5 posts tagged “dance criticism”

My boyfriend's flight last night was delayed for over four hours due to "mechanical difficulty."  A reminder of why I avoid flying if I can during the summer.

I did get some work done at home yesterday and, in fact, felt slightly more productive and less fatigued by the end of the day.

Sat and stared blankly through the final competition episode of So You Think You Can Dance.  This is the first season in which I have followed the program from the beginning more or less.  As cultural phenomena go, this one is typically strange.  In thinking about/responding to/performing dance, the lines separating "art" from "entertainment" and "schlock" seem to be exceptionally fluid.

As all of the contestants appear to be decent people and possess some dancing skills, I don't feel all that invested in who wins.  Or, rather, I wouldn't be upset by any one of them being declared the winner.  I think it will be Twitch, though I am rooting for Courtney (who reminds me of someone I know and is from New York State, to boot).  I liked Katee better during the early going (though I remain offended by the spelling of her name) and I am somewhat less impressed by Joshua's "versatility" than the "judges" appear to be.

On the upside, it is fairly uplifting to see young people of various colors dancing together without it raising an eyebrow (though lingering homophobia seems to be another matter). 

Does the show have any "educational" value?  This season, in the grand tradition of golden age television variety shows, they brought in a smattering of performers or choreographers from the sphere of "high art" (Ailey company, Desmond Richardson, Los Angeles Ballet doing Balanchine excerpt) whose pieces were received with wild enthusiasm (but then again the studio audience is trained to applaud anything).  We also learned that "Bollywood" represented "world dance."

But perhaps more than anything, this season affirms the ascendancy of hip hop in popular culture.  Two "untrained" black male hip hop dancers made the final.  And what was being passed off as "Broadway" (the former dominant popular culture) choreography seemed the most irrelevant and least entertaining genre of all.  Moreover, a few weeks ago, wack guest judge (the disinterred) Toni Basil, kept sounding the keynote of "street" dancing, which was repeated by producer (and prat) Nigel Lythgoe last night.

That said, the only piece I found really compelling last night was the group dance by Mia Michaels, which looked like some sort of "dream ballet" (remember that subgenre?) cut from Spring Awakening.  Come to think of it, talent-wise, Michaels is about on a par with Bill T. Jones.

Well, they were on the mark with the weather forecast.  After another couple of sickly warm days, the temperature has dropped again--this time the air feels really cold.  Managed to get caught in two downpours on my way into work.

Stopped in the local diner for rather a grim lunch.  In came a woman who was seated near to me who looked like the 21st Century embodiment of Typhoid Mary.  She ordered chicken soup, coughed and sneezed a lot and left.  Thank you very much.

I sort of enjoyed Pennsylvania Ballet last night, in spite of the absence of the glamorous and never-to-be-forgotten Rialoma Lorenzo.  The three women principals (I still have to sort out who was who) were all good in Serenade, as was the entire corps.  I don't know what to make of the Carmina Burana.  The bizarre costume and scenic design overwhelmed the choreography.  Spring Awakening meets Appalachian Spring/Rite of Spring via Star Wars?  (Hmm...there are other seasons, you know.)  Joseph Campbell would have been perplexed.  The set was dominated by a sort of mystic tipi and a hovering ball, rather than a wheel of fortune.  Very busy choreography, which, on the whole, was no sillier than the score.  The dancers gave it their all.  I paid attention for about the first third, but got bored and also was distracted by the amazingly bad breath of the man seated to the left of me.  People went apeshit over it (Carmina Burana, not the guy's stank breath). 

I ran out of steam on my (overlong) previous post.  But I thought that some good (bad) criticism would make a nice change.

The retirement of Kyra Nichols and several other prominent ballerinas after relatively long careers this past spring certainly forced many critics into an unusually introspective mode.  But the yoking together of these disparate dancers often seemed forced and irrelevant as in Alastair Macaulay's June 10th piece.  Were those four ballerinas (especially in the eyes of New York audiences) really all equals?

As usual, a 1996 article by Arlene Croce, Our Dancers in the Nineties (one of her final pieces to appear in The New Yorker), still resonates, and, in touching on a related theme, doesn't leave much that is fresh to be added.

The tribute it contains to Nichols is at once stirring and sad.

To the emergence of the business company we owe the phenomenon of the disaffiliated ballerina – the dancer who seeks artistic completion by freelancing or guest-starring all over the world.  Nichols is a disaffiliated star who never left her home company.  One could say that it never left her, but there has been no actual rupture between her and Peter Martins.  Since they’ve stopped working together, she has if anything found more freedom to maneuver and more challenge and inspiration in her roles.  The splendid isolation of Kyra Nichols can even be a dramatic statement.  When she enters in Vienna Waltzes, it’s on a high note of resolve: “Alone then!”  Head up, erect as only Kyra Nichols can be, she walks into the darkened ballroom.

Croce's writing is so powerful; it either wins you over to her argument or it doesn't.  There's no real middle ground.  She easily manages to convince the reader that her own viewpoint is reflective of a "Kyra Nichols" true state of mind or attitude. 

What comes after the "disaffiliated ballerina" then?  It surprised me in the various ruminations on retiring ballerinas I read, that neither Macaulay nor any other critics commented on whether or not they believed that there still would be ballerinas in the future (or ones with careers that lasted over twenty-five years).

At the request of someone, a couple of days ago I had started working on a response to Alastair Macaulay's round-up of the NYCB spring season in last Sunday's Arts and Leisure section, but I was finding it tough going.  Primarily, I believe, because I didn't think I found anything that Macaulay had to say to be all that interesting or memorable.

I referred that friend, who was troubled by the puzzling tone of the second half of the Macaulay piece, to a similar article by Robert Gottlieb in the New York Observer, in which he expresses many of the same observations (even to the point of praising and castigating many of the very same dancers).  Although Macaulay is perhaps a slightly better writer, the Gottlieb essay makes a better read, drawing as it does from a deeper experience with NYCB, than Macaulay, at this stage as a New York critic, is able to muster.

Some of Macaulay's rhetorical strategies are downright laughable.  The opening paragraph, in its combination of gushy name-dropping and what one can only hope is faux naivete is disingenuous and representative at the same time:

IN moving to New York this year, I had expected to see much of the world’s best choreography and many of the world’s finest dancers. I hadn’t quite expected a single week like June 18 to 24, when I saw not only the farewell performances of Kyra Nichols and Alessandra Ferri but also dancing by, among many others, Nina Ananiashvili, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Roberto Bolle, Angel Corella, Herman Cornejo, Maria Kowroski, Diana Vishneva and Damien Woetzel (as well as Victor Barbee, Georgina Parkinson and Frederic Franklin in character roles). And I had no notion that New York City Ballet would include a young dancer like Ashley Bouder.

Didn't he take the time read his press kits or his schedules while he was unpacking?  Also, Ashley Bouder, even for NY Times readers, is hardly an undiscovered country.  Her rapid progress having only been slowed down here and there by injuries.

Perhaps the most irksome passage, however, was Macaulay's paean to the Balanchine repertory, in which, comparing it to a dismayingly trivial set of touchstones of "great" Western art available in New York City, he concludes, "[they are] works that make the New York State Theater seem the same kind of sublime haven the Frick Collection is."

Now that is troubling.  Misguided (and possibly insincere) as some of Martins' attempts have been, the stated goal of his regime always has been to try to balance a commitment to honoring the legacy of NYCB's founders with the development of new works in that tradition.  While it can be argued that he has been a miserable failure in both regards, it is only fair to point out that Martins has repeatedly said that he never wanted to see NYCB become a "Balanchine Museum." 

I certainly don't begrudge Macaulay his opportunity to lounge Jellaby Postlethwaite-like in the Frick's Garden Court, but it was very telling that the task of reviewing the sole new work of the season, Christopher Wheeldon's The Nightingale and the Rose was assigned to Jennifer Dunning.  Nor did Macaulay appear to engage very much with the other recent work, new to the repertory, Alexei Ratmansky's Middle Duet, tossing off a couple of brief paragraphs in his May 17th review.  Other than the individual performances of many of the dancers, I would consider Ratmansky's bold revisions to what, in its performance at the Fall gala, seemed an intriguing, but unfinished work, the single most encouraging development of the season.  Full points to Ratmansky for having the integrity to make any kind of alteration to a work that was already widely-praised. I haven't experienced enough of his choreography to know whether or not I really like it, but it is refreshing to see the work of someone who appears to have an authentic "voice" and soul.  Shouldn't NYCB be more seriously trying to cultivate a continuing relationship with him, now that Wheeldon is gone?

I also found Macaulay's singling out of the declining (or non-existent in the first place?) abilities of Darci Kistler, Nilas Martins, and Yvonne Boree to be so much flogging of an already-dead horse.  Do these dancers cast themselves (do they?).  Kistler, who, after a busy May (appearing in every performance of Romeo + Juliet) I believe danced rarely, if at all, in June, certainly does not maintain a lock on any roles the way Heather Watts did in the early 1990s.  The only part she danced exclusively this spring was in Liebeslieder Walzer, but that ballet, which demands a full complement of mature dancers or ones with a mature sensibility (increasingly rare in any company) is notoriously difficult to cast.  Taken along with his earlier commentary on the violence in Martins' R+J, it amounted to little more than a personal attack, as does his criticism of Nilas Martins.  Neither Martins nor Boree have fared well in many of the opportunities handed to them over the years, but they have been dancing far less and somewhat better (for them) in the past year. 

What is the point of this kind of criticism, anyway?  Does Macaulay seriously think he has the power to effect casting?  While I'm sure the announcement of Nilas Martins' arrest on cocaine possession earlier this morning is in no way connected with the adverse criticism of Macaulay or others, perhaps it is as well to keep in mind that these are real people after all.  Criticism can be pointed, but it should have a point as well.

Or did it? 

Amusing blast at NY Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay on James Wolcott's blog today.  Macaulay has had it coming.  His latest piece on the Kyra Nichols farewell certainly was ludicrously overripe.  Especially since I was not able to attend, I had hoped for a more objective blow-by-blow account of the evening than he offered.

Still, I don't totally agree with Wolcott's critique.  The most annoying thing about Macaulay has not necessarily been his display of ego or over insertion of himself into his reviews.  It's that his frame of reference in the context of New York culture (and in regard to New York City Ballet in particular) has been so limited and tedious.  Enough with the nostalgia already.  You're being paid to be reviewed what's in front of you.  Even sometime Anglophiles are bored. 

That said, I've also found Wolcott's own cultural criticism to be a tad myopic lately.  Or his taste questionable at the very least: relentless partisanship of a certain Soviet ballerina who shall go nameless and equally endless hyping of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which went downhill a long time ago.  Anyway, it was never the overrated Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren who made the show rock back when it still did, it was always Kathryn Erbe's Eames who made it a must-see and hear.