Friday Fabulosity: Katsiaryna Halkina Hoop Final Sofia 2017

I just discovered Halkina, and I love her style.  She is very precise and always exceedingly poised.  She puts together her routines in non-typical and delightfully surprising ways.

Friday Fabulosity: Dancing that Makes Me Actually Like Swan Lake

On paper, Swan Lake should be fabulous.

In practice, the score is weak and descends into groaning schmaltz if not played gently and with care. If Petipa's choreography is followed, say farewell to any good ensemble work and prepare for endless pas des duex between Odette and the Prince hammering us over the head with the plot point that they are In Love at the expense of the rest of the storyline. And the practice of having the prima dance both Odette and Odile, and relegating Odile to one short appearance, weakens the story even further, especially as it is extremely difficult for one dancer to play both different princesses convincingly.

In short, I would like to like Swan Lake, but so far the only version that I think does it justice is the anime Princess Tutu (exihibt #1 in the series of "anime that are not as silly as their titles sound in English").  In Princess Tutu we learn the stories and the hearts of both the black princess and the white princess, and come to love them both.  The prince stops being boring and develops a personality, and the prince's friend stops being a manly asshole and learns to actually listen to women.  And we meet a host of other minor characters, some tragic, some comic, some strong and kind, some weak and unkind.  And in the end, the power of love and dance triumph, as they should in any fairy tale.

Now, however, right alongside Princess Tutu, I present the Italian rhythmic gymnastics team's take on Swan Lake with 5 hoops at Pesaro, 2017:

All the best parts of the music!  Nods to the traditional choreography while not getting stuck in it, or in white platter tutus!  Breathtaking musicality and coordination and arabesques!  This, this! is what group work is supposed to be.

iLuminate Comes to Town and My Heart Is Swayed By Blinky Lights

iLuminate is a dance company in which everything is done in the dark, with light.  The costumes light up, as do the props.  Rather than conventional set changes, the lights go off, and then come back in different patterns, taking us from house to street to through a magic portal.  Rather than regular costume changes, the color and patterns of the dancers' gear shifts.  Magic pixel insects called out by a magic paintbrush fly up into the darkness and a green outline rat runs out from under green outline trashcans.  (I am so in love with the green rat.) 

I was extremely impressed.  This is technology meets dance in a way that forces us to pay attention to both, without being so busy making sure we know that Art is a Serious Philosophical Pursuit or They Are Using Modern Technology to do Art as to lose the fun and natural flow.

(Not that I am against art as a serious philosophical pursuit or using modern technology to do art.  I'm in favor of both.  But if you have to tell your audience that your art is Serious and they should be feeling Reverent Aesthetic Bliss, you're doing it wrong.  Likewise if the best use you can come up with for your fancy backdrop projector is a bizarre parade of iconic figures not related to a story mediocre to start with, you're again doing it wrong.) 

Rather, iLuminate gave us a lovely evening exploring what dance looks like if dancers light up the dark, rather than being light-reflecting objects in light.  The story was archetypal: love rejected and accepted, outcasts finding solace in other worlds, magic, giant glowy snakes, and badness being conquered through love and dance.

The choreography was solid and technically impressive.  The lifts and partner tricks were extra impressive done with a partner invisible in the dark.  I felt that hands and lower legs needed more illumination, and the heads less: a number of beautiful high kicks, front and back walkovers, and other moves were not as visible as they needed to be to show off how lovely they were.

The main character was recognizable through his dance, but the other characters needed more personality dance-wise.  (This is something I'm really trying to work on with my dance, so I'm paying extra attention to others' dance, to try to get a feel for what I need to be doing or not doing.)  The blend of hip-hop and ballet was interesting and I thought fairly seamless, although concentrated on big flashy moves rather than on an overall fleshed-out flow.  But that might be me coming from Kuchipudi where you can perfectly well spend half a dance drama simply having the 2 or 3 main characters introduce themselves (the pravesam, or introductory dance.  Satyabhama's pravesam is the highlight of the famous Kuchipudi dance drama Satyabhama.)

I liked what I could hear of the music, it was about being what you are and other good sentiments, but the volume was turned up way way way too loud, and I missed a lot of the treble lines because I had to keep my fingers in my ears. 

iLuminate was founded by Miral Kotb, a software engineer and dancer who meshed her loves.  She is my new hero, and her iLuminate is fabulous!   

Swan Lake from Russia, with Love

For the first time in years, I made it back to one of my favorite places in Atlanta, the converted and still part-time shriner temple which is now the Fox theatre, one of the most fun architectural (though, alas, not acoustical, which is why the opera doesn't perform there) buildings around.  Shriners have a seriously fun sense of architecture.  The Russian State Ballet was in town to perform Swan Lake.  There were ballerinas in the lobby in full swan maiden regalia, available for photos and autographs (at a silly price, of course.) After an attempt to be a dignified adult who does not need her photo taken with a ballerina, I abandoned that project and had my photo taken with a ballerina.  She signed it "From Russia, with love!" and drew a little stick ballerina after her name.

Once I have my OWN apartment, which cannot happen fast enough, this will be
a decoration in my dance room. 

It was a simple, actually quite low budget, production of Swan Lake, no programs, recorded music and a rather small ensemble.  Nonetheless, the sets were quite classic, and it's hard to be lovelier than the softly painted forest and lake backdrops of a simple production.  Likewise the costumes were both classic and exquisite.  The Evil Von Rothbart had a feathery headdress, wild face paint, and bat wings.  The swans looked exactly as the swans always look, which is always pretty.  The palace scenes were filled with women in lovely floating dresses, accompanied my swains in velvet tops with sparkles.  Also a jester in red and purple who completely stole the show with comic antics and gorgeous floating leaps.  Though that did, unfortunately, do a little more to show up the prince who has, at best, the personality of mayonnaise.  It's not the fault of the production, it's a problem in the ballet itself.  This prince is boring.  The other inherent problem with the ballet is that invariably Odile is more interesting, and more interestingly costumed, than Odette, but what can you do, while still being faithful to the source material?  Though the production did use one of the alternate endings, in which Odette and her forgettable prince live happily ever after.  I disapprove.  I deeply believe that everyone should die at the end of Swan Lake.  Oh well.

Despite mostly faithfulness to the source material and the classic choreography of Petipa (which I honestly don't like) the second act wasn't boring.  The music, while canned, emphasized horns and percussion, which is good because without that the music just becomes impossibly saccharine.  Furthermore, the pas de deux between Odette and the prince was shortened, which helps, in favor of more and more constant movement of the swan maidens.  Any time 15-20 dancers in white move together, the effect is beautiful.  And of course, the famous pas de quatre is still the exact same as the way everyone does it, and it's still cool.

It was the palace scenes that really shone.  In the first act, the prince was dancing with two princesses, each in gold with puffy sleeves, and surrounded by ladies and peasants in white and cream or bronze and brown.  In the third act, the princesses were all properly county coded, and danced by themselves, the Spanish princess with her tambourine, and the Russian princess with her handkerchief (I loved the Russian princess.  Not only was her handkerchief choreography precisely with the music, she had on a white gown with puffy sleeves and pale blue accents.).  They were all quite properly snubbed when the prince declined to propse to any of them despite their really fabulous performances.  When Odile entered, stealing the show in her black tutu with sparkly green wing accents, she brought with her a pair of flamenco dancers as retinue.  The flamenco pair did a balletic flamenco together in black with gold and red accents, and both were phenomenally and skinny and generally impressive and probably evil.

The final act was very anticlimactic for me, because I've seen at least 4 different versions of this now, and I keep waiting for all the principles to die.  I was still waiting for them to die when the curtain went down.  Apart from that, it was a lovely rendition of one of the classics, lovely enough to gloss over some of the weaknesses inherent to this ballet (I think it could really stand some major overhauls to the typical Petipa choreography, frankly.  More swan maidens, less Odette and Siegfried, and more of Odile.  Also, I wish Odile and Odette were two different ballerinas and more attention was paid to Odile.  As Neko-sensei remarks in Princess Tutu, "who is to say that the love of Odile is less pure than that of Odette?").  Regardless of my opinions on the inherent structure of the ballet, it was a joy and a delight to watch the dancers of the Russian State Ballet.  There was one minor bobble--the prince had to put his hand down as he landed a leap and promptly sank into a kneeling position he started to tip sideways--and two minor wardrobe malfunctions.  Von Rothbart's headdress fell off during the first act and the flamenco princess was developing a rip in the back of her skirt.  Live productions are sometimes plagued by such issues, and while I would have appreciated being less distracted during the flamenco performance, overall this was a pleasing production that made me happy.

In Which an End is Put to my Whining

When I dance, I have a good side, and I have a stupid side.  I do not like doing things on my stupid side.  Recently,  I was told by a dance teacher that I should just be glad I am not an octopus.

I have no rejoinder to this.  None.

In Which I Learn Things about Splits

One of the many wonderful things I got to do recently was take a class with Cirque du Soleil's Yuliya Mihailovna, the incredibly talented handbalancer who lights up Amaluna with her smile.  The class itself was unbelievably painful, but it helped a lot.  Particularly technique-wise.  Turns out, I've been doing splits wrong for years, and the silks have been reinforcing my bad habits. I need to keep my shoulders and hips square and pointed forward rather than letting them turn sideways.  Turning feels natural, particularly in silks, when I typically have one hand reaching back anyway for balance and style.

You can see me, as the black princess, turned out of square with my upper body,
and my back leg is bending so that I can still look like I have a straight line.  Chihaya,as the
princess in pink and white, has spent a lot of time as a classical ballerina,and is a lot more square.
You may also notice she doesn't have a problem keeping her back leg straight.

Having Yuliya grab my shoulders, pull them square, and force my hip down onto the floor was a lightbulb moment, cheesy as that sounds.  Technique is important for flexibility, who knew?

 

Yuliya signed my program!  Fan girl squee!  

In Which I Lament the Vapidity that is the U.S. Notion of the Pinnacle of Artistic Achievement

I bought shoes recently.  For Argentine tango, in which I am taking classes.  This requires me to dance in heels, which in turn requires me to purchase good heels.  The sort with good thick leather soles.   I described my needs to the helpful sales clerk with the reason thereunto, the tango that is.  Her response, which I think was supposed to be a compliment, was that maybe I'd be on Dancing with the Stars.

No.  Terrible television shows are not why we dance.  At least, not why I dance.  As long as people who dance love their dance, who am I to judge, but television shows are a horribly vapid reason for dancing.  Please do not ascribe such to me.  

Studying Dance

One thing that occasionally frustrates me about dance is that apart from ballet and angsty contemporary pieces, the stages available are largely nightclubs.  Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with nightclubs but I prefer to see art treated with a little more respect than is typical there.  But apparently there is now an academic conference for performative teaching and learning!

A dear friend and teacher of mine is presenting.  I am insanely jealous but I can't think of a better person to do this than a fierce Greek lady who studies folklore and promotes Middle Eastern dance as an expression of cultural identity.  She taught me about the Turkish influence on Greek fire rituals.

There are people in this world who know and understand the effects of the Turkish on Greek fire rituals.   This makes me almost as happy as knowing there is now an academic forum for such people.

La Bayadere

I am slowly filling in the gaps in the repertoire of classical ballets that I have seen.  Most recent was La Bayadere, courtesy of the wonderful Munich StaatsBallet, which streams their performances live online.

La Bayadere is the tragedy of Nikiya, a devadasi who is in love with Solor.  

Nikiya

We do not forgive Solor, even though he has lovely gran jetes.

 Solor is an idiotic twit, even by the standards of ballet princes.  He is perhaps not quite as bad as Albrecht in Giselle, but only by virtue of being apparently genuinely confused, about everything.  He has Nikiya, who has already won our hearts completely in the first scene with her dancing: such grace, spirit, and joy!  But upon being told he is to marry the princess Ghamzatti,    

Solor falls for the sparkly purple pants and agrees.  Trouble is brewing, of course: not even a ballet princess with a sparkly purple costume has things completely her own way.  Nikiya comes to see Ghamzatti,

who proudly refuses to give up Solor.  Nikiya draws a dagger, but what could have been a magnificently choreographed fight is cut short by the elderly servant.  I was disappointed; a well-done knife fight on pointe shoes would have been amazing.  However, one of the priests is also in love with Nikiya, and sees a chance to have her by ratting on Solor and Nikiya to Ghamzatti's father, the rajah.  This doesn't turn out well, as the infuriated rajah decrees that Nikiya, and not Solor, shall die.   

Time for the wedding!  Nikiya dances for the wedding couple, despite an obviously broken heart.  A snake hidden in her basket of flowers, courtesy of the rajah, bites her and this dance becomes her death dance as well. 

Solor is a little disturbed and takes a break from wedding preparations to smoke enough opium to have a drug-induced visit to the land of shades

Wait, a classical tutu?  Why?

where he dances with the ghost of Nikiya, who forgives him.  No, stop.  Stop right there, Nikiya.  You do NOT forgive the jerk who abandoned you for a rich princess, especially since he's not even sorry enough to call off that wedding!  This is where you force him to dance to death, or at least spurn him so he will die of a broken heart when he wakes up from his opium trance! 

This makes me very angry, both the trope of letting the jerk prince off without so much as a slap, and the La Bayadere instance of the trope.  Also confused, because this pas de deux was as emotionless and flat as 3-day-old ginger ale.  Solor and Nikiya don't interact or display any emotion at all, even while dancing together.  The large ensemble sits on stage and is not given anything to do besides being scenery.  I don't get it.  I don't care if you are following the choreography of the supposedly famous Petipa; he obviously didn't know how to do this kind of scene, and you should change it.  If we are going to have a land of shades scene with the grievously wronged prima, we should have recriminations and sorrow and a choreographer who can use large groups for something besides extra scenery!  

Back to the awake world for the wedding celebration!  Ghamzatti appears in a purple tutu and discovers the tutu is much less alluring than her purple sparkly pants.  Her dancing becomes more and more desperate as she tries to convince her new spouse that he should be happy because he now has her!  I feel for Ghamzatti.  She wouldn't have had much choice in her marriage, she wouldn't have been able to call it off, she has to make this work because she can't get a divorce, and she can't kill Solor because of the lovely little custom called suttee.  Patriarchy sucks.

Anyway, Solor alternates between gloomy depression and thinking his new princess is just as nice as the old one, and we have some good ensemble work

 and then the god(s? only one shows up to dance)

Dude, that is totally the wrong hasta (hand position) for a god.  I don't think that's even one of the classical hastas.  You should be doing mushti or sikhara, or pataka for swords of righteous wrath.

show up because they are angry at the wrong done to Nikiya and destroy everyone.  Except we get a disconnected final scene where the three principals...

go to heaven?  attain nirvana?  merge with the tao?  Your guesses, gentle reader?  Any "happy" ending would be shallow and silly after the total lack of resolution between Nikiya and Solor, so I think the ballet should have stopped with the destruction.  

General rant: costumes and hand gestures.  La Bayadere is the ignorant Victorian idea of India, so I would have accepted Western ballet costume and conventions throughout.  However, this production tried to mix things...and came up with vaguely Arabian-nights costumes next to classical tutus, which was weird, and totally wacky hand gestures.  This is the internet age.  How hard would it be to google some actual Indian dance attire and modify it for pointe shoes?  How hard would it have to been to watch some actual classical Indian dance  and copy the actual hastas?  (Conflict of interest disclosure: the video link is of my guru, who is the best dancer in the world!) 

As someone who has worn classical dance costume, I can attest that that fan opens out a full half-circle or more of fabric, so you could do arabesques in it with very little, if any, modification.  And the blouse is close-fitting, so that could be used almost as-is as well.  The belt and jewelry might have to be modified, but while the Arabian nights look is pretty, you can get much closer to the real thing and still dance classical ballet in it.  And the ignorant guessing about hand gestures just makes me roll my eyes that the choreographer was too lazy to do some research.

In the end, though, I will forgive everything about this production for Nikiya (Ekaterina Petina).  I do not have enough superlatives to describe how good her dancing was.  Not just the technique, everyone at the Munich StaatsBallet has perfect technique, but the unbounded grace and the clear storytelling through her dance.  She was perfect.     

Delightful and Drunken Dancing: SF Ballet's Cinderella

While in San Francisco, we went to see the ballet present Cinderella.  I was under the impression that the SF ballet is really really good, an impression helped by the number of well-dressed people outside the theatre begging for tickets.  Also, I had seen one of their principals, Yuan Yuan Tan, in a film version of The Little Mermaid and found her performance incredibly beautiful and moving.

Yuan Yuan Tan in The Little Mermaid

I was a little disappointed that Yuan Yuan Tan was not dancing the night we went to Cinderella, particularly since her photos were used in all the promotional materials, but we were going on a Thursday night, which meant that many of the principal roles were being filled by dancers from the corps.  It should be noted that the technical skill displayed was still absolutely incredible.  Several of these corps dancers would, I think, be soloists if not principals in smaller companies.  The audience was great as well.  There was a minimum of people getting up and leaving during the final scene and through the curtain calls, and people did not give a standing ovation.  Those are so easily given at most theatres they mean nothing.  Also, the audience was overall well-dressed with a good sense of when to clap.  I like this city.  I like this ballet.  Prokofiev is not the most structured of balletic composers, but Christopher Wheeldon choreographed everything perfectly and beautifully with the music.  There is nothing ugly in this Cinderella.  Even when Cinderella's mother dies, the blood-stained handkerchief (the mother coughs blood and dies, as proper tragic ladies do.) doesn't detract from the grace and beauty on the stage as the four fates (why four?  Why are they male?  Why are they present throughout the ballet?  I was confused by that) shelter the crying prima as she grows a magic tree with her tears.  The sets and costumes only get prettier and more elaborate as we go along, though the high point is indubitably Cinderella's departure for the ball.  The ball itself is a close second.

Cinderella preparing to change.  

Cinderella in her magic coach and dress. 

Showing off at the ball.  

Beyond the ball, the part I thought would be boring--the fitting of various women to see if the shoe fits*---was great.  A line of women sitting and doing pretty foot things in their pretty toe shoes, and perfectly timed to the music, was just delightful.  The chairs were then hoisted above the stage to float in an odd but pretty arch above Cinderella's home, where they remained for the great denoument.

All the characters in the ballet are extremely likable in themselves, not just for their dancing ability.  Even the evil ones are great.  The stepsisters are comic, and one is even rather kind and sweet.

The step sisters, in feathered hats,
 work on tightening a corset to timpani beats.  As they should. 

The stepmother is simply the best.  She gets really drunk at the ball and performs a passionate dance to and with wineglasses.  I am so inspired.

The evil stepmother may be my hero. 

The prince deserves an extra mention for being a great prince.  Most of the princes of ballet range somewhere between the boring (Siegfried) and the foppish twit (Solor) with a possibly a side trip into smug evil (Albrecht).  This prince, however, is an fun-loving soul who tries to avoid his own party, shows up badly dressed for it, and is then humorously horrified by the country-coded princessess who are having a dance-off for his hand in marriage.

Princesses of Spain, Russia, and Bali disregard the prince's personal space. 

Also, the prince is accompanied by his good friend Benjamin, who deserves a mention for his ability to perform satirical dances to mock princesses.

 Cinderella, of course, is the perfect magic ballet princess, if a little on the shy side.  Kind to beggars (who just happen to be princes in disguise), and ready to laugh and pretend magic ball dance with them.  And, of course, she is attended by four fates throughout, who appear to have no other purpose other than to give her a lift whenever she needs one. Oh the perks of being a magic ballet princess!

In sum, I loved it.  As a bonus, on the way back to the subway, we were regaled by a busker belting out a beautiful and accapella Waltz of the Toreadors. San Francisco is a delightful city.

*This is actually a terrible authentication method.  Out of the population of an entire kingdom, the odds of one person, and only one person,  fitting into a particular shoe are slim to none.

In Wyoming. With Dance Classes.

I seem to be a good dance teacher!  I am very surprised.  It's one thing to just be better than the dance teachers I have observed heretofore in this town, one of whom just sat on the floor doing her makeup and yelling at her students when they did something wrong, and at least one of whom apparently has no problems with students who do not wear underwear on stage, but it's another thing to be actually good.  I've certainly been enjoying teaching my belly dance class, but when the students come in and tell me they look forward to my class all day, or that they've noticed they've become more limber since starting, or that they have taken to thinking "how would Elisheba stand" during the day because they want to be more graceful, I get seriously warm fuzzies.

I really do have wonderful students.  They actually practice at home in between classes!  They remember my instructions (mostly, I think, because they find the way I give instructions to be hilarious.  They love the term "dinosaur hands.") and they want to do more things in the dance I choreographed for them.  I adore them.

So far, teaching this class is the only good thing about Wyoming.

Ballet West's Sleeping Beauty: Clockwork Toy Jewel Box Edition

We went to Salt Lake City this past weekend, because there is civilization there.  Also, Ballet West was presenting Sleeping Beauty in a recently renovated and incredibly gaudy little theatre that made up for its small size with as much gold and sparkles as could be crammed into the space.   It was a little like looking at a toy jewel box theatre, an illusion reinforced by the perfect shininess of very classically costumed dancers, a choreography which features slow ensemble work, and an orchestra with a very mellow tone (they do not tune sharp at all).  Sure the prologue had some very wobbly wobbles, but I am going to chalk that up to beginning of performance tightness and jitters, since all anteceding acts were technically solid.

Calling the production akin to watching a clockwork toy jewel box is in no way a criticism.  I very much enjoyed the sparkling relaxed feel, and while I've seen better faerie solos, the loveliness of the ensemble and commitment to hitting the phrases and highlights of the music made the prologue completely a joy and a delight.  Carabosse contributed with her own sparkles, minions with grand jetés to envy, (I love a ballerina with a good grand jeté, and an unexpected benefit of a theatre this tiny is that even in the balcony I could hear the clunks of the toe shoes and get a sense of exactly how much force the dancers are traveling with) and exits to flash bombs.

The prologue was followed by an equally delightful Act 1, in which villagers danced with garlands, and the children's corps danced with little garlands.  I cannot stress enough how good the ensemble work is here.  I was disappointed with the princes.  While the Prima is very traditionally in her gold and white sparkling gown all her princes were in shades of brown rather than being colorfully color-coded. Also, they didn't have a dance off, and only supported the princess and offered her three rounds of roses (which I think is a little excessive, but whatever.)  I realize this is a reasonable artistic choice; this ballet, like all of Tchaikovsky's ballets, is about the women, and if the princess decides to mostly ignore her princes and dancer herself, I deeply respect this choice. But I wanted to see color-coded princes in pastel-colored tights tour jeté their way across the stage in order to demonstrate their passion and worthiness. Is that so much to ask?

Oh well.  Act 2 was incredibly confusing.  I liked the introduction of the prince and his party, since they were costumed in a style I mentally tag as 1700's but I am not knowledgeable enough about fashion to say for sure.  At any rate, it was noticeably different from the more Renaissance look of the villagers in the preceding act so that we know time has passed.  All is well until the prince enters the magical enchanted forest.  There were beautiful enchanting wood faeries forming enchanting patterns as the prince wandered about in a confused fashion, but then he ran into a vision of Aurora and made a huge flaming deal out of dancing with her.  Umm, weird.  Especially since this happened at the expense of making a flaming deal out of awakening her and dancing with her then.  The final battle with Carabosse was similarly disappointing.  Quick, simple, and then he has vanquished evil without more than a lift or two of her evil minions.  Excuse me, but I expect to see evil defeated with grandiose balletics here, followed by a grandiose pas de deux with the princess, the actual one, not the forest hallucination.

The final act was a little unbalanced. While it was still pretty, and the faery tale characters took turns dancing, as they should, the amount of time they got was unbalanced.  Bluebird and companion got too much dance time, as did Gold, Silver, and their escort.  (Though I believe it was Gold who performed insanely impressive leaps taking of and landing en pointe.  I hope her feet don't suffer too much for it, because that was grand.) Puss in Boots and companion got just enough time, as did Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, while no other faery tale companions got individual dance time at all.  It was still pretty, and the glitter being dumped on the stage just reinforced the illusion of a toy theatre, but I'd like to see more than just a handful of the distinguished guests get party dance time.

Still, I was able to feel fabulous, in a glittering theatre watching shiny dancers present Sleeping Beauty, with wonderfully excessive care given to costuming and ensemble work.  Well done, Ballet West.

Nutcracker: A Better Princess Tale

The typical narrative of European fairy tales is a princess who needs rescued by a prince.  At least, when the tale is not about the evilness of dwarves or Jews (We tend to ignore the nastier parts of our traditions. This is known.  It is faithfully continued by Disney.

To be fair, I've heard Disney is doing better with its princesses from a feminist standpoint.  I wouldn't know; I refuse to patronize Disney's offerings due to their continual lobbying for a longer copyright period and the way they block Japanese animated releases in the U.S.  Also, the last time I tried to play a Disney DVD, it turns out they don't play nice with Linux because of their demand that the user download InterActual player.  Stallman's curse on the purveyors of DRMs!  Turing bless the makers of libdvdcss!

I said all that, not just because Disney, like the TSA, is an entity I won't pass up an opportunity to say bad things about, but because I recently saw The Nutcracker. It's not the first time, but it had been some time.  Nutcracker is an inversion of your prince rescuing princess trope.  Our prince needs rescued himself, because, well, he's been turned into an anthropomorphic novelty kitchen tool.  This may be the pinnacle of incompetence.  After our eponymic character is restored to human form by Clara, he then must engage in an epic battle with the Mouse King.  He loses.  Clara saves him by beating the Mouse King to death with her shoe.  It's hard to get less distress-y than that as a damsel, while at the same time it's hard to get more rescued as a prince.

In Which I Support the Arts as They Should Be

There is life outside this little hamlet a few km left of center of nowhere.  Sometimes, we forget this, so accordingly, we went on a pilgrimage to Denver, to see actual art.  Also, a dear friend of mine from Peace Corps Tanzania who has earned my admiration for many feats of strength and capacity building, including, but not limited to, teaching comprehensive sex education to Masai dudebros and running a half marathon while suffering from giardia.

On to the main event!  Actual art!  A dance show that is not a haphazard mess!  Momix' Botanica!  This is everything that art should be.  It incorporates "digital technology," or more meaningfully, projection technology, in a way that adds to the performance and delights the audience, beginning with the opening in which green lights dance on the curtain and form smiley faces, or birds, or stick figures, dancing or fighting with one another.  I have never seen moving lights anthropomorphized so perfectly.   A storm sequence alternately lit first the dancers, then increasingly enlarged projections of them on the screen behind.  At the end, to Azam Ali's beautiful rendition of "Aj Ondas" a dancer manipulated a giant sail on which changing flowers were projected.  Most of the time, though, the projection screen was just used for pretty easily changeable backgrounds.  It is so easy for projections to be used sillily, and I've seen that quite a lot, but this was projection done right.

The non-electronic props were used just as effectively, my favorite being the woman (possibly representing a jellyfish?) in a sort of headdress with long strands of light-catching something falling freely around her.  All she did was spin and turn, while the light-catching somethings spread out and spun the light with her.  It was beautiful.  Additionally, during the above-mentioned storm scene, men held and spun long (10 ft+) poles from which fluttered rippling silk for other dancers to leap over and under as the lightning flashed.  A group of mushroom women had amazing long pale green dresses with giant fluffy orange fluff at the hem, an orange fluff which could be raised for them to hide behind, or held at tutu level.  The fluff was moved up and down by (I think) strings attached to the dancers' hands.

The choreography itself constantly surprised and invited the audience to see movement in new ways or set up what appeared to be cliches, only to destroy them.  One of the very first acts was a woman on a mirror, dancing with her own reflection.  Simple, graceful movements, reflected and lit in gold, making her into constant symmetrical patterns both abstract and intimate.  Later on, we see a man sleeping in a forest, and a woman sees him and wants to approach.  Just as we think we are about to witness an Eve and Adam type scene, the woman's friendly dinosaur skeleton becomes jealous and eats her.  Which is a little disturbing.  More importantly, somewhere in the world, there are people whose job it is to create and operate a giant skeleton dinosaur puppet.  This world is beautiful.  Near the end of the show, a group of "centaurs," each composed of two dancers, one upright, one behind bent over, demonstrated amazing coordination in creating a horselike optical illusion.  Likewise, the dancing worms (pair acrobatics in soft green light) appeared wormlike, rather than human.

Overall, the performance was excellent.  Beautifully designed by an illusionist, and exquisitely performed by masterful dancers.  This is what art should be.  This is how to show us new ways of dance and movement while constantly delighting us with beauty. 

In Which I Support the Arts, Such as They are

We went to the theatre at the college the other night, because the dance program was putting on a concert.  I wanted to enjoy it.  I like theatrical evenings.  I like dressing up in sparkly clothes to be as fabulous an audience as I can manage (which is quite fabulous indeed).  I like dance.  I really want to find something delightful in Wyoming.  So I really wanted to enjoy this concert.  But I didn't.  I made a list of good things about the production:

• Dancers of all different body types were featured.
• Some of the pieces had visually interesting choreography.  

That's all I can come up with.  The performance opened with a piece by an alumna choreographer.  An all-female ensemble with skintight black pants and tank tops in varying but mostly drab colors performed various moves better known as warmup moves, but performed half-heartedly and with angst.  Seeing women hunched over in pike stretch, or kneeling and tapping their hands boredly, or doing half planks or small jumps made me assume the choreographer was portraying how I warm up when I'm grumpy and tired.  This would have been entertaining if performed as a comedy.

At least one of the dancers started adjusting her costume while not far enough into the wings to be invisible to the audience.  Bad form.  While I'm on the topic, I'm willing to overlook most of the technique issues; these are beginning dancers, most first year students at the college.  I'm not so willing to overlook poor stage manners and presence.  At least none of them looked terrified, but when they were done with a move or headed off stage, the dancers had a tendency to slouch, if they weren't doing so already.  Overall, even for beginners, they seemed to lack a commitment to what they were doing on stage.

On to the next piece, which I really wanted to like because the choreographer worked with the Atlanta Ballet.  It was visually interesting.  The costumes were still drab (seriously, my nail polish was more sparkly than anything I saw on the stage, and that sparkly nail polish hadn't congealed after two years while I was in Tanzania, which makes me assume it contains something toxic and likely to shorten my lifespan considerably), tank tops and bike shorts, and the three dancers, two men, one women, did nothing to challenge the idea that the purpose of men in dance is to lift women.  Seriously, isn't modern dance supposed to break rules and expectations?

Whatever.  On to lots of female dancers in white dresses, high waisted, with sleeves improperly cut so that the entire dress had to move everytime they raised their arms, and at least the skirts wore short enough to reveal plain white bloomers.  Couldn't they even have pretty bloomers?  With lace?  The male dancer was wearing trousers of a dirty brown color, with a dirty looking white shirt, untucked and half unbuttoned.   The choreography was a wandering unfocused mess, but the dancers seemed to like it better than their previous material.  I think because it was country-ish music about love.  Some of them even smiled.

Continuing the momentum of engagement by the dancers, they engaged in the only good piece in the production, choreographed by Carol Mendes.  Performed only by women in shiny black and white dresses with cut outs in the back so they could move their arms freely.  Of course, this revealed bra straps (who told these women to wear bras with transparent plastic straps on stage?  The plastic catches the stage lights and glitters.  Underwear should match either skin or costume.), but it was an improvement.  The movements matched the music, it was happy, and the dancers smiled and engaged with their audience.  I call that a win, even though a major moment of the piece was the dancers pulling up their dresses and smiling as they revealed their bright pastel-colored bike shorts.

It was a short-lived win, since an artsy short film was up next.

As the dance world continues to evolve and incorporate digital media, I am happy to say that Western will be premiering a short dance film.                                                                                                  ~Note from the artistic director in the program.  

Digital: it does not mean what you seem to think it means.  A film is not necessarily digital, and the dance world has been incorporating digital media pretty much since the invention of the CD.  Technical language quibbles aside, the premiered short film was horrible.  Not only did it continue the choreographic pattern of modern dance without any particular point, it was actively annoying.  It opened with two mouths close together loudly pronouncing "oh" and "ah" in alternation.   It continued to show people arranged on the floor to spell "oh" and "ah" in case we weren't getting the point from the music.  The ohs and ahs continued loudly throughout not pretty shots of the campus (which is sad, the campus is quite pretty) with people either dancing not prettily through hallways, or body parts way too close too close to the cameras for anything but marveling about how ugly skin is in high enough resolution.

After the terrible film, all the dancers performed, following the narrated stage directions in the music (so cliche) while in skintight bodysuits without adequate lining.  I wanted to hulk into one of my dance teachers and smash things with my righteous fists of costuming fury.  Then the women of the ensemble began angstily grabbing their breasts.  Suddenly I stopped blaming the dancers for not seeming committed to the choreography and began sympathizing.

After a brief break for the dancers to get out of their ill-lined body suits and back into something slightly less horrid, which meant black bike shorts with skintight black tank tops (for the men) and poorly fitting corset-style shirts in a noticeably different shade of black from the shorts and held on with what looked like white elastic straps (for the women), the ensemble proceeded to perform a second visually interesting piece.  I still didn't understand what the dance was supposed to communicate, and it was still overly angsty, and it was still the same look and style of modern dance as the rest of the production, but at least it was moderately better than what came before, so ending with that will work.

Insofar as I understand modern dance, which is at least moreso than I understand modern visual art, it is supposed to be transgressive against rules and structures such that new forms of dance become possible.  When structure is banished only for the sake of banishing structure without bringing anything new, we are left with an incomprehensible message and bored.  Why does it have to be all modern dance anyway?  Adding basic pieces of other dance styles would give the students a better education in dance and lead to a more varied dance production.

I'm going to be teaching beginning belly dance at the college next semester.  Now I'm worried that I will be as bad an influence on dance here as what the college is already subject to.