Kyle Davis's A Dark and Lonely Space claims, in the liner notes, to tell an anthropmorphized story about a planet coming into creation. If it did, it didn't succeed.
I recently read a heartbreaking blog post, which I can't seem to find once more, from a woman who went through the music program in college and obtained an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in composing music for the symphonic orchestra. Her final was just that: she had to compose a symphony, and it would be played by a symphony. It was the finest night of her life thus far, but it was laden with two realizations: she would never hear it played again, and she would never compose again.
Because she was middle class.
She didn't have rich parents who could afford to send her around the world, attending conferences and garnering patrons of her own. She didn't have an in to the patronage system that her peers did. Many of the new compositions and such you hear these days, if you listen to anything composed since the 1960s, is composed by people who have very little to say. Their world is backstopped by money. No matter how hard it gets, they have a place to go.
A Dark and Lonely Space feels like something written by someone who had that kind of patronage. I don't know if Davis did, but damn if it doesn't feel like that, because A Dark and Lonely Space feels like someone with nothing to say trying too hard to say, well, to say anything.
The music for A Dark and Lonely Space was composed by Michael Giacchino. Giacchino is an award-winning composer who's written music for a lot of different movies: Inside Out, the Star Trek reboots, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, as well as soundtracks for the video game series Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. So let me ask: can you hum anything by him?
John Williams, Ennio Moriconne, Hans Zimmer, and Danny Elfman have all written scores that stay in our minds long after the show ended. Elfman recently complained that directors now want wallpaper music, music that doesn't stand out, that pushes the audience's emotions from behind without being a prominent feature.
Michael Giacchino excels at that sort of music. Can you remember anything Michael Giacchino wrote? I can't. Which is disappointing because I'm a big fan of the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending, and the music for A Dark and Lonely Space is the Jupiter Ascending Symphony, adapted by Giacchino for this ballet.
The music is bombastic and noisy, brassy and intrusive, yet at the same time completely unmemorable. If there's a place for that kind of music on the ballet stage, A Dark and Lonely Space isn't it; it's just that Giacchino writes a lot of science fiction soundtracks and Kyle Davis was writing a science-fictiony ballet and apparently thought it would be cool to marry the two.
Writers have a saying: always honor the promise of your premise. Your back-cover blurb, your liner notes, your cover art, and your opening scene all describe your premise. The pre-credits act from James Bond always shows the premise: a spy of great charisma and derring-do, killing bad guys and wooing bad girls, and the movies succeed when they follow through. Jaws has a woman eaten by a shark in a small village; Jurassic Park has a nasty fight with a caged velociraptor go wrong. The premise is about scary animals and the people who have to deal with them.
A Dark and Lonely Space opens with a huge premise: a woman at the stands fifteen feet tall at the back of the stage in an enormous, ethereal dress, and sings at the audience in wordless operatic fashion...
... and that's it. The costumes are generally uninteresting. The dance isn't technically challenging, there are no particularly skillful or risky moves, with few lifts or catches.
As the opera singer sings, the light focuses on the "newborn planet." They twitch uncomfortably under the glare, but it's a twitch we've seen before; avante garde ballet has been experimenting with getting these incredibly physically beautiful people to move in uncanny and discomfitting, alien ways for a while now. Crystal Pite's Emergence is my favorite example of that.
There are several movements in the piece. There are a lot of dancers including four menacing figures in dark masks, our "newborn planet" is played by a distinctly androgynous and enby figure, and there are nine male/female couples who represent... what? The othernineeight planets? But none of the dances add up to anything.
I get that dance, dance without a well-known storyline, a narrative, a sequence of emotions communicated through expression and costume, has a problem like instrumental music: it has trouble communicating with its audience. Vivaldi's Four Seasons only communicates that Winter is cold, Autumn has winds, Summer is nice and Spring is hopeful because we've heard those themes in other places and we know what Vivaldi is trying to say even before the first notes are played. Davis doesn't have that kind of illuminating platform on which to rest our expectations, and he fails to deliver. There's no narrative in A Dark and Lonely Space that I could follow with any coherence.
A Dark and Lonely Space has a full orchestra, a large chorus in the upper boxes of the audience, the woman singing opera, and a cast of over twenty people. It's an enormous production. It must have been expensive to fund. I wish it had been worth it.
I recently read a heartbreaking blog post, which I can't seem to find once more, from a woman who went through the music program in college and obtained an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in composing music for the symphonic orchestra. Her final was just that: she had to compose a symphony, and it would be played by a symphony. It was the finest night of her life thus far, but it was laden with two realizations: she would never hear it played again, and she would never compose again.
Because she was middle class.
She didn't have rich parents who could afford to send her around the world, attending conferences and garnering patrons of her own. She didn't have an in to the patronage system that her peers did. Many of the new compositions and such you hear these days, if you listen to anything composed since the 1960s, is composed by people who have very little to say. Their world is backstopped by money. No matter how hard it gets, they have a place to go.
A Dark and Lonely Space feels like something written by someone who had that kind of patronage. I don't know if Davis did, but damn if it doesn't feel like that, because A Dark and Lonely Space feels like someone with nothing to say trying too hard to say, well, to say anything.
The music for A Dark and Lonely Space was composed by Michael Giacchino. Giacchino is an award-winning composer who's written music for a lot of different movies: Inside Out, the Star Trek reboots, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, as well as soundtracks for the video game series Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. So let me ask: can you hum anything by him?
John Williams, Ennio Moriconne, Hans Zimmer, and Danny Elfman have all written scores that stay in our minds long after the show ended. Elfman recently complained that directors now want wallpaper music, music that doesn't stand out, that pushes the audience's emotions from behind without being a prominent feature.
Michael Giacchino excels at that sort of music. Can you remember anything Michael Giacchino wrote? I can't. Which is disappointing because I'm a big fan of the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending, and the music for A Dark and Lonely Space is the Jupiter Ascending Symphony, adapted by Giacchino for this ballet.
The music is bombastic and noisy, brassy and intrusive, yet at the same time completely unmemorable. If there's a place for that kind of music on the ballet stage, A Dark and Lonely Space isn't it; it's just that Giacchino writes a lot of science fiction soundtracks and Kyle Davis was writing a science-fictiony ballet and apparently thought it would be cool to marry the two.
Writers have a saying: always honor the promise of your premise. Your back-cover blurb, your liner notes, your cover art, and your opening scene all describe your premise. The pre-credits act from James Bond always shows the premise: a spy of great charisma and derring-do, killing bad guys and wooing bad girls, and the movies succeed when they follow through. Jaws has a woman eaten by a shark in a small village; Jurassic Park has a nasty fight with a caged velociraptor go wrong. The premise is about scary animals and the people who have to deal with them.
A Dark and Lonely Space opens with a huge premise: a woman at the stands fifteen feet tall at the back of the stage in an enormous, ethereal dress, and sings at the audience in wordless operatic fashion...
... and that's it. The costumes are generally uninteresting. The dance isn't technically challenging, there are no particularly skillful or risky moves, with few lifts or catches.
As the opera singer sings, the light focuses on the "newborn planet." They twitch uncomfortably under the glare, but it's a twitch we've seen before; avante garde ballet has been experimenting with getting these incredibly physically beautiful people to move in uncanny and discomfitting, alien ways for a while now. Crystal Pite's Emergence is my favorite example of that.
There are several movements in the piece. There are a lot of dancers including four menacing figures in dark masks, our "newborn planet" is played by a distinctly androgynous and enby figure, and there are nine male/female couples who represent... what? The other
I get that dance, dance without a well-known storyline, a narrative, a sequence of emotions communicated through expression and costume, has a problem like instrumental music: it has trouble communicating with its audience. Vivaldi's Four Seasons only communicates that Winter is cold, Autumn has winds, Summer is nice and Spring is hopeful because we've heard those themes in other places and we know what Vivaldi is trying to say even before the first notes are played. Davis doesn't have that kind of illuminating platform on which to rest our expectations, and he fails to deliver. There's no narrative in A Dark and Lonely Space that I could follow with any coherence.
A Dark and Lonely Space has a full orchestra, a large chorus in the upper boxes of the audience, the woman singing opera, and a cast of over twenty people. It's an enormous production. It must have been expensive to fund. I wish it had been worth it.
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