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Must-See: Scott Wells and Dancers
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The more I see of scrappy stuntman Scott Wells, the more I become an evangelizer for his work. It's the best-kept secret on the San Francisco dance scene: wild yet carefully crafted, slouchy yet smart--and oh, yes, as you can see from the photo above, it's a spectacle. His company's 15th anniversary season continues at ODC Theater this weekend, and I can't imagine who wouldn't relish it. There are two new giggle-inducing dances for eight men, one involving balance beams and lovingly satirizing everything from Mary Lou Retton to "Les Sylphides;" in the other, the guys sit around grunting as though on a New Age male-bonding retreat, then cheer on a contact improvisation jam as though calling out a boxing match.
Voice of Dance's Allan Ulrich loved the show; I profiled Wells for Sunday's Chronicle. The deepest and most thoughtful appreciation, though, comes from Paul Parish in this month's San Francisco Magazine. He writes about Wells as only one who "follow{s} Wells as some movie-goers followed Kieslowski," as he once admitted, could--and he explains how Wells manages to make an inherently non-theatrical form like contact improv wittily, side-splittingly theatrical. So pick up the magazine if you can, but by all means check out the show.
June 27, 2007 · 04:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Pity the dance critic who raises the ire of James Wolcott. From Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog:
"When Alastair Macaulay springs a leak, it's a gusher.
Gush--gushy praise and tender teardrops--has been Macaulay's chief export since being named first-string dance critic of The New York Times, replacing John Rockwell, who had ironing to do. I first became acquainted with Macaulay's dance criticism--probably most of us strapping balletomanes did--when he subbed for Arlene Croce twice at The New Yorker during her tours of duty with the Israeli Air Force, first in 1988 and again in 1992. What I remember about his New Yorker reviews was their frictionless, informed, unforced urbanity; his prose had a smooth, even spread, like Brendan Gill's minus Gill's boisterous, gentleman's-club bonhomie. I also followed Macaulay after he joined the salmon pages of the Financial Times, where his reviews were distributed in smaller doses. There, like most Brit crits, he doled out the praise and demerits with smart, light little dabs, seldom making large claims but seldom sticking in a gratuitous dig either. When it was announced that Macaulay would take over the dance spot at the Times, I assumed he was bringing his elegant sheen with him, that he might class up the dump. Such foolish hopes. Yet again I overestimated the human animal, as I so often do when I extend the benefit of the doubt. Sometime during the transatlantic flight Senor Suavity seems to have transformed into a complete hayseed who writes as if he's pinning corsages with each compliment and who inserts himself into the nougat center of every review. Perhaps the pale enamel of Croce's Mother Superior austerity inhibited Macaulay during his first American sojourns, but now that she's vacated the scene to her mink ranch in Rhode Island, he's free to express every quivering sentiment and glandular effusion he once stored below deck, lathering and slathering his prose with palmfuls of the "simple creamy English charm" that was the blight and despair of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Worse, the cream has curdled, and the charm is so unctuous it seems to be begging for applause."
Lest you wonder how Wolcott finds the time to be so au courant in dance criticism, he is married to New Criterion dance critic Laura Jacobs.
Via Ballet Alert.
June 26, 2007 · 01:15 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
My very good friend and much admired fellow member of my writers group, Lindsey Crittenden, has a personal essay today in the New York Times. It's about sorting through her parents' belongings after both had died, and it's poignant and beautiful. Here's a snippet:
"One day I turned to Photos & Stuff, six boxes labeled in my father’s chicken scratch. I reached for the box cutter, but the cardboard was so soft that the flaps almost fell apart in my hands as I started sneezing from the dust. These were old boxes, the contents in no particular order.
The year of my birth seemed as good an organizational device as any, so I made two piles, Before 1961 and After 1961, and draped a Hefty bag over a chair for trash. Most decisions came easily. I didn’t need two pictures of blurry pink bougainvillea against a whitewashed wall, or 10 shots of my nephew with his chubby fist in his first birthday cake. But the accumulated glimpses — Mom’s smile, Dad’s eyes crinkled in laughter — added up and, after 10 minutes, I was worn out.
I was halfway through a roll from a trip my parents had taken to Grand Teton National Park in 1995, flinging scenic vista after scenic vista into the Hefty bag, when my hand stopped. A shot of a wooden chapel on the edge of a field glorious with lupine. I recognized the scene from a moment of family lore: in 1970 my brother, then 3, had walked into that empty chapel to recite the Lord’s Prayer without prompt. He’d died in 1994, the year before Mom returned to the spot and took the photo.
I wasn’t just the person deciding which pile it went into; I was the only person alive who understood why it had been taken in the first place. If I threw it away, I was throwing away layers of emotion and association and identity. And if I kept it, well what then? "
Read the rest here.
"The Water Will Hold You," Lindsey's recently published memoir, is exquisite too, by the way. "Exquisite" is the word I used in the quote I provided for the jacket, but I'm hardly alone in the sentiment: Publishers Weekly called the book "exquisitely written" in a starred review. Check out Lindsey's book here.
June 21, 2007 · 12:28 PM · Books · Comments (0)
Back from Chicago, where I had a wonderful time meeting Dance/USA members from around the country and hearing Vanderbilt sociology professor Steven Tepper discuss his forthcoming book (co-edited with Bill Ivey) “Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Social Life” at Friday morning’s opening session. From the synopsis provided, the book seems to synthesize a great deal of research as well as an astute understanding of trends from blogging, online communities, and the ease of producing art due to cheaply available technologies (think Mac’s “Garage Band”) to propose that art in America is entering a new “folk art” period of “amateur art makers” who are happy to pursue their music or writing or dancing or painting in their free time and no longer see art-making as such a rarified professional realm. The message Tepper offered for choreographers and presenters was that audiences today don’t want to simply enter the theater and consume art like a product; they want to engage with it, have the curtain drawn back on the process of creating it, be in relationship with it. He talked about the popularity of shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” (and took an interesting impromptu poll—about half of the choreographers and presenters detested “Dancing with the Stars” and about half liked it) as reflecting this new ethos that anyone can be an artist. And he offered a lesson: The old model for presenters and dance companies, Tepper said, was offering audiences value; instead they should be offering the chance to create meaning.
I haven’t read the book yet, and so can’t offer much response to its theories, but I was especially struck by Tepper’s yoking of three obvious trends: the rise of the amateur, the audiences’ desire to be in relationship or dialogue rather than spoken to from on high, and the desire to have the “curtain drawn back” and be behind the scenes. I wondered what they meant for me as a dance writer.
The panel I served on, just after Tepper’s, was practically oriented, so I didn’t theorize much. Instead, as the representative blogger speaking on “Connecting with Audiences via the Press, the Web, and In-Person,” I pointed out some of my favorite dance blogs (culled from the list of 70 and growing on Doug Fox’s Great Dance): The Winger, Apollinaire Scherr, Ann Murphy, for starters. I talked about the ease and cheapness of blogging, the way it allowed me to sustain a dance writing presence back when the Chronicle wasn’t using me much, and the way it’s allowed me to be in direct dialogue with my readers, even though I haven’t exploited this fully for some time. And I exhorted choreographers and companies to try launching their own blogs.
Meanwhile, the Boston Herald’s Theodore Bale gave nuts and bolts tips on getting your dance company covered in the newspaper (that old chestnut, have strong photographs), and our moderator Suzanne Carbonneau talked about offering program notes and pre-performance talks, etc. Doug McLennan, founder of the indispensable arts news aggregating site Arts Journal, laid out the new media landscape for the crowd: newspapers are suffering because they haven’t figured out how to monetize the web, and we’re in an awkward phase of not knowing what model will replace them.
I hope the panel was useful. But I kept thinking of all that Tepper had said during the earlier panel. And I wondered if, despite all my evangelizing, the migration of dance writing from newspapers and onto the web weren’t so bad for dance and dance writing at all, but only for me personally. After all, the unpaid writing found at the online DanceView Times is as informed and insightful or often far moreso than what can be found printed in the dailies, even if it speaks directly to a dance audience rather than a broader public. Do dance reviews in newspapers ever draw general readers to dance anyway, or is that a naïve fantasy? Perhaps it is simply more efficient to let dance lovers find what they want to read directly online, and write directly for them.
Perhaps I mostly bemoan the leeching of arts coverage from print publications because I happen to want to make a living at it, and happen to cherish an ideal of writing for the widest audience possible.
But with many competent and even dazzlingly talented dance writers willing to write for free, is the dance world any worse off?
And, a forecast: Perhaps the writers who will make it through this new media/old media shakeout are the ones who take full advantage of blogging and the web to relentlessly self-promote, to build their audiences directly instead of relying on print publications as portals, to cultivate their personal “brand” as a writer. Perhaps the writers who make it are the ones who figure out how to convert their web presence, via advertising or some other channel, to income.
I don’t think I’m enterprising enough for this new landscape.
INCIDENTALLY: Doug’s Arts Journal is hosting a group blog conversation about the new book “Engaging Art,” in anticipation of the Nashville conference “Every City, Music City,” here.
June 19, 2007 · 12:12 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
I'm at the Dance/USA Spring Council in Chicago, speaking on a panel titled "Connecting with Audiences Via the Press, Web and In-Person." I'm the panel's representative blogger, a role I find ironic since, although I was one of the first dance bloggers when I launched this site in 2003, I've hardly written any posts over the last year, using this venue instead to link to my Chronicle stories. I also find it ironic since, even though I was here relatively early, I've never been a blog evangelizer. I've always been an advocate for keeping dance prominently in the pages of print publications instead, clinging to the perhaps nostalgic notion of that general reader who might happen upon a dance review over her morning coffee, get sucked in by that first sentence, and start reading about dance even though she had no intention of doing so when she picked up the paper.
That notion seems even quainter this week as the San Francisco Chronicle continues to hand pink slips to the 100 newsroom employees who won't survive the paper's latest round of budget cuts. For once, I'm in a relatively cushy position as a freelancer, watching the layoffs from the outside even as I wonder what future the paper can possibly hold for me in the midst of such a crisis. It's dark times at the Chronicle, and though I know few editorial employees there beyond my direct editors, I feel for those losing their jobs, and I can't help but share the grim mood. Remember when the San Francisco dance community was actually mounting a pressure campaign upon executive editor Phil Bronstein to hire a full-time Chronicle dance critic? How luxurious those days now seem.
So: blogging. It's cheap, it's easy, it's quite good depending on the individual writer, it's unpaid, and it's read by specialized, fragmented audiences. Is this what dance writing is left with?
Also, I'm hearing murmurs of discontent among the dance community with new Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay. To which I say: Macaulay is the best thing to happen to American dance coverage in at least 15 years, a voice at the Times who writes passionately and for a wide audience. He's given me a fresh level of liveliness to aspire to--I believe my own dance reviews are improved now that I'm regularly reading his. To lament Macaulay's hiring because he's shaking things up, or beacuse of one particular cringe-inducing review is, I believe, incredibly short-sighted at a time when professional dance writing can't afford myopia.
So enough with the funereal grumblings. My intent on tomorrow's panel is to be as practically useful to the attendees as possible. Who knows where the Q and A might lead. If the excursions prove interesting, I will post about them here.
June 14, 2007 · 09:39 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, always one big happy party, starts this week. My preview in yesterday's Chronicle:
"Charya Burt fans her fingers like an exotic flower, lowers to her knees with her back leg bent skyward and bounces gently to the xylophone-like tones of a Cambodian roneat ek. It's a warm spring day in a Santa Rosa high school auditorium, but Burt is wearing traditional Cambodian attire: tight silk bodice, folded sarong pants -- and, far more unusual -- a microphone pack with a black wire snaking up her back.
Her throaty voice sounds natural as birdsong, but for a dancer to also sing is revolutionary in Cambodian classical dance. Even more extraordinary are the words that follow: "Isolated from tomorrow, surrounded by beautiful antiquities, surrounded by loneliness," she says, then takes tiny soft steps as her arms form exquisitely sculpted arcs.
This is Burt's new Cambodian dance take on Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," titled "Blue Roses" and depicting the fearful loneliness of a Cambodian princess instead of a fragile Southern belle. That may sound bold enough, but some of the real risk-taking is in the subtleties. In addition to musicians on the roneat ek and sompho drum, a violinist and cellist sit onstage, playing melodies created for Cambodian Pinpeat orchestra on Western instruments. "This was a way to merge the two cultures together, because I'm influenced by Western culture and Cambodian," Burt explains during a rehearsal break, her softly smiling face as serene as in performance. "I want to create living art, not a museum where you can't touch."
Burt is far from the only "traditional" dance artist acting on this sentiment. At this month's 29th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival -- during which Burt's "Blue Roses" will premiere on the second of three programs -- you can see just about every dance form imaginable: Chinese lion dances and Spanish flamenco, hip-shaking Tahitian spectacles and smoothly gliding Korean rituals. But much of what you will see this year will be brand new. Of the 29 Bay Area groups taking over the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre's stage, eight will present world premieres. Four of these are commissioned by the festival's producer, World Arts West, but the new works are also coming forward unprompted, in traditions as differing as Mexican folklorico and Indian odissi, West African and Filipino folk.
"Something's happening across the field," says Worlds Arts West Executive Director Julie Mushet. "So many of the performances this year are thrilling because you see a shift in perception, that these are not static forms. Anyone who sees Charya's piece will understand that Cambodian classical dance is still evolving." "
Click here for the full piece, including the story of Charya Burt's training in Cambodia, where an estimated 80 percent of traditional dance artists died under the Khmer Rouge.
June 04, 2007 · 02:23 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
