foot in mouth: July 2009 Archives

The first time I saw the company, with him still dancing strong, I was 14, it was 1978, and there, at Zellerbach in Berkeley --Sounddance. I leaned so far forward in my seat--drawn into the vortex of the dance--that I fell on the floor.

On paper, in description, Cunningham's kind of dance wasn't what I thought would move me. I was a repressedly moony teenager--the kind of girl who reads Sons and Lovers and can't understand why Paul prefers translucent Clara to the gloomy, entangling succulent, Miriam. But it did move me, more than almost anything else--and has done for 30 years. That's the sign of genius--to make a person alive to something that wasn't even in her. He changed me.

Every time I've shown up, I've wondered, Will the spell have worn off? Will the dance become what I've always anticipated it would be: cerebral and faraway? And every time, there it startlingly is.

Click for Alastair Macaulay's fascinating obit (did you know Cunningham started at Cornish as a theater major?) and here for a lovely video tribute (with clips from a few dances). 

The New Yorker is also offering a bounty of archived articles and reviews--by Joan Acocella, Calvin Tomkins, Alma Guillermoprieto--on its website, some of which are available to anyone and some of which you need a subscription for. If you have a print subscription, they tell me, you can sign up for the electronica free here. 

UPDATE: Guillermoprieto posts a short, very poignant remembrance of a Cunningham birthday party, with organic cake on paper plates, in his shabby loft.  

First, a few facts: New York City Ballet's Peter Martins is making about $629,000  a year

while 11 corps members are cut.  

The original Bloomberg article from which the Times quotes listed other exorbitant salaries--music director Faycal Karoui, around $300,000; general manager Ken Tabachnick, about the same; etc.--but this only proves that the writer knows nothing about the arts or is afraid to admit what he knows, because the company isn't the general manager's or the music director's baby the way it presumably is its balletmaster's, so of course they have to be paid competitively. The article also mentions the 2008 income of outgoing dancer Damian Woetzel, a 23-year-veteran of the company: $278,000, of which $66,000 was exit pay. Also, irrelevant: A ballet dancer's career is over at about age 40, and if it's at all possible to give her a cushion to prepare for a second act, it should be done. Martins isn't in that situation.

As the Baryshnikov example makes clear, Martins is basically paying himself--with the NYCB board's approval. And what's the worry on the part of the board? That if he isn't paid like a king, he's going to work for the competition? See? Comparisons to directors outside the arts don't work. But if Martins is in fact thinking about it that way-- if the money's what's keeping him--let him go. These are bad values for a ballet company to be burdened with. 

So I debated whether to link to my latest review for The Financial Times--on the Emanuel Gat company, at the Lincoln Center Festival--because I may have bungled it (not for lack of trying, believe me). But perhaps you could click on the link and NOT read the review (dance never gets enough clicks)--and maybe, once explained, the bungles will make an instructive story--you know, for all of you hoping to make your fortunes as dance writers.

The glorious Assaf (in white T-shirt) and Gat. Photo by Sara D. Davis courtesy of ADF/2009

The piece was hard to write because I had a big idea and couldn't decide how much of it to get into in a 400-word review. A review is not exegesis--not what we did in college--except insofar as the dance's "about" reveals the experience of watching it. And yet so often it does. In fact, I'm not sure how you can decide what a work of art is worth if you don't have in mind what it's doing and meaning. In this case, though, it was only by a series of analogies that I understood what it (the first dance on the program, at least: Winter Variations) stirred in me. Gat presents something invisible--two people thinking together--in visible form in order to mirror the difficulty and magic of that mental communion. I'm not sure I gestured toward that chain of equivalencies, which made the dance feel deep and far away, without getting entangled in it.

Next time...

I review her debut as Sylvia for the Financial Times.

In the cave with ogre Jared Matthews. (He might have bit into the part with more appetite: would have helped Vishneva's comic turn.) Photo by Gene Schiavone for ABT.

It's really a delightful ballet--the delicious Delibes score as mercurial as the deus ex machina plot, sliding from trumpeting horns for huntress Sylvia and her cadre to lyric love passages to sensuous harem music to the buzzy sound of the villagers to the plucky violins for the ultimately princesslike Sylvia at her nuptials. It clearly influenced Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty (and some of the Candyland divertissements in the Nutcracker). In 1877, shortly after completing Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky wrote a friend, 

Listened to the Leo Delibes' ballet Sylvia. In fact, I actually listened, because it is the first ballet where the music constitutes not only the main but the only interest. What charm, what elegance, what richness of melody, rhythm, harmony. I was ashamed. If I had known this music early then, of course, I would not have written Swan Lake.

My friend, playwright Andy Podell went to see the ballet for the first time and writes with enviable insight [my interpolations in brackets like this]:

Great review. I basically agree, but it's the first time I saw Sylvia and I was pretty much in heaven. The first act and the entrance of Vishneva and the Delibes music made me shiver. Also the ending of the first act is beautiful... lovely... I loved the way Eros points the direction to Aminta after returning his life.

It's a very pagan ballet. The opening sequence is the erotic play of the elements of water and trees or wind [and fauns, swinging each other around and then settling in a little love bundle with the naiads (or perhaps it was the dryads)]. Later the two sheep are kind of intruding into the Classical world to keep us reminded that love has its animal level (even though they're a pretty cutsey-poo duo) [in case the bronze sculpture of Eros, carried overhead with great comic solemnity, doesn't!] So the ballet has a coherence to me, but it's a kind of masque drama--The Triumph of Eros--and Sylvia and Aminta are really just another duo like Pluto and Persephone. There's no arc of character, as you said.

I really liked the two slaves in the harem sequence. I don't know what their names were [Arron Scott and Grant DeLong] but they were fantastic clowns--really subtle and sexy clowns. It tickled me how the heavy was this Muslim/Turk/terrorist who kidnaps the girl from the Western civilization.

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