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May 12, 2005

Dance Shorts

Some dance tidbits I’ve been storing up to share:

--Valerie Gladstone travels to Spain to survey the grotesqueries of flamenco’s commercialization:

“The Pagés Company's "Songs Before a War" ("Canciones, Antes de una Guerra") showed clearly that commercial success is not necessarily a good thing. Ms. Pagés, who won a wide following in the flamenco segment of "Riverdance," was trying to use this soulful, ancient dance to convey an antiwar message. Supplanting the usual keening vocals and thrumming guitars with popular music associated with war, she kicked up her heels to Louis Armstrong's "When the Saints Go Marching In" and to African songs sung by Tsidii Le Loka. In the final moments, a curtain painted with a map of the world unfurled behind the performers as John Lennon's "Imagine" played over the sound system.

Ms. Pagés, who will take "Canciones" to the International Festival of Music and Dance in Granada in June, is sinuous and eloquent when dancing traditional flamenco, and she knows how to move dancers around the stage. But this show, with its corny, incongruous elements, proved simply labored.

And it is not alone.”

--Chronicle sports columnist CW Nevius takes notes on the similarities between soccer dads and ballet parents:

“OK, it isn't exactly like a soccer match where a coach socks a referee, but it can be close.

"Maybe the difference is that you don't have parents screaming at them during a performance," says Ossala. "But you do get parents going to teachers and wondering, why don't you promote little Johnny? He's so perfect." “

--On a belated Mother’s Day note, Montreal’s Kena Herod ponders the pas de deux from a maternal perspective:

“It had been ages since I last saw The Sleeping Beauty, and it was the first time since becoming a mother. The curse laid on Aurora and the horror of the princess’s parents took on a whole new meaning.

Later, my eyes filled with tears as I witnessed the “Rose Adagio” of the radiant sixteen-year-old beauty. For don’t all parents hope their daughters will turn out to be as gracious and loving as Aurora? Don’t we all hope, whatever our feminist beliefs, that our daughters will be beautiful too, or at least attractive? (Too much beauty can be a curse, as poet W. B. Yeats wrote in “A Prayer for my Daughter.”) Do we not wish for our children, girls or boys, partners who will—like the prince—do whatever it takes to prove themselves worthy of our precious offspring?”

--And in the New Yorker, Joan Acocella has a pair of articles, the first a quick jaunt through the disparate seasons of the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Mark Morris Group, and the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble:

“One thing that united all these performances was live music. The Graham company had an orchestra of twenty-eight; the Morris troupe, six instrumentalists and eight singers; Nrityagram, three instrumentalists and a vocalist. I don’t know how Nrityagram works out its finances, but the music bill for the Morris company’s four performances was thirty-five thousand dollars; the musicians for the Graham troupe’s two-week season cost a hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars. In these days of near-zero public funding for dance, one assumes that the companies more or less killed themselves to raise that money, and the result made all the difference in the world. Dance audiences, I believe, have now got used to taped music, and you can get used to it, the same way you can learn to eat Spam instead of ham, or breathe smog instead of air. Your life is just diminished, and you don’t realize it until you see concerts such as we saw last month.”

The second is a Talk of the Town profile on 66-year-old retiring Alvin Ailey dancer Dudley Williams:

“He always told the people he worked for that he didn’t want to do any partnering. This choice may have been partly practical—Williams weighs a hundred and thirty pounds—but he says it was a point of pride: “I don’t want to carry anybody around the stage. I want to dance. I want it to be me.” The refusal paid off, he believes. He got “special things,” solos. To his fans, probably the most special thing he ever danced was the “I Want to Be Ready” section of “Revelations.” In this number, set to a Negro spiritual about renouncing sin, a man in white struggles to rise from the floor. Williams’s specialty is contained emotion, and that was perfect for this soul-testing dance.”

Links via Arts Journal.

Posted by Rachel at May 12, 2005 08:51 AM

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