Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
George Balanchine’s Square Dance, choreographed in 1957 to the music of Corelli and Vivaldi. In this performance, telecast on The Bell Telephone Hour in 1963, the principal dancers are Patricia Wilde and Nicholas Magallanes and the square-dance caller is Elisha Keeler:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.”
The Journal of Jules Renard (entry, July 1902)
From 2007:
Kyra Nichols, the prima ballerina assoluta of New York City Ballet, hung up her toe shoes last Friday. She danced with the company for thirty-three years, all the way back to the fast-receding days of George Balanchine. Except for Darci Kistler, she is the last NYCB dancer to have worked with Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century.
I’ve been watching Nichols from afar ever since I started looking at ballet in 1987. Throughout that time she has been my touchstone of excellence….
Read the whole thing here.
“I know, after all, that the works which in every way arouse one’s dislike are precisely those the next generation will in every way like. And the better the jokes one makes about them, the more seriously one will have to take them.”
Arnold Schoenberg (quoted in Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times)
A scene from They Were Expendable, originally released in 1945, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. The screenplay was adapted by Frank Wead from William L. White’s book. The poem recited by Wayne is Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem”:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony at a 1978 concert in Vienna’s Musikverein:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”
William Faulkner, “The Bear”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall. Here’s an excerpt.
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Once more, with feeling: Politics makes artists stupid. Not invariably, you understand, but often enough, and pretty much always when the politician in question is Donald Trump, the mere mention of whom can instantaneously reduce writers on both sides of the Great Ideological Divide to red-faced screeching. I place in evidence Robert Schenkkan’s “Building the Wall,” a two-hander by the author of “All the Way” that is the dumbest play I’ve ever reviewed….
“Building the Wall” is set in the visiting room of a prison somewhere in deepest, darkest AmeriKKKa (oh, whoops, pardon me, I meant Texas). The characters are Rick (James Badge Dale), a white prisoner, and Gloria (Tamara Tunie), a black journalist who is writing a book about him. The year is 2019, by which time Mr. Trump has been impeached and “exiled to Palm Beach” after having responded to the detonation of a nuclear weapon in Times Square by declaring nationwide martial law and locking up every foreigner in sight. The bomb, needless to say, was a “false flag” operation, planted not by terrorists but by the president’s men. As for Rick, an avid Trump supporter, he’s since been jailed for doing something unspeakably awful, and at the end of an hour or so of increasingly broad hints, we learn that he helped the Trump administration set up a death camp—yes, a death camp, as in Zyklon B—for illegal immigrants.
What we have here, in other words, is a piece of pornography written in order to stimulate the libidos of political paranoiacs who find their Twitter feeds insufficiently lascivious. Mr. Schenkkan, on the other hand, has described “Building the Wall” as “not a crazy or extreme fantasy,” which tells you everything you need to know about his point of view. It is, of course, possible to spin exciting drama out of raging paranoia, but that requires a certain amount of subtlety, not to mention intelligence, and there is nothing remotely subtle or intelligent about “Building the Wall,” which is both dramaturgically inept and simple-minded well past the point of unintended comedy….
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Read the whole thing here.
Robert Schenkkan talks about Building the Wall:
Jeri Southern sings Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” on Stars of Jazz, originally telecast by KABC-TV on April 22, 1957:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“These songs are cold and clear-sighted, there is a direct realism in them, faith in ordinary life just like in early rock and roll.”
Bob Dylan, “Q&A with Bill Flanagan” (bobdylan.com, March 22, 2017)