West Wave Festival; trusted sources swear that slice was not the best representation of what this company can do.
Click here for details, and see you there!
August 26, 2004 · 01:03 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Birthday Bash
I’m in the Chronicle today, writing about a surprise celebration of Bay Area dance:
“You'd expect a socialite to fete her 50th birthday with dinner and dancing, but former cookie magnate and professional dancer Linda Rawlings has decided to do that formula one better.
"I thought, 'How can I give myself a birthday present?,' " Rawlings said last week from Toronto, where she was attending a wedding. "I was ruminating on turning 50 and missing the Bay Area and the dance scene there." So last month Rawlings called haute event designer and former San Francisco Arts Commission President Stanlee Gatti, who was already planning her Saturday birthday bash, and asked him to pencil in a second event.
At "A Celebration of Dance and Music," taking over the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason on Monday night, revelers will dance in the lobby and up the aisles, but most importantly on the stage, with representatives from 10 Bay Area groups each giving five-minute performances before letting loose to the sounds of Los Angeles' Durell Coleman Band and munching savories from McCall Catering. The program includes delegates from small companies like Run for Your Life and Tantrum, alongside major players like Smuin Ballet, ODC/SF and Diablo Ballet. Children from Cal Performances' Ailey Camp will take part, and, for a flashy finale, members of Ballet Counterpointe Rep will model togs by Hong Kong designer Barney Cheng.
The free extravaganza is not a fund-raiser -- "I'm asked for money all the time too," she said -- and it's not just another chance for the in-crowd to rub elbows. Rawlings has set aside a block of tickets to distribute among dancers and choreographers through local studios.”
Rawlings now sits on the boards of the Mark Morris Dance Group and UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances, and wins my admiration for earning three college degrees, leading a busy career, and raising four children. It’s still not at all clear to me how she’ll distribute the tickets set aside for members of the dance community. But if you’ve heard rumors that Mark Morris was going to perform and a big marching band was going to take over the Cowell, now you have the real scoop.
My favorite quote in the piece is from ODC/SF artistic director Brenda Way:
"How fantastic that someone would mark a milestone birthday with dancing, " Way said. "It's a wonderful statement that to celebrate major moments, we dance."
August 25, 2004 · 01:39 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Allan Ulrich reports in the Chronicle today on a new film about the
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo:
“The names and histories of those dancers -- Alicia Markova (now 93), Maria Tallchief, Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska (two of the three celebrated "baby ballerinas"), Nathalie Krassovska, Yvonne Chouteau, Frederic Franklin, Mia Slavenska, Marc Platt and George Zoritch, to cite the most prominent -- add up to a chronicle of ballet in the 20th century. Within that span, the art of classical dance traveled from its home in czarist Russia to what many observers deemed its logical destination in the United States. These people made it happen.”
The catalyst for the documentary was the company’s 2000 reunion, which inspired filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller:
"To see people that old who relied on their bodies for their whole careers, finding their bodies betraying them and still carrying on with optimism and exuberance, still working every day, is remarkable," Geller says in the couple's home and office in San Francisco's Alamo Square. "These people are examples of lives well lived."
It sounds as though the film offers plenty of glimpses of the dancers in their prime, as captured by Ann Barzel:
“The public has never seen most of this footage. True, it comprises short excerpts, it is all silent (though some is in color), and the speed varies. Yet these tantalizing glimpses of the young Tamara Toumanova in George Balanchine's "Cotillon," or Franklin and Alexandra Danilova in a number of traditional and character assignments, are a unique window on the past.”
Geller and Goldfine are the same team that made an excellent documentary about Isadora Duncan featuring many restaged dances. Keep an eye out for this new project.
August 24, 2004 · 02:43 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Speaking out
A big day for dialogue in the dance world yesterday.
In response to the New York Times article on patrons who sponsor individual dancers, Dance Magazine editor Wendy Perron writes to the paper:
“Because dance doesn't get the media support accorded movies, music and sports, dance companies cannot count on box office income and must be resourceful about fund-raising ["How Much Is That Dancer in the Program?" by Erika Kinetz, Aug. 15]. If daily newspapers like The New York Times gave more space to dance — the actual art of it — maybe more readers would attend performances and dance companies wouldn't have to resort to tactics like those described in the article.”
Robert Greskovic and Joseph Carman also pipe up to correct errors and omissions.
And former New York City Ballet dancer and memoirist Toni Bentley writes in apropos Deborah Jowitt’s engrossing new Jerome Robbins bio:
“Robbins was Salieri to Balanchine's Mozart, and we all knew it. On the Great White Way he was ''Mr. Robbins,'' the King of Broadway, but in the elevators and studios backstage at the New York State Theater he was ''Jerry,'' just ''Jerry.'' Balanchine was the Man. And he was the Man to Jerry too. Perhaps Jerry found it a relief. No one understood Balanchine's depth better than Jerome Robbins. But unlike Peter Martins, who appears to have drowned in the wake of Balanchine's enormous spirit, Robbins had the intelligence and humility to embrace it and risk living under its moral reckoning. That took considerable courage.”
August 23, 2004 · 02:24 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
The Christian Science Monitor rounds up new philosophy books for the layman. Academics may look down their noses, but I’m glad these books are out there. I would tackle a degree in philosophy if I were ever to return to school. But sometime after getting in to an MFA program and balking at the $28,000 a year in tuition, I committed myself to lifelong auto-didacticism. I make do with books supplemented by lectures from The Teaching Company (don’t laugh till you try them; they’re quite good).
And I listen to Philosophy Talk Tuesdays at noon on the Bay Area’s KALW 91.7. The show, hosted by Stanford University professors Kenneth Taylor and John Perry, is in its pilot year. The duo is no Click and Clack, as this otherwise upbeat Chronicle story strangely takes pains to emphasize, but they keep the discussions—on everything from affirmative action to “the meaning of life”—lively and on topic, and they recruit eminent guests. A master’s program in an hour a week? Of course not. But a fun way to pick up tidbits to ponder while you’re eating lunch.
CS Monitor link via Maud Newton.
August 23, 2004 · 01:59 PM · Books · Comments (0)
In previous posts I've referred to Michael Smuin's company as Smuin Ballets/SF. Alert readers will notice the company has rechristened itself Smuin Ballet. The name is much improved. The company also has a snazzy new web site, and this October's program at the Palace of Fine Arts will include a premiere by Amy Seiwert, whom many Bay Area ballet fans have their eyes on. I may actually have to attend the show just to see that piece.
August 21, 2004 · 01:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Recommended this week
August is low tide for the dance scene, but adventurous modern dance fans will likely find these shows worthwhile:
--“Three Drops of Blood” is a new multi-disciplinary series curated by the experimental music ensemble Nanos Operetta. This week’s installment includes performances by inkBoat, the stunning Balinese music group Gamelan Sekar Jaya, and the young but talented choreographer Leyya Tawil. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., at Dance Mission Theater (3316 24th Street at Mission). Tickets are $15 advance/$18 door; call (415) 273-4633.
--ODC Theater’s “House Special” presents works-in-progress, but theater manager Rob Bailis has an eye for choreographers on the verge, and last year’s installment was followed by some wonderfully open Q and A. This Saturday’s show features work by Lisa Townsend, Rachael Lincoln, and Leslie Seiters. Click here for details.
August 19, 2004 · 01:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Book Bites #3
It feels inaccurate to say I finished Julian Barnes’s The Lemon Table last week because it’s the kind of book to return to at different stages in life, finding new truths. It’s a collection of 11 stories about the awareness of mortality, a subject that rarely loosens its grip on me.
Some selections, like “The Story of Mats Israelson”—about an unacknowledged but mutual love—take place in far off countries in olden times; others, like “Knowing French”—in which a frank nursing home resident strikes up a correspondence with, well, Julian Barnes—are more ruminative than narrative-driven. Even the stories not set in England are shot through with British humor and a kind of farcical resignation in the face of physical decay that American culture could do well to embrace. In “The Revival,” the Russian playwright Turgenev gracelessly falls for a much younger actress; in the final and most resonant story, an unnamed composer whom musical detectives might recognize as Sibelius embraces “The Silence.” “[M]usic must come from silence,” he says. “Come from it and return to it.”
The “lemon table” comes from that last story, inspired by the Chinese idea of the lemon as a symbol of death. Together these tales form an imaginative space to hold that uncomfortable image in mind. To some, morbidity is an oft-investigated literary theme; to me, it is the theme that matters most. Barnes treats it with elegance and depth.
August 18, 2004 · 12:46 PM · Books · Comments (0)
Ballet in the park
Paul Parish reviews San Francisco Ballet’s Stern Grove performance for the DanceView Times. Like so much that Paul writes, the whole review is so lively that I’m tempted to quote it in its entirety, but I’ll offer just this slice:
“Last year, or was it the year before, they actually cancelled one of the trickier ballets because it was so cold. The dancers agreed to go on anyway, even though it was several degrees below what it said in their contracts they didn't have to do, and they did everything else instead.
I love going to Stern Grove. You see what the dancers are made of out there.
This year's concert yielded several more occasions to see grace under pressure . The funniest, probably was watching Vanessa Zahorian checking out the situation in front of her as she executed her variation from Makarova's "Paquita Pas de Trois" while a horizontal lady in distress was being carried directly across the sight lines on the shoulders of paramedics like the dead Sylphide. Ms. Zahorian seemed to yield pride of place to the lady—who was not by any means unconscious, but was overseeing the proceedings and trying, it seemed, to direct traffic with very expressive use of her eyes and chin—without neglecting her duty to her dance, giving each step its little life. I found myself admiring Ms. Zahorian greatly, and remembering her performance in San Jose when the Kirov Academy's "Nutcracker" came through and the lights went out all over San Jose right at the beginning of her big solo. (We watched her by the ghostly radiance of emergency illumination till an oafish stagehand came out and told us we were just going to have to wait and see if the power came back on. She was gracious on that occasion also.)”
August 17, 2004 · 12:48 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet has announced semi-finalists to replace Francia Russell and Kent Stowell and artistic directors. And the shortlist is: Peter Boal, Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary, Jeff Edwards, Benjamin Houk, and Victoria Morgan.
Link via Ballet Alert!.
August 16, 2004 · 01:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
The New York Times reports on ballet companies whose patrons sponsor dancers:
“In a surprisingly entrepreneurial move, American ballet companies have recently begun allowing donors to sponsor individual dancers, for amounts that range from $2,500 to $100,000 a year. Some ballet companies even compile and distribute rosters, which look eerily like shopping lists, specifying their dancers' ranks and prices . . .
‘The first time you look at your photo and you see where you're from and `so-and-so's artistry is supported by whoever,' " said Ethan Stiefel, a principal with Ballet Theater, "the first time it's a little different. But you get used to it.
"You have to have a practical sense of what the business of ballet is. It's kind of a fact of life of arts in America.’”
I’d seen this at ABT but had no idea the practice was this widespread . . .
August 16, 2004 · 12:36 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
I can never see Balanchine’s “Serenade” too many times—or read too many elucidating essays on it. This one is by Tom Phillips in the DanceView Times:
“Seventeen girls stand in blue light, with their feet parallel. One arm is raised, the hand flexed toward the vertical. Balanchine reportedly told them they were ‘blocking the moonlight.’ The position is un-balletic, the expression anti-romantic; but then it is transformed. Suddenly, the wrist curves and circles overhead, then downward through the center line of the body, followed by the gaze; the arms form a ballet fifth position at the hips. Then, without warning or preparation, seventeen pairs of feet suddenly turn out from parallel to first position. The floor squeaks in protest. This movement is striking in its abruptness, almost violence. The point is that it is not an impulse from within, but a discipline imposed from outside. Graham herself said the first time she saw it, tears sprang to her eyes. ‘It was simplicity itself,’ she said, ‘but the simplicity of a very great master.’”
Earlier this year I led an outing with members of my church (several of whom had never been to the ballet) to a San Francisco Ballet performance of “Serenade,” and gave a preparatory lecture on “Balanchine and Spirituality.” No surprise—they were enchanted by “Serenade,” and many were eager to see more of SFB’s season.
I think Phillips has it right when he says:
“This was Balanchine’s answer to the despair of modernism, to an age of blindness and death. For him, even death is communal, and redeemed by beauty.”
I must have seen “Serenade” a dozen times in the last year, and it moved me on every occasion.
August 13, 2004 · 04:58 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
This review by James Wood in the London Review of Books is not new, but well worth reading:
“Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart . . .
This ought not to be possible. If all those clever writers studied other writers at university, they should, in addition to producing fiction and poetry, be writing capacious essays for the mythical common reader. We should be awash in V.S. Pritchetts and Edmund Wilsons. There are many reasons why this is not so. The audience for such essays is probably smaller than it was, and certainly less cohesive. The growth of the canon, and changing attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic.”
I’ve been dipping into Wood’s new collection, The Irresponsible Self, and enjoying every page. If you’re looking for a quietly brilliant alternative to the kind of analysis Woods finds specious, it’s in his book.
Link via Maud Newton.
August 13, 2004 · 04:29 PM · Books · Comments (0)
Calling all dance review readers
The more I reflect upon the conclusion to my post “Thinking out of the Niche,” the more those final lines sound like a futile and frustrated directive to no one but myself. Last week I harped about the need to continue pitching dance criticism to the fabled general reader even as dance writing migrates to the fractionalized web. And then what should I do come Monday? Post a review written for already committed balletomanes. Why? Because a journalist naturally writes with the actual, not the idealized, audience in mind. So as that actual audience narrows, how do dance writers prove they can connect widely? I don’t have the answer.
But I know it involves rallying an audience whose members identify not as readers of dance reviews, but as general readers who happen to want to read about dance. And I think we have an excellent test case in the San Francisco Chronicle, which decided not to hire a dance critic after the departure of Octavio Roca a year ago. To be perfectly forthright as one of the stringers now providing coverage, the situation works to my advantage: I like freelancing. But the lack of outcry from the dance audience—and the reaction from the dance community itself—puzzles me.
A group of dancemakers calling themselves Choreographers in Action (or CIA) launched a write-in campaign to the Chronicle in the spring. Their tactic was for each dance company to send a press release for an upcoming performance along with a big glossy photo showing the Chronicle editors what their paper was missing out on and shaming the paper for neglecting to support the local arts. In other words, they wrote in as a special interest group demanding their right to coverage.
I admire their spunk and believe that at the very least, the CIA has tightened connections among Bay Area choreographers. But does their strategy work? Or does it inadvertently strengthen the impression that dance reviews are for a specialty audience? Because what did not come in to shore up the CIA’s position, at least according to Datebook editor David Wiegand on this Voice of Dance thread, were letters from the readers of dance reviews.
Dance review readers! Are you out there? When the Chronicle cut its book review, readers cried out and the section was restored. A campaign to get readers of dance reviews to write in—not just to the Chronicle, but to mainstream publications everywhere—now that I could really get behind.
August 12, 2004 · 03:41 PM · Dance · Comments (1)
Voice of Dance’s Allan Ulrich also reveled in San Francisco Ballet’s Stern Grove appearance:
“Having returned from its annual holiday a month ago, the S.F. Ballet is gearing up for next month’s tour to the Athens Festival and Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.
Logically, everything on Sunday’s meaty program - George Balanchine’s Ballo della Regina and The Four Temperaments, Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush and Natalia Makarova’s setting of Marius Petipa’s Paquita, of which we were shown the Pas de Trois - will be included in that tour. As a preview, this was something special. Refreshed from its vacation and with several dancers back after extended injury layoffs (the list includes Sergio Torrado, David Arce and Kristin Long), the company should leave them wanting more abroad.”
And enjoyed inkBoat’s “Ame to Ame.”
August 12, 2004 · 12:53 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Via Arts Journal, a rather touchingly earnest column on why dance criticism matters, from a Montreal critic:
"I read dance criticism—and write it—because dance still deserves more attention than it gets, despite the fact there is more dance and writing on it than ever. A case in point was an article in Time Magazine this past spring on New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon. At first I was happy to see it, but how paltry it was! Wheeldon is an artist who not only creates significant art but can speak eloquently about it and his field (see “Balanchine’s Heir Apparent”). Compared to most of his fellow dance makers, he gets far more press, but anything substantial is usually found in trade publications. In mainstream journalism, forget it."
August 11, 2004 · 01:43 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
inkBoat's "Ame to Ame," which I review in the SF Chronicle today, did not disappoint:
"'Romance' isn't a word usually associated with the Japanese dance form butoh, but inkBoat's "Ame to Ame (Candy and Rain)," which opened Friday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and repeats this weekend, manages to pull heartstrings while posing profoundly philosophical questions . . .
. . .the core of the work is the dance performances. The petite Kaseki, in her Carnaby Street Mod white minidress and knee socks, is like a wise child. Koga is an extraordinarily focused performer with a long face capable of resembling a gargoyle one moment and the visage in Edward Munch's "The Scream" the next. The unfailing intensity of their connection only underlines the tragedy of their psychic individuality."
The show repeats this weekend. For info, click here.
August 10, 2004 · 01:50 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Ann Murphy has a hybrid feature/review of San Francisco Ballet at Stern Grove. She finesses the neither-fish-nor-foul form nicely; I too have been asked to do feature/reviews for the Chron (notably one on Ballet Folklorico Amalia Hernandez last year), and I find them difficult. I'm curious as to what readers of dance reviews out there think of this form: A good way to kill two birds, journalistically? Or Frankenstein-like? I'll keep my opinion out of the matter for now.
August 10, 2004 · 01:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
life's a picnic at the ballet
San Francisco Ballet
Stern Grove, San Francisco
August 8, 2004
One of the pre-show pastimes for San Francisco Ballet’s free annual appearance at Stern Grove is predicting the weather. The odds are stacked: if memory serves, four out of the last five years a thick shroud of fog has come cascading over the eucalyptus trees while the dancers tried to stay warm and the crowd clutched their winter coats. The weather this year was ideal by San Francisco standards: an even layer of gray in the sky, but no wind chill. No sunburns, no need for sunglasses or squinting, and no worries about whether the temperature was too low for the dancers to safely take the stage.
SFB made the most of these conditions with a program that was surprisingly meaty for an afternoon in the park: two servings of Balanchine, a slice of Petipa, and for an overwhelming dessert an ambitious work by Christopher Wheeldon. Most of the time, these ballets looked just as good or better than they have on the opera house stage during the last two seasons, and the casting was top-drawer.
The moments that stayed most vividly in mind came during “The Four Temperaments,” one of the strengths of SFB’s recent Balanchine Festival. The company danced to the Hindemith as though in the cauldrons of hell, not at a summer picnic. Gonzalo Garcia, in the Melancholic variation, looked ready to throw himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. Sarah van Patten, a young and highly individualistic dancer recruited from the Royal Danish Ballet, danced the Sanguinic variation with Vadim Solomakha. If once I doubted what Helgi Tomasson so prized in her, I see it now. She is uncannily musical—the crisp correspondence of her footwork to pianist Roy Bogas’s single notes in one passage makes you wonder if her body isn’t somehow producing the sound. And she breathes drama like a perfume. She stole your eye in last season’s “Serenade,” and she did it here again in the full company finale.
The most fascinating interpretation, though, was Yuri Possokhov’s. All the balletomane picnic tables were a-twitter about his Phelgmatic: “he dances it like Petrouchka!” Indeed, he plays the sad clown-puppet with an incredible economy of facial gesture. He looks like Todd Bolender in those old photographs, dressed in the original Kurt Seligmann costumes. No one would want those distracting rags restored, but Possokhov’s rendering does make you rethink the appropriateness of character in Balanchine’s supposedly “abstract” works.
Like Sarah van Patten, Sergio Torrado is another young dancer whose quick ascendancy I questioned. Is he dancing better with a new haircut, or could his old coiffure have clouded my judgment? His longer, romantic locks flying, he made a robust cavalier to Lorena Feijoo in “Ballo della Regina.” Perhaps programming such a notoriously challenging work for less than perfect stage conditions is asking for trouble: If so, Feijoo dispensed of it quickly with a small tumble to one knee before whipping through those piqué turns and punching up those bouncing échappés. The entire cast galloped nimbly to the Verdi.
Likewise Vanessa Zahorian kept her cheery composure during her hummingbird-like solo in the “Paquita” pas de trois (drawn from Natalia Makarova's setting) as an ailing audience member was carried away. Guennadi Nedviguine delivered his uncommonly clean beats with gentle nobility. Frances Chung’s epaulement lacked sophistication, but the stretch of her feet in glissade was a delight.
A second viewing of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Rush” only confirmed my dislike for it. I’m an admirer of Wheeldon’s trio of ballets to Ligeti, and appreciate the challenge he’s bitten off in setting Bohuslav Martinu’s almost manic Sinfonettia La Jolla. It’s a big, busy, inventive work for 10 corps dancers, two principal couples, and another pair who dance the adagio sections, and it’s full of quirky shoulder rolls, torso ripples, and floorwork. But “Rush” illuminates the score only in fragments, and it suffers a confusion of tone. In one key image, repeated throughout and used as the closing tableau, the men place their partners on the floor with the women’s hands pushing against the ground. Is this merely quirky or disturbing? You can’t get a clear sense of Wheeldon’s “take” on the music to guide you.
No matter, the dancers looked ravishing. Katita Waldo and Damian Smith danced the adagio couple with elegance. Spunky Kristin Long reclaimed the stage after a long injury, making a sparkling pair with Tina LeBlanc. The orchestra heroically battled the elements under Andrew Mogrelia’s baton.
August 09, 2004 · 04:33 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
sport of the arts
And now just for fun . . . Launching this blog has connected me to an old friend in high school, who writes:
“I was reading an email about "SUMMERDANCE" in Santa Barbara and saw that a "Rachel Howard" was reviewing it and had a website. I didn't know if this was the same Rachel that slinked around the floor in 1993 with the rest of us during a fabulous rendition of Sade's work so I checked out your website.”
I am indeed the same Rachel Howard who slinked to Sade a decade ago. But let me explain.
The one question dance critics (particularly if they’re female) are constantly asked is “Are (or were) you a dancer?” Many dance writers, including Deborah Jowitt, Wendy Perron, and Gus Solomons Jr., can answer in the affirmative. Here in the Bay Area, the Contra Costa Times’ Mary Ellen Hunt puts her pointe shoes on for class five days a week.
My own reply is more tentative. I took neighborhood tap/jazz/ballet classes from age four to eight, quit because I wanted to ride horses instead, and returned to ballet (and dabbled in modern) in college. Frankly I was never very good: one of my legs is incurably turned-in, one of my feet won’t point fully, and I hit a solid double pirouette only once in my life. Besides, I prefer writing.
But the real story is this: From eighth grade on, I was a colorguard fanatic. What is colorguard? The shortest answer I can offer, “flag team,” is woefully inadequate. Today’s colorguard is much more evolved—and often bizarre—than those girls in knee-high boots and sparkly vests who used to stand next to the drum line. At Clovis High School, we marched alongside the band in the fall but had our own “Winterguard” productions, performed inside gyms. Three years in a row we traveled to the Winterguard International championships in Dayton, Ohio, where we always made the top twenty.
We spun flags, true. But we also danced, some of us more crudely than others, practicing jazz runs and chassés and grand jetés across the football field or the cafeteria floor. Colorguard began as a competition in military precision, with teams passing before the judging panels with their flags, rifles, and sabers carried in regulation formation. But by the time I joined the “Sport of the Arts” in the late eighties, west coast troupes had introduced dancing, upping the “artistic” ante.
With Clovis High colorguard, 1992 (the year before the Sade show). The supressed terror on my face is because I'm afraid I won't catch the flag pole behind my back.
The year before I entered Clovis High, the colorguard performed a “Swan Lake” to truncated Tchaikovsky, transforming the cygnets' dance with crisp flag tosses. While I was in colorguard I saw routines danced to everything from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” I even remember a rendition of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” performed, with flags, en pointe. My senior year of high school, our rivals at Clovis West donned long black dresses and skittered around the perimeter of the basketball court, pausing to pulse their torsos urgently. No one from my school recognized the costumes and the movement as deriving from Martha Graham’s “Night Journey.” We just thought the Clovis West instructors had gone kooky.
The Sade show came my junior year at Clovis High. It was a work of high camp fantasia, designed by a glamorously hip instructor named Marc whose last name, regrettably, now escapes me. We slithered and winked to “Smooth Operator” and “Cherry Pie,” wearing sparkly red pantsuits and enormous falls of fake “Barbarella” style hair. We had a purple vinyl floor with a diamond of white fake fur across which we crawled, suggestively placing our sabers between our teeth. I have the videos to prove it.
Marc's inspiration?
Also in my senior year, I moved up into the “A” corps of the Concord Blue Devils, an independent drum and bugle corps I marched with in the summers. Or should I say the World Champion Blue Devils. We won again that year in Boston, before an enormous, roaring crowd, with “My Spanish Heart,” a show designed to the music of Chick Corea. I was on the saber line that year. I could throw a Marine-style ceremonial sword in the air, watch it rotate seven times, and stop the metal blade dead in my hands before dancing off in a new direction. Ah, the nostalgia! The Blue Devils are gearing up to take the championship field in Denver tonight even as I write this. I’m with them in spirit.
Obviously colorguard wasn’t the School of American Ballet. I couldn’t hold a decent arabesque, but I could twirl a full rotation beneath a saber toss. I didn’t get my dance history until college, but I learned a thing or two about choreographic phrasing, spatial patterns, and the workings of muscle memory. I put in more work than you might imagine (the Blue Devils often practiced from nine in the morning to ten at night, sleeping on hard gym floors as we toured the country). And I had a hell of a lot of fun.
I think colorguard is a fascinating American subculture—kind of marching band meets Cirque du Soleil. Its participants are passionate—until my senior year of high school, I was determined to make a career as a colorguard instructor. Did I take the right route? I think so, but I miss the warm summer evenings with the mosquitoes buzzing around the stadium lights as we prepared for a final run-through. I’d like to write about colorguard someday. I just haven’t figured out how yet.
August 05, 2004 · 11:30 PM · Personal · Comments (1)
Thinking out of the niche
Leigh Witchel furthers our discussion on the (sidelined) place of dance criticism in mainstream journalism:
“I've had a similar conversation with Alexandra T. over at Ballet Alert. If I recall the substance of it correctly, she maintained, interestingly and arguably, that we have to think of the media as more than an instrument of response to people's interests. It forms them as well. She felt there was a time that papers operated on that assumption with a sense of cultural duty. It's easy to posit the self-perpetuating cycle of lower profits and more specialized readers leading the media to think of itself purely in terms of commercial survival.
Pretty depressing I realize, but to ask the question optimistically, can we find new ways to form popular taste?”
I agree more editors taking the initiative to offer their readership a broader range of interests would help. But let me provide a grim example of how it’s not happening.
A month ago, National Public Radio’s ombudsman wrote a gently wrist-slapping analysis of NPR’s pop music reviews. They were, he said, “incomprehensible.” But just look at the examples he cited:
“The songs themselves are the draw. They're disciplined little gems of composition, poison-pen letters set in the first person and caustic, coffee-shop observations propelled by not particularly heroic desires. The best of them tell about being deluded in love or not being able to let go of an old flame. And even under Merritt's dour storm clouds, they gleam.”
And:
“Morrissey has always seemed to be a walking paradox, both playful and morose, ambiguously asexual, political but hopelessly self-involved, which is why You Are the Quarry is still a classic Morrissey album. Songs like "All the Lazy Dykes" and "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" serve up such themes in spades. But his usual inclination towards detachment ends there. And the new Morrissey, the older Morrissey, the wiser Morrissey, the Morrissey of this moment is unafraid to show a more personal side, venting his soul with songs like "Irish Blood, English Heart" about his withering sense of nationalism and, of course, the starkly brave and confessional accusation of Christianity entitled "I Have Forgiven Jesus."
Both perfectly comprehensible to me (and to Terry Teachout). In fact I remember these reviews catching my ear and holding my attention when they first aired. But then, I’m not a member of NPR’s base demographic. The real problem, it seems, is that these reviews made NPR’s older listeners feel unhip. And because those listeners feel an ownership of NPR, they wrote in—crankily.
The ombudsman’s conclusion is a misguided one. He believes the network should pull smart pop reviews like these and run soft features on pop music instead. But the pop reviews—not the stories on, say, how Timbaland found inspiration in “The Lord of the Rings”—snagged me, and I venture they would snag other younger listeners too. And the listeners who were incensed because they were made to feel unhip are hardly going to abandon NPR because they have to sit through a three-minute pop review. They’re vociferous, but if you heed their every complaint, you’re going to lose a potential new audience and gain nothing.
What is the moral here for dance writing? After all, just as pop reviews are considered a niche on NPR, so is dance writing considered in most publications. I take away two points: We need to build a committed, vocal audience that speaks to newspaper and magazine editors not as uppity representatives of a special interest but as general readers who happen to like the dance reviews. And we need to do what we have the most power to do: write well, and write for a broader audience. In the above article on NPR’s pop reviews, the review excerpts themselves are the best evidence against the ombudsman’s argument. We need to stop hand-wringing over sociological factors we can’t control and start building our arsenal of evidence that dance writing can engage a wider readership.
August 04, 2004 · 01:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Other takes on West Wave
For those who caught the West Wave Dance Festival and would like an alternative to my impressions, let me steer you to some excellent sources. Voice of Dance offers Allan Ulrich on programs three and four. Meanwhile the Dance View Times has Christopher Correa on program two and Ann Murphy on program three. Correa is a new name to me and, from what I can gather on the Internet, quite young—though you would never guess it from his writing. It’s nice to welcome a smart new voice to the scene.
August 03, 2004 · 02:50 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the Margins
Sandra Kurtz and Leigh Witchel, both of whom I enjoy reading at Ballet Alert! (and Leigh at Dance View Times, post some thoughtful comments to “Damning with Fulsome Praise?”
Leigh writes:
“It is sad that the byproduct of the Internet is the specialization of the reader. But when Bill Keller, editor at the NY Times, calls people who read dance and opera reviews a niche market as he did in an interview with the LA Times, he's counted us out of the general readership. How do we reconvince mainstream publications that the fine arts are not a specialized interest, but a necessary part of cultural literacy?”
And Sandra writes:
“Several years ago, at a Dance Critics Association conference, we had a panel on changes in dance writing as it moves to the 'net, and one of the phenomenon discussed was something then called "point casting" -- the method through which the reader (or, more ominously, the publisher) could tailor news to the specific reader. As a reader you could request to see only certain parts of a publication -- as a publisher/distributor you could use that information to track other, specialized, material to that reader. I don't know that this potential is always utilized, but I do know that the weekly paper I write for tracks individual "hits" on section of the website quite thoroughly. And that every time I as a reader go to a specific part of any web publication they have the capacity to put a "check" in that particular "box." We have, as readers, in many ways participated in our own marginalization.”
Leigh’s final question is a tough one. Newspapers and magazines are simply responding to what they perceive their audience wants. That’s why I think reader engagement is key. If a newspaper’s subscribers wrote letters to the editor on dance with one-tenth the frequency with which they respond to movie reviews, we’d see a lot more space for dance coverage. I like to think it’s not just a personal pipe dream of mine that this could happen.
I’m not sure if the DCA conference to which Sandra refers is the same one I attended in 2003. The Nation’s Victor Navasky and the NY Times’ John Rockwell spoke to us with grim news about the increasingly sidelined place of dance—and indeed all the “high” arts—in even culturally literate publications. All kinds of sociological explanations—many of them accurate, I’m sure—were given. But what frustrated me was the scant time given to finding solutions. I hate to be simplistic, but I think as dance writers the number one thing we can do is focus on the writing—i.e., take pains to write for a general audience even as all signs point to that audience diminishing. This does not mean “dumbing down.” One of the things I admire in Joan Acocella’s work for the New Yorker is that it’s intelligent without presupposing historical or technical knowledge of dance on the part of the reader. Any culturally literate person could stumble across one of her reviews and engage with it.
Of course, there is always an important place for specialists and the specialist audience. But as more dance writers migrate to the Internet, as dance coverage withers in general interest publications, it’s incumbent upon those of us so inclined to try to write for people both inside and outside the dance world. If we accept that dance today belongs in the margins, we may write ourselves right off the page.
August 03, 2004 · 02:34 PM · Dance · Comments (1)
Still ailing
West Wave Dance Festival program #4
Cowell Theater, San Francisco
August 1, 2004
The shingles took me down a few more notches than expected. I had to skip Mary Armentrout’s show Friday--actually, I showed up at 7:45 only to learn the show started at 8:30 and lose heart. And I had to ask Janice Berman to take over my review of the West Wave Dance Festival’s program four for the Chronicle (many thanks for stepping in, Janice).
But yesterday, still nauseated but recovering, I could not resist taking a cab to the Cowell Theater for the final show. The big draws were premieres by Benjamin Levy and Amy Seiwert, two choreographers I’ve been watching out for over the last year and a half. They were worth it, and the program as a whole, with one baffling exception, was a delight. Since I was a bit drugged, what I offer here is snap commentary, not a review.
Levy is a young UC Berkeley grad with a remarkable gift for densely layered, kinesthetically detailed modern dance. His aesthetic tends to be futuristic and brutal yet beautiful: “Holding Pattern,” like several other Levy works I’ve seen, was set to mechanistic music (in this case by Matthew Johnson) and costumed (in slashed space suits) by Wendy Sparks. Cambria Garell and Lauren Slater stood defiantly in the background as Christopher Hojin Lee caught his own arm as though to prevent himself from committing violence. One girl returned to push his chest, which rippled through him like an electrical current. Their entwined duet was full of inventive partnering—at one moment, she slid into a shoulder stand and he dove to balance upon her split leg. When the second girl entered their trio was a waterfall of cascading bodies. Finally the two girls left, chained to one another. “Holding Pattern” was engrossing.
Seiwert is a fine technician with Smuin Ballets/SF who’s proven adept at twisty pas de deux and interesting ensemble spacing; she contorts the classical vocabulary with extreme flexibility, perhaps influenced by William Forsythe. For “End Quote,” her infelicitously titled company im-ij-re looked like a “Who’s Who” of former Oakland Ballet members. Set to Andrea Parker’s now lush, now stark music, the piece was anchored by male-female duets, with forays into all-female unison and a shadow-lit all-male section. The duets had lovely moments, especially some very pretty lifts, but some of the unison sections looked a bit like an avant-garde dance competition. Motifs were introduced—a woman hoisted by her partner walking upside-down, for instance—but they didn’t thread through with the force of logic. I don’t think it’s a breakthrough work for Seiwert, but it’s a fine addition to her continuing development and yet another demonstration of her considerable skills. And the dancers—especially Phaedra Jarrett, Lynlee Towne, Ethan White, Vanessa Thiessen, and Seiwert herself—looked chiseled and fabulous.
Among the other three works, Liss Fain’s “The Unknown Land” proved a pleasant surprise. She chose a very difficult piece of music in Ligeti’s piano concerto and tackled it straight on, with the full ensemble of eight rushing in. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing Alonzo King’s influence in the hinged-from-the-hip positions, but the heady use of stage space was all her own. I especially liked the way the dancers lurked in the shadows during the menacing slow sections, creeping by like forest goblins. This piece is worth a second look.
“Three Quartets,” created and performed by Annie Rosenthal Parr, Ashley Holladay, Patricia Jiron, and Julie Kane, was solidly built upon eye-arresting gestures (like applause that deteriorated into hand-wiping), but presented a flat line of monotone intensity. Jiron’s zany energy spiced it up. And Ken James’s “The Appetites of Gluttony” left me cold. Cynthia Adams, Ann Berman, and Julie Sheets (an intriguing enough trio) crossed the stage shouting “duck!” and placing little ceramic duckies. By work’s end, little dancing had transpired and one duck had bit the dust.
August 02, 2004 · 04:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Damning with fulsome praise?
Allan Ulrich jumps into the discussion about Octavio Roca’s reclycling with his usual ferocity. Allan takes seriously the charge that Roca’s actions smear critics as a class:
“Nevertheless, any lapse in ethical standards on the part of one critic makes all critics suspect. Many readers and editors still don’t consider us quite legitimate, and every time a critic is fired for recycling or reviewing an event in absentia or committing a crime while in a paper’s employ or using a position for ulterior motives, editors simply find one more reason for not hiring a successor. Critics, editors feel, are deemed more trouble than they are worth. So, let’s not gloat too long, folks.”
He sounds weary of the debate over just what crimes Roca committed, but he raises some important and provocative points about the proper role of dance criticism:
“[I]f these frustrated scribes claimed that newspapers should have staff dance critics because dance is an infinitely fascinating subject worthy of discussion in a large circulation newspaper in 2004, I could buy it.
But no, the argument goes something like: "All those poor dance companies will wither if they’re not reviewed." The presumption here is that critics, as a matter of course, should use their bully pulpits in praise of what they find in their communities. They believe, in their self-aggrandizing way, that to find fault with a local favorite is to consign this choreographer to oblivion. Never mind that, back in the 1930s, John Martin’s doubts about Martha Graham scarcely impeded the progress of that seminal artist; and not all the Balanchine ballets we celebrate as masterpieces today were thus greeted at their premieres.
To enter into dance criticism because you feel you should boost local talent, rather than examining it as objectively as you can, seems like do-goodism misplaced, an ethical lapse almost on a par with Roca’s. I sometimes read Bay Area reviews that suggest the successor to Margot Fonteyn is slaving away in a studio in Walnut Creek, waiting to be discovered. Where does validation end and sheer dishonesty begin? No wonder prospective audiences don’t trust critics. Too many dance critics write with dancers, rather than audiences, in mind. Do you wonder why readers often feel left out of the critical process?”
It’s the last three sentences that rally me. The delivery is perhaps harsh, but the warning is, I believe, well taken. Although it’s not unwarranted praise I worry about so much as the increasingly technical and insider tone of reviews. As serious dance writing increasingly migrates to the web (and thank God we have an outlet for it), dance writers can take for granted that the readers who seek them out online are dancers, choreographers, and hardcore dance fans. We have very few dance critics today who write to engage with a general audience—the reader who, perhaps looking for a book review, stops and lingers over the critique of last week’s ballet. Dance criticism is drawing its circle of readership tighter and tighter, a trend the Internet, with its specialized groups of readers, is encouraging. It’s a question of whom you write for—whether the review is laudatory or damning.
August 02, 2004 · 02:25 PM · Dance · Comments (2)
