{"id":856,"date":"2012-09-10T17:00:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T21:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp\/2012\/09\/indie_ballet.html"},"modified":"2012-09-10T17:00:57","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T21:00:57","slug":"indie_ballet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/2012\/09\/indie_ballet.html","title":{"rendered":"Indie ballet"},"content":{"rendered":"
From my Financial Times review of the Smuin Ballet<\/a>, at the Joyce a month ago: <\/font><\/div>\n
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Trey McIntyre, whose own troupe is now the toast of Boise, has finally found a form for his whimsical, wide open, very American imagination. Taking its title and music from the Portland band The Shins, <\/span>Oh, Inverted World<\/em> is ballet’s answer to indie rock – The Shins’ kind, in which sweet, strummed melodies support vivid, ruminative lyrics. The dance imagines introspection as a way of being with others: a loose, unmannered communality. <\/span><\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shrugs, shakes, and pops punctuate the movement as jangle and pluck do the melodies. These casual eruptions set off chain reactions through the body, the cluster of dancers, even the dance’s various sections, which McIntyre has strung together with unforced ingenuity.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"ohinvertedworldDavidAllensmall.jpg\"Jane Rehm and other members of the Smuin Ballet in Oh, Inverted World<\/em>. Photographer: David Allen. <\/p>\n

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The McIntyre was the highlight of the Smuin Ballet’s mishmash of a program last month (for the full Financial Times report, <\/font>click here<\/a>). In fact, those who were happy with McIntyre’s slouchy low-key world were likely to hate the slick histrionics of Smuin’s own Medea–<\/i>and that <\/i>neatly summarizes the problem American ballet as a whole faces.  <\/font><\/div>\n

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Smuin’s schlock keeps the company solvent but also dooms it to artistic irrelevance; American classical companies make a similar bargain with the 19th-century or at least full length story ballet. The bulk of the national audience equates ballet with story ballet–and wants to see what they already know. The powers that be lack the funds and\/or the guts not to give it to them. No one is being brave or, if you like, reckless enough. <\/font><\/div>\n

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For a sample taste–a very bitter taste–of the audience to which ballet companies just may be catering, I suggest you read the reader comments to Alastair Macaulay’s nuanced essay on the racial politics of too many Imperial ballets<\/a>: Le Corsair, Raymonda, <\/i>etc. (I don’t agree with Macaulay’s every point, but many. He argues carefully for the most part. I discuss similar issues in a 2005 essay for Newsday, “The Exotic Ballet,” on the occasion of the Bolshoi’s reconstruction of Petipa’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter. <\/i>There’s no free link to the article on the Newsday site, but it was pasted into this Russian ballet forum<\/a>. Scroll down to after the photo from Don Q. <\/i>I return to the issue near the end of this Foot post<\/a>, here, about a year later.) <\/font><\/div>\n

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Macaulay’s responders combine vitriol with blockheadedness. One commenter a<\/font>rgues in favor of the stupid and evil Muslim characters in Raymonda<\/i> and Le Corsair <\/i>because stereotypes, he says, are basically accurate. (They may have removed that comment…I couldn’t find it this time.) <\/span><\/div>\n

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Other people cling to the notion of authenticity despite Macaulay pointing out that there is no extant original to adhere to–and this lack of anchor seems only to have made the caricatures more offensive, not less. <\/span><\/div>\n

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The commenters accuse him of the equivalent of book-burning and of “political correctness”. Why is it that one is only guilty of “political correctness” when one is correcting for reactionary values? How about those who “correct” for liberality–you know, demand we favor the fetus over the mother in cases of rape. (See: the current Republican Party.)<\/span><\/div>\n

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It would be bad enough if the heads of ballet were organizing their seasons around know-nothings, but around bigots as well? <\/span><\/div>\n

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From my Financial Times review of the Smuin Ballet, at the Joyce a month ago:  Trey McIntyre, whose own troupe is now the toast of Boise, has finally found a form for his whimsical, wide open, very American imagination. Taking its title and music from the Portland band The Shins, Oh, Inverted World is ballet’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}