Clavigo by the Paris Opera

Being a student of dance history, I have immense respect for the Paris Opera. The Opera House was at the forefront of ballet fashion/development for a critical hundred year period. I found a video of a new ballet made on the company in a sale bin at olson’s in dupont. I was astounded. So astounded that I shared it with a friend. I don’t remember who.

If it was you, dear reader: shame, shame shame!!! Return my video!

Regardless – enjoy. The whole is well worth viewing, if only to inspire one to realize that some people really are still making serious ballet out there.

This is the entrance scene by Le Riche. Watch. (He plays a saucy little minx, and is an astounding dancer.)

So much of the ballet is so enthralling. Tomorrow night Hilary Clinton speaks at the convention (according to someone – ‘Clinton in 2012!) and so its appropriate to say that it takes a village to make a ballet. The sets are amazing. The music, the costume, the dancers, the choreography. It takes a village to make good art. When I wrote ‘some people are making ballet’ above I meant it. Making ballets is not an individual sport. In that way it’s much like policy. Inspiration/leadership MAY come from the top, but it takes many many many to create anything real.

I’m posting this next clip for simple shock value; the French are less afraid to include sexual content. Oral sex never looked so arty.

I’m pretty verbose, and not afraid to offer an opinion. Watching this ballet humbles me as a writer, dancer, and choreographer. Check out the video if you can. You can order it from Kultur or Amazon.

Judge Art Now!!

I frequently meet people who are scared to judge Art. This is fascinating to me, because as I understand it, Art is an inherently personal experience, a gift from the artist. It is mine, and so mine to judge, like bad breath or bad shoes. I feel comfortable assessing a Van Gogh as second rate, a Pollock as mediocre, or an unknown coffee-shop drawing as brilliant. It is a sign of the (perceived) irrelevance Art has in modern life that many do not feel licensed to judge it.

Most lay-people evaluate Art (be it music, visual art, or dance) with simple standards. Discouraging the use of these standards does us no service. It is never in an artist’s best interest to imply that he/she is more intelligent, or sophisticated, than the audience. It is interesting to consider the public’s disinclination to judge Art in contrast to its inclination toward the judgment of sport. Sports teams, which have a loyal community based on geography, are the subject of constant – and usually completely uninformed – discussion.

The act of judgment is an act of ownership, and investment. Sports teams have public support, in part, because the public is empowered to critique them. Art is reliant on encouraging the engagement and investment of its community. How does one encourage engagement and investment? By encouraging judgment. Burdening potential stakeholders with the correct means to evaluate an experience is asking too much. As we move forward to the discovery of the Art and audience of tomorrow encouraging judgment could be meaningful to the growth of the Arts community.

This was published in the dance magazine Contact Quarterly a few months ago as a letter to the editor. It’s the short short version of a 1500 word piece.

I would add here that I find sports to be a common ground in our society. When I don’t know what to say to people ‘out in the world’, I can usually strike up an engaging conversation on sports. (I’m not faking it; I do genuinely like and follow some sports.) Perhaps in the 18th or 19th century it was different. Maybe then people talked about sonatas, witches, or taxes. But I find comfort – and I think many do – in the common shallow shared passion that sports provide.

I do not mean to imply that sports are bad. I am simply trying to explain the mass appeal. A conversation on the relative merits of sports vs. arts for children and adults will be forthcoming.

Liberalism and Modern Dance

This piece has had various titles, and iterations. At one point it was called, ‘Goooooooo classical!’. At another point, ‘A Refutation of Liberalism in Modern Dance.’

I find some attitudes in the Modern Dance community congruous with many of the least attractive attributes of political Liberalism. Liberalism, politically speaking, is a strain of social theory that emphasizes equality. The causes of death for political liberalism are interesting in critiquing modern dance, which is possibly perishing with some of the same symptoms.

I grew up in Massachusetts at a time when politicians were re-claiming Liberal ideology. Political Liberalism was a stance of hope, inclusiveness and generosity. Liberalism brought us school lunches and affirmative action. And then it was de-flowered – the Randian freemarket go and get it beating the crap out of the Liberal come and get it.

Modern Dance began, like Liberalism, with an individualistic and inclusive streak – from Duncan to Graham, Nikolais to Rainer, Modern Dance was an expression of the embrace of individual experience and personal vocabulary over pre-determined positions and rote facility.

Some argue that Modern Dance is the somatic equivalent of jazz music. When Modern Dance began it was an organic and personal response to times, places, and personal experiences. And perhaps it is like Jazz: the practitioners of today are hard put to find the blood memory that ran through the creators of the form.

I am not trying to lionize even more antique forms – for instance ballet – but simply am trying to offer Modern Dance a little humility. Ballet came before Modern Dance, and will still exist after Modern Dance has disappeared. The majority of professional Modern dancers are heavily trained in ballet. And yet ballet seems to be talked about like a grandfather who has hairy ears and a penchant for pinching cheeks. There seems to be a perception that Modern is today, and ballet the past.

Modern dancers, like Liberals, need to recognize that all solutions rely heavily on craft, and that whether jazz music or dance, one will be taken more seriously in creating new work if one is capable of mastering the craft used by earlier practitioners. In political Liberalism the dismissal of free-market economic principles can be compared to the modern dancers dismissal of ballet.

When artists believe that they can take the craft out of dance, they reduce it to something like pop poetry. If your name begins with e.e., or ends with Ferlinghetti, that is surely a reasonable thing to do. But if you do not happen to be a genius, perhaps having the will to dance within the forms crafted by others would serve you better in reaching an audience (which last time I checked was the reason for performing.) Certainly pronouncing that one is a dance artist will help you in the bars, but in contributing to your community, its deeply ineffective.

All dance is not good dance. All dance is not of value, even if its practitioner says it is. All dance is not of value for the practitioner even if they say it is. In the end, it does not matter if you practice Modern, Ballet, Jazz, Horton, or Rumba. There is no guaranteed way toward good social solutions. But there is a guaranteed means toward bad ones. Reasonable practice of prior forms can assist in the creation of what sculptor Frederic Hart called art that has a role “in the public pursuit of civilization.”