Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
A reader writes:
Just wanted to write to tell you how much I enjoy your blog and your
writing. I took the TT Reader
with me to Yellowstone: sitting by
Yellowstone lake, enjoying the view of the mountains, and reading about
ballet, modern dance, jazz, literature, etc. struck me as a triumph of
aesthetic appreciation. Thanks.
Right back at you.
– From twang twang twang, the blog of Helen Radice, a British harpist:
The passionate attachment you feel when first you discover a work of art is precious: youth orchestra concerts are so great because they are ardent (I remember in mine, a shaven-headed fifteen year old chap getting the Paul Gasgoigne award at the end of the course for crying during the Alpine Symphony). It is also easily lost. Professional music-making is gruelling. Driving through the night when you’re so tired after a concert you have to wind the window right down in January so you keep awake; red-eye flights and a lunchtime concert in Barcelona, then straight back home and teaching all day the next; pouring energy every spare moment into generating your own income or chasing those who have “forgotten” to pay you; never being sick or injured; never having time to work on your favourite repertoire because you are doing outdoor prom dates in Northumberland in October. This is why musicians can look so famously miserable on the concert platform because everybody is just so bored: another Beethoven 5; once again the 1812; I’m just going to make this contemporary music up because I can’t be arsed to practice it and I know everyone else will be so busy struggling with their own parts they won’t notice me miming at the back….
Do I ever know what Helen means, and then some. I still have horrifying nightmare-gig memories from my bass-playing days in Kansas City–as well as memories of occasional evenings of pure bliss when the band was in the pocket, my instrument seemed to be playing itself, and all I had to do was stand there and grin like an idiot. Those are the ones you live for.
– From Footnotes, the blog of West Coast dance critic Rachel Howard, who recently saw New York City Ballet dance in Orange County:
We have entered an age of the Balanchine smorgasbord. You can walk down the buffet line and pick your favorite Jewels as Miami City Ballet’s, your favorite Stravinsky Violin Concerto as San Francisco Ballet’s; your favorite Serenade as Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s. You can make a case for preferring these renditions based not on uniformity of technique, but on subtle yet crucial shadings of interpretation, intention, and mood. Whatever your argument, the conditions for it remain the same: NYCB no longer holds the monopoly of authority on how these ballets should be danced. Whether it relinquished this authority or whether that authority was bound to fade during the Balanchine diaspora remains, to me, an open question.
Perhaps to keepers of New York City Ballet history, this new laissez-faire Balanchine market is but another symptom of the sad slide they lament. But to those who came of age after Balanchine’s death, it is impossible to mourn a golden age you didn’t witness. Freed from memories of New York City Ballet under Balanchine, I was delighted to discover new dancers and to see new choreographic details in ballets, such as Rubies, that I had previously seen only other companies perform….
This shrewd observation reminds me of something I wrote in the last chapter of All in the Dances:
No less noteworthy, though, are the numerous ballet companies, most of them based in America, which are led by New York City Ballet alumni. These “Balanchine companies,” as they are known, include San Francisco Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and Carolina Ballet. All dance Balanchine’s ballets constantly and for the most part convincingly, and by the Nineties, many New York-based dancegoers had begun to wonder whether the city long known as “the dance capital of the world” was now no more than primus inter pares in the decentralized world of post-Balanchine ballet….
“You know, these are my ballets,” Balanchine told Rosemary Dunleavy, New York City Ballet’s ballet mistress. “In the years to come they will be rehearsed by other people. They will be danced by other people. But no matter what, they are still my ballets.” Of all the self-contradictory things he said about his work, that one seems to me closest to the truth. In the years since I saw my first Barocco, I have taken countless friends to see their first Balanchine ballets, in New York and elsewhere, and watched them weep at the sight of blurry, infirm performances far removed from the way such works look when lovingly set by first-string r
Please let me know via e-mail as soon as you spot All in the Dances in your local bookstore. I have yet to see it in New York, so I’d appreciate knowing where it’s on sale, how many copies are in stock, and what kind of display it’s getting.
Much obliged.
(And yes, I’ve finally answered all my accumulated blogmail. Sorry it took so long! I’d tell you I won’t let it happen again, but I know you wouldn’t believe me….)
For a guy who doesn’t like to fly, I’ve sure been spending a lot of time on the road lately: first Chicago, then North Carolina. I went down to Raleigh last Friday to see Carolina Ballet dance half a dozen ballets by George Balanchine, plus the premiere of Symposium, a major new work by Robert Weiss, the company’s artistic director. I was–as always–delighted and amazed.
My delight came from the fact that Carolina Ballet dances Balanchine’s formidably complex choreography with a stylistic assurance that can never be taken for granted, not even in the biggest of cities. Concerto Barocco, Tarantella, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Who Cares? are longtime staples of the company’s repertory, and Victoria Simon, one of the Balanchine Trust’s r
I write about Carolina Ballet with some regularity, but it occurred to me on the way back to New York that many of you might not be aware of how the company got started. To that end, here’s part of a longer piece I wrote about Robert Weiss and his dancers five years ago for the New York Times. More than a few things have changed for the better since then (though not, alas, the constant struggle to make financial ends meet), but it’s still quite a tale.
* * *
RALEIGH, N.C. — How long does it take to start a professional ballet company from scratch? Don’t try this at home, but Robert Weiss, the founding artistic director of Carolina Ballet, did it in just under two years. He answered an ad published in Dance Magazine in November of 1996; 23 months later, his new company, 21 dancers strong, made its debut here, accompanied by the 67-piece North Carolina Symphony. The company opened its doors with a demanding all-Balanchine program, and since then it has presented works by such noted choreographers as William Forsythe, Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Christopher Wheeldon, as well as two new full-evening ballets by Mr. Weiss himself.
It takes a driven man to carry off a high-wire act like that, and Mr. Weiss, a New York City Ballet alumnus known to all as “Ricky,” is nothing if not driven. A quarter-century ago, one dance writer compared him to Jimmy Porter, the seething young working-class anti-hero of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger”; at 50, he is still an in-your-face lapel-grabber, more polished but just as tough. He has had to be tough. After running Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years, Mr. Weiss ran afoul of the board and was fired in 1990. He then spent the next six years looking for a job. “I got a raw deal, and I had a very hard time,” he says. “I sent out resumes and auditioned for every post that opened up–there were 13 of them. Sometimes I’d come in second, but never first.”
You’d think a ballet company situated well below the Mason-Dixon line would have preferred someone a bit more genteel. But the Old South has changed, and though board chairman J. Ward Purrington, a Raleigh native, has a magnolia-sweet accent that any Hollywood casting director would covet, he is also a no-nonsense lawyer who speaks of Carolina Ballet as if it were a new Internet company: “What this is, is a venture start-up. You have to be lean and agile, and very, very good, and you have to grow as fast as you can.”…
After an abortive attempt to use a local dance school as the basis for a professional troupe, Mr. Purrington realized that he would have to build from the ground up, so he advertised for an artistic director; he received 98 applications, all but one consisting of fulsome cover letters and inch-thick resumes. The exception was Mr. Weiss, who sent a four-sentence letter and a one-page vita. “I’d had it up to there with looking for a job,” he says. “What did I know about North Carolina? And who was Ward Purrington, anyway?” But his bluntness impressed Mr. Purrington, and the two men started talking. Four months later, Mr. Weiss finally came in first.
“Ward said he wanted to start a ballet company on the highest level,” Mr. Weiss recalls. “I told him that every little city in America has a little company with a million-dollar budget, and they’re all trying to pander to what they think the public wants. You can’t do that if you want to do something real. You have to go for quality and seriousness, right from the start–good dancers, good ballets, good d
I’m listening to “My Ship,” from Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead, arranged by Gil Evans. Mmmmm.
Next up: The O’Kanes’ “Oh Darlin'” (recently downloaded from iTunes, thank you very much).
Tyler Green, whose Modern Art Notes
appears under the artsjournal.com umbrella, is now the art critic of Bloomberg News–an excellent choice, in which I am well pleased.
Read all about it at From the Floor, another superior art blog.
(Incidentally, Tyler never bothered to tell me the news. Shame on him! In the never-to-be-forgotten words of John L. Lewis, “He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.” So I’m a-tootin’.)
A reader writes:
A story I thought you might enjoy hearing:
My brother has no formal education, and never acquired a love of books. I doubt he’s read more than a dozen in his entire life, and he is not a young man.
Yesterday, he happened to notice a copy of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken on my bookshelf and began thumbing through it. Then,
to my great surprise, he sat down and began reading
it. Engrossed in it would be a better way of putting
it. Every so often he would look up and smile and read
aloud some terrific line from the book. Understand,
this is a guy who had never heard of Mencken before he
picked up your book. “Damn, who IS this Teachout
dude?” he asked at one point. “I’d give anything to be
able to write like he does.”
When my brother left, he took The Skeptic with him. He
promised to finish it quickly and return it promptly. I’ve no doubt he will do the former if not the latter.
I’m still smiling.
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