foot in mouth: March 2009 Archives

This winter, a deadline forced me to miss Janie Taylor in Balanchine's "La Valse" at New York City Ballet. I felt even more gloom than usual at missing her--I try to catch everything she does--because the reviews confirmed, as Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic at the New York Times, wrote, that

no other recent interpreter... is so right for the heroine as the febrile, driven Janie Taylor. The piece begins to Ravel's "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales." Ms. Taylor enters to the eighth and final waltz, and at once she shows the morbidly curious nervous system that is at the ballet's heart. She stretches out into the dark as though it will answer her needs. [And it does. With Taylor, the darkness always does.]

"It's applying a museum curatorial approach to live art practice, and by 'live' I mean of the moment," said Simon Dove, who left the Springdance festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to become chairman of the dance department of the Herberger College of the Arts at Arizona State University last year. "A museum approach is a way of holding on to something that by its very nature cannot be held onto."

[And Tere O'Connor:] "My art is a lens I see the world through: it's not about the product as much as it is about me looking forward."

I'm with Dance Theater Workshop's artistic director, Carla Peterson, though, who

spoke out against "the tyranny of commonly accepted wisdom" that she said fetishizes the ephemeral nature of dance.

About a year ago, a rough draft of Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory" at the La Mama Festival jumpstarted all sorts of memories for me, and now it's back in full: at Danspace Project this Thursday through Sunday.

The esteemed Eva Yaa Asantewaa, irregular Foot contributor, has a half-hour interview with Barnett here on her blog, Infinite Body.

I love Eva's interview style--her engagement and clarity, the way she follows up on questions, the way she nudges her subjects along without ever betraying one iota of impatience. Julian Barnett, on the other hand, reminds me of the gulf that exists between the way certain choreographers (usually in a postmodern vein and usually under 40) talk and the way they dance and choreograph.

When talking, the most fierce and engaging of movers can be overtaken by a wayward vagueness, a tendency toward the most banal of abstractions. I'm guessing they're trying to get their minds around something they know best from moving or watching others move, and English isn't helping them. It's as if they understood language as a repository for all that doesn't have a place in the world, as if they'd never encountered an active verb, a concrete noun, a verb in the imperative or vocative mood.

It drives me crazy.

But I'm guessing "Sound Memory" in full will be a real trip, as people used to say. The last time, anyway, it took me far and near.

Postscript Monday March 16, evening (we had an email back-and-forth that yielded some insights...):

All the best,

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Body and Soul podcast

http://infinitebody.blogspot.com

Apollinaire: I hear you, Eva, but I don't understand the degree of fuzziness that so many dance artists seem to require of themselves. That's the weird part: they seem to be working toward vagueness.

Eva: Specificity is not on the menu for many because they are, almost to a person, reluctant to direct the audience or provide answers in their work, let alone in a preview interview about it. I kinda understand that. At the same time, it makes my project a bit more challenging. I'm hoping most listeners will hear within and around what's actually said.

Apollinaire: I think you've hit on it, Eva! They don't want to prescribe our response. But they don't realize how powerful both we and they are: that we're not Pods, we're not preprogrammable, and the dance isn't something we read like a book, anyway; we move with it as we like, whatever anyone has said beforehand.

Eva: Yes, it's such a powerful artform. Think of it: the basic medium is the body, the same body that the dancer lives in and walks around in and feeds every day. If non-dancers really stopped to think about that, really think about it, it might electrify them. I would think it might transform them and the way they live in their own skin. It's really the spookiest art in that way. The daily and quite difficult honing of the body to deliver the energies and information of art: It's a mission, it's a shamanic commitment.

Apollinaire: Amen!

My friend Paul Parish, irregular Foot contributor, writes from the Bay Area:

The world sure is looking unfamiliar -- not unrecognizable, just distorted and actually "on-the-morph."

San Francisco Ballet's "Swan Lake" did unbelievable box office. Two million dollars in sales, biggest box office ever for SFB. High ticket prices, of course. Standing room's gone up to 20 bucks, and standing room was jostling, 4-5 people deep at the back of the orchestra. Plus, they put another crowd up in the balcony....

My hunch is that in alarming times, ballet -- maybe dance of any kind, but especially the kind with a steady beat - becomes something that people find emotionally helpful -- not necessarily an escape, more like a lifesaver, something that buoys them up. It certainly happened in the '30s and '40s, when ballet first took hold here. During the war, everybody commented on the exponential growth in the audience's numbers and fascination...

Right now movies and bars and ballet are doing real well.

Here is Paul's gracious review of the "Swan Lake" that's breaking box-office records. And here's hoping for an update after further viewings (nudge, nudge...).