elfs | Entries tagged with ballet

Omaha and I attended the ballet once more, the Season’s Canon, which which is also the title of the third piece performed in the program, and which was also the most interesting.

I have nothing against admiring hot ballet dancers. One of my top-ten favorite Tumblrs during the nudes era was Alt Ballerina Bondage Fairies. The curator loved tied-up ballerinas in dreamy fantasy settings, but he’d gleefully reblog a pretty woman in any of those three states.

The first piece, premiering at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, was Dwight Rhoden’s Catching Feelings, a series of ensemble and duet pieces that basically had a single theme: ballet dancers are hot. The clothes they wore were tight-fitting and form-showing; the male dancers had either very short crop tops to highlight their arms and shoulders, or nothing at all. There were a series of lifts and twirls, but it was very much an unchallenging piece and it didn’t really say much other than “Look at these bodies with all this muscle and no bodyfat at all. Aren’t they amazing?” I have to agree that they are.

The second piece was 50 years old, George Balanchine’s Due Concertant. It was more classical, being fifty years old, a simple duet played with the pianist and violinist on stage, trying to show how music is communicated to the dancer before the dancer can begin the dance. It had more story and more verve than the first piece.

The third piece was Crystal Pite’s The Season’s Canon, and was the most interesting of the three, although that may just be me being a Crystal Pite fanboy. When it was over I said, “That was, um, very Crystal,” and Omaha just laughed because she knew exactly what I meant. Pite loves very large ensembles working in absolute harmony, and she especially loves pushing these beautiful bodies in very organic but still surprisingly uncanny ways. In this piece, she takes different bits of Vivaldi and sets her choreography to it with her usual panache and taste. There are pieces with thirty or more dancers on the stage, sometimes en-masse together and moving as a single organism, sometimes pulsing with energy out to the audience, and sometimes running to refract the stage lights in wild and hypnotic patterns. It’s gorgeous work, and much of what I’ve come to expect from Crystal Pite.

The music caught my attention, as it often does. Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed was a beautiful rearrangement of the original The Four Seasons, and Johan Ullen’s Recomposed Bach does the same thing for a lot of J.S. Bach’s music.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Johan Ullen, Recomposed: Violin Concerto in E Major

Yesterday, Omaha and I went to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Rep 4” in which they do contemporary dance pieces. They’re still requiring vaccination cards at the door, masks at all times except when taking a sip of wine, forbidden wine in the auditorium again, and they’ve taken away the coffee service. I approve of the vaccination and masks, but if they're going to let us have wine, they should let us have coffee as well.

There were two older pieces, one of which I had seen before, and two debuts.

The one piece I had seen before was Crystal Pite’s Plot Point, which is an involved piece that every writer would find familiar. The story is something of a combination of a noir spy thriller and a domestic infidelity melodrama but what’s interesting is that there are two people on the stage for every character: someone dressed to play the role, and their white-costumed doppleganger wearing a mask and headpiece that hides their identity. Pite has the dancers interact in a way that shows how the “plot point” set out in the rough draft has the character do something that is in or out of character, and how the character sometimes defies what the writer set out in the rough draft. It’s an interesting piece.

On the other hand, David Parson’s Caught is absolutely magical. Using an completely darkened theater, powerful strobe lights, and a sensor on the solo dancer it creates a superhuman effect: as she dances the strobes only go off at the height of her jumps, leaps, and other moves, creating the illusion that she never touches the ground. She circles the entire stage with her legs in a split, as if floating on a magical carpet; she seems to walk two feet above the ground across the stage, and other astonishing moments that could only be captured by a strobe light and the human eye’s afterimage processing. After every physically demanding movement she would appear by magic in the middle, lit by the conic beam of an overhead flood, implying that she hadn’t moved at all, but you could see how heavily she was breathing. It is a genuinely new kind of dance, and it was a highly emotional privilege to watch it. The video does not capture how fantastic it was, and PNB Corps du Ballet principal Angelica Generosa was far better, far more physically capable even, than the dancer in the video.

Mineko Williams’ Before I Was says it’s about growing into adulthood, but I took something different away from it. Her last piece, The Trees, The Trees, which I saw in 2019, was quite good, and this one is as well. She has more vocalists on the stage this time, again singing a kind of poem, as the dancers move and gyre in front of what looks like the outline of a suburban house. It seemed to me that the story was much more one about the difficulty of maintaining a connection, both to yourself and to your spouse, as you struggle to raise children.

And finally Justin Peck’s The Times are Racing was physically demanding and fun to watch, but it didn’t communicate much. It was great, and the dancers were all on and fabulous. I wish it had spoken more to me, though. On the other hand, it may have given me a new favorite musician.

Current Mood: verklempt
Current Music: Dan Deacon, USA I-IV

Omaha and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet Director's Choice, and I think I had a much better time here than at the season premier. There were three pieces, and all of them were quite fun.

Bacchus was the opening piece, and it was a lot of fun. The point of the piece was to use dance to show the emotional energy of wine, merriment, and abundance. It wasn't a hugely complex bit of choreography, and there was no particular set. The costumes were gorgeous, the dancing precise and well-timed, and the forms of joy being displayed by athletically powerful bodies were various and engaging. Boys kissed boys, girls kissed girls, there were hints of a triad, and the whole thing came off as just a very pretty piece.

The Trees The Trees was a much more involved piece, and at first I worried it was going to be another disaster along the lines of Dark and Lonely Space from last year. It was much better. It has its pretensions; for one, one of the people on stage is a vocalist, striding across the stage and reading a poem aloud in a somewhat operatic fashion as the dancers act out around her. The poem, of the same name by Heather Christie, is a series of vignettes about 20-somethings trying to figure out how their lives are supposed to work. "I am the sort of handbag everyone weeps into because we have no jobs and no health insurance so also we can't have any babies and I want to talk about the future of my peer group..." The dancing is emotionally affective as it follows three couples interacting, coming together, falling apart, having their difficulties, all in a small, modernist apartment setting with only a couch. I liked it a lot, and it worked well for me. Omaha thought it was only passable.

The vocalist was Alicia Walter, who has her own fascinating history, and I'd love to hear the story about how she ended up on the Ballet stage.

In the Countenance of Kings was a dance about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I joked recently that I have now seen actual and somewhat successful "dancing about architecture." It's actually more than that; it's a very energetic piece about the kinds of people who live along that stretch of road. The music was The BQE by Sufjan Stevens, and is very listenable in its own right, but when joined by 18 dancers in costumes that reflected a kind of 70's inflected athleticwear, the rhythms and force of the piece was wonderful.

Omaha and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet's All Premiere season opener, and it was a mixed bag. That's always true when you go to an all-premier; you're getting a combination of dances that either have never been seen before on this stage, or have never been seen before ever. The only distinction they have is that someone chose to bring them to PNB, and someone chose to pay for them. There were three this year, and I'm going to review them backwards.

Cacti, by Alexander Ekman

The last piece, Cacti is ballet comedy, and it was successful. Cacti has twenty people on stage: sixteen dancers and four musicians. The dancers each have a small wooden platform of their own, described in the text as a "Scrabble piece" although none of the platforms have letters. There are four voiceover pieces, two of which seem to be quoting from the worst, most pretentious critical reviews the choreographer ever garnered, one is the inner monologue of the choreographer, and one is a recording of the dialogue between two dancers as they go through the motions as if in rehearsal.

Cacti is technically demanding; with sixteen people on stage weilding heavy pieces of wood and flowerpots with dangerously spiny plants in them, there are dangers aplenty, and the dancers go through a dizzying array of complex interactions and physically demanding body moves in very rapid succession, all the while playing roles that are alternatingly funny, incongruous, or just outright silly, and you get more than one laugh out of it. There are four movements, and all of them are distinct, interesting, and tell a story about just how much the choreographer hates pretentious critics.

Silent Ghost, by Alejandro Cerrudo

I trust Cerrudo; his Little Mortal Jump, which I saw in 2016, was an amazing sequence, with its beginning silliness and its ending passion, all highlighted though large black cubes on casters that, when turned, revealed lights, costumes, and other paraphenalia that led the viewer through the idea of people seeking immortality through intimacy. You can see that the "little mortal jumps" he wants to get across are the heart-stopping courage it takes to be vulnerable with someone else.

In that light, Silent Ghost is... okay. But just okay. Cerrudo remains a technically challenging choreographer pushing his dancers to their limits, seeking that exact edge at which their expressiveness to the audience and their own physical limitations are both at their utmost. Cerrudo's taste in music has always pleased me; he has a really good ear for chosing music that communicates authenticity and verisimilitude, for getting across to the honest the place and time he wants to invoke.

But Silent Ghost doesn't seem to have anything to say in quite the same way Little Mortal Jump did. The pieces were all pretty and strong, but that's a lot of what they had to say: these dancers are pretty and strong.

I mean, that's not a bad thing to say.

A Dark and Lonely Space, by Kyle Davis

See separate review TL;DR: I really didn't like it.

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 other ~~nine~~eight 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.

Current Music: Michael Giacchino, The Jupiter Ascending Symphony

Last night, Omaha and I went to the Pacific Northwest Ballet. It's a little weird, I guess, to be talking abouth the ballet; it seems a bit pretentious, and the tickets aren't cheap, and everyone who's there looks far more wealthy and comfortable than the people I ride the train with. But last night was Crystal Pite's Emergence, which has moved into being one of my favorite ballets.

Emergence is a story about a human insect hive. The opening piece shows a new worker emerging from her chrysalis, and the way the ballerina twitches and shudders is definitely creepy, even as another worker slowly helps her figure out how her body works. During the transformation, she takes poses and positions that are just not natural, at the limits of human mobility, and look defiantly weird.

One movement has the women of the hive in what looks like a traditional chorus line, but then they begin chanting weirdly as they slowly and aggressively sweep the stage clean of men. The traditional long-legginess of a chorus line becomes weaponized, like the prow of a harvesting machine.

In another movement, a procession of males makes a slow walking step across the stage, taking odd turns at precise moments, until the last four realize that one among them isn't male. The woman chosen for the role is atypically strong and convincingly butch, and the men dance with her in a way that shows an attempt to accept her in their role— she even does a lift of the smallest of the men— even as they struggle with knowing what she really is. The movement ends with the rest of the hive showing up, and the four of them fleeing.

The piece ends with the males lying on the floor as the light rises, face-down, their arms twitching upward behind them in a cyclic rhythm which is downright uncanny. They rise, and the women join them, and the hive slowly emerges into a full-on discipline rhythm become a solid, unified mass of creatures all moving as one, until one breaks off and makes his way down the tunnel at the back of the stage setting, to leave the hive.

It's transhuman and post-furry, and definitely weird. It takes these people whose whole life has been learning how to be fluid and elegant on stage, and makes them learn these weird, twitchy gestures and sharp, harsh movements, using their physical talents at the exterme of their abilities to give impressions that are uncanny and inhuman.

Current Mood: satisfied

Omaha, Raen and I went out to see Cendrillon, the retelling of the Cinderella story that's currently playing at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. It is straight-up Cinderella, only with some seriously kinky themes thrown in that make it great.

In the beginning, we see Cinderella's mother and father in a flashback, as she recalls their love for another. It's a very touching dance, sensual and beautiful, until of course the mother dies of a heart attack. Then we get Cinderella's current life. The two sisters, with bandaged heads to imply they're constantly under the knife or undergoing some treatment to make them more beautiful, parade around the house, teasing Cinderella. The mother praises them. Cinderella's father comes in and tries to intervene, but is stopped: If you always wondered what kept Cinderella's father from leaving the Wicked Stepmother and her two cruel daughters, the answer is: a smokin' body and the promise of great sex.

Meanwhile, we get a glimpse into the Prince's life. He's bored, and his four fine fellows are trying to keep him entertained. The Prince, it turns out, has a, um, thing for feet; in one uproarious scene the fellows throw themselves at his feet, not in a gesture of obesiance but trying to the Prince happy, and his response is to thank them but say that that's not exactly what he's looking for. He orders a ball to bring all the beautiful women to him.

The two girls, excited by the ball, hire "Superintendents of Pleasure," played to great gay camp by two fabulous dancers, who dress the girls in garish asymmetrical outfits. The dance sequence is a lot about the father trying to convince the stepmother to let Cinderella go, but is overwhelmed by his wife's power. There is just a hint that the mother even uses her daughters' sexuality to keep him in line, but it's equally clear that he rejects that line of thinking.

After they leave, Cinderella is visited by a Fairy– played by the same woman who played Cinderella's mother– who hosts a hilarious retelling of the story as drag comedy, with masculine mannequins cross-dressing as various characters in a story that recounts Cinderella's plot and ends with a happily-ever-after event. Cinderella tries on a variety of the outfits, but it is the dress her mother wore that is perfect. The scene ends with her dipping her feet in a bowl of gold, which adheres to her feet in glittery patterns.

The ball sequence is exquisite, with the Prince receiving a warning from the Fairy that his life is about to change. Cinderella comes in, and the prince is entranced. As she descends the stairs, he stands next to them and stares at her feet, then to the audience, then back to her feet. It's very clear where his interests lie! But as he spends the evening with Cinderella, his eyes eventually move higher and he learns that there's a whole woman there he can love and even respect.

The clock tolls and Cinderella is forced to run. He doesn't even get a shoe in this story; all he gets is a drawing of her foot, from memory. He goes on a voyage. There's a strongly racially tinged sequence where he seeks out the perfect foot from the African and Asian continents, but eventually he is led back to his own kingdom, and Cinderella's home. The girls force Cinderella into the back room, but the fairy is having none of that, and stuns them to let Cinderella meet the Prince. There is a reunion, and a happily-ever-after dance, as the Fairly and the Father dance on the far side of the stage.

The ending is intensely sad, as Cinderella's father is eventually left with nothing but the dress, and the promise that his daughter will be cared for properly.

So you have gay camp, robofetishism from the mannequin sequence, body horror from the seriously weird assymetrical costumes (the mother's resembles a purple wasp!), all manner of crossdressing, inappropriate family relationships, and more foot fetishism than a dozen drag shows. Equally amazing is how well the choreography makes it clear the father's love for his daughter is pure and paternal, the one aspect of the story that's not mixed up in any weird sex and power plays from beginning to end.

The set is gorgeous, with the very in-vogue use of high-powered still projectors on large, mobile white set pieces to reflect the surroundings. The pieces look like torn sheets of paper, and much of the story is told in stills and brief texts on the walls. (When the prince is raging about how he lost that beautiful girl from last night's ball, the sheets all bear oil paintings of women's feet.) The costumes are gorgeous (I totally want the father's long coat, vest, and high-collared shirt). The lead does the entire performance barefoot, which I'm told by people who know is incredibly hard.

And I'm totally changing my title at work to "Software Development Superintendent of Pleasure." Those two guys got the loudest cheers of anyone on that stage.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1628688.html

Kouryou-chan in rehearsal

Kouryou-chan has finished out her year of ballet, and at the end of the year the school puts on its annual performance. This year, the ballet of choice was Cinderella, which is, like most ballets, and excuse to have lots of pretty people float about the stage, looking pretty and demonstrating some pretty crazy athleticism. Kouryou-chan is in Ballet III, which is one of the last grades before the school start to get serious about actually dancing, weeding out the ones who'll never be graceful on the stage. Ballet IV through VI is all the upper grades, where the kids get the hard stuff. And the solos. Kouryou-chan is so looking forward to solos.

She's a great dancer-- to the chagrin of her peers. She is precise and completely in time with the music. Unfortunately, those around her are not, and she sometimes finds herself running into someone who's a half-beat slower. She's gotten so much better with her arms, too; last year she was sloppy with them.

She's also so much taller than everyone else. There is one girl in her class who is a year older and an inch taller than she is-- and when they stand side by side Kouryou-chan's waistline is two inches above hers. The kid is all leg.

Unfortunately, when she doesn't have anything to do, she fidgets. Which is why she fronts a routine when her class is on stage, only to be rotated to the back when they're being asked to pose prettily and be backdrop for another act. We're working on that.

Curtain call rehearsal

The rest of the cast was fairly amazing, too. I can't speak for other dance schools, but the principals for this performance were much better than they have been in previous years.

The biggest standout is the young woman who played the Blue Stepsister. You can barely see her in the group photo, back row on the left, in the blue dress and black braids. (They labeled them "blue stepsister" and "green stepsister" because the school director didn't want to label them with the traditional names, "skinny" and "dumpy," and they aren't specified as Anastasia and Drizella in the original dance score.) The stepsisters had the hardest job of all, because they were being asked to do ballet as physical comedy. And while the green stepsister was game, the woman who played the blue stepsister was not only game, she was absolutely fearless. She was willing to fail, and it showed in her every second on stage. Her facial expressions were bright, broad, and communicative all the way in the back row; when she "practiced" dancing, she showed just how awkward a stepsister could be, willing to be off-balance, willing to fall over. I hope she stays in show business, because that's a rare gift.

On the other end of the spectrum, during Act I all of the tiniest kids, the toddlers from "The Joy of Movement" classes get dragged out and put through their adorable routines to adoring parents and relatives and randomly chosen music from the score, which would be boring if it weren't for the overdoses of cuteness. Apparently one little girl got so freaked out during the second show she had to be taken off, crying. The infinite patience and grace of those dance instructors is wonderful in its right, and I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with that, day after day.

And while this show of smalls is going on, the Fairy Godmother character has to stand at the edge of the stage and pose prettily. This goes on for something like 40 minutes, with her arms slightly out in a stage-filling expansive gesture. Good grief, her arms must be strong.

Kouryou-chan made it through two brutal six-hour dress rehearsals, and then two performances in which she had roles in all three acts. Reminding her to stay hydrated and with protein was quite the challenge. I was very grateful to Storm's mother for letting Storm out for the night so she could attend.

Afterward, we took Kouryou-chan out to The Cheesecake Factory, where I overindulged in their carrot cheesecake. Which was... meh. Two great tastes that fail together.

Current Mood: satisfied

Kouryou-chan in rehearsal

Just like every year, the local ballet dance studio put on its big performance at the local performing arts center. Ms. Moss is a believer in getting kids on stage, making the rehearse and perform for an audience, and getting them used to the idea that hundreds of people are staring at them as they do both solo and group work.

Kouryou-chan is in the pre-pointe ballet, and will be for at least another two years, but she's made huge strides in her dancing abilities and is now working on her consistency.

I forgot my glasses for the performance, so it took me almost a minute to even recognize my kid when her group came out for their part in the ballet. I couldn't recognize her because she was so pitch-perfect on stage, she looked like she'd grown an entire foot taller in the time since I'd dropped her off to get ready for the performance. Kouryou-chan has always had trouble with her arms and keeping still, but during her dance she was gracile and perfect, absolutely in sync when she needed to be.

During the finale, she was much more herself: sloppy arm work, fidgety and looking around. I guess they didn't rehearse that nearly as hard as they had the main routine. But she did fine even there; many of her peers were just as ready to be done as she was.

The ballet included a lot of solos by the graduating class-- five young woman now going on to other things. At least one of them ought to go pro; Mariko is so graceful and delicate, and so well-rehearsed, she'll do well anywhere as a dancer.

The performance is a hodge-podge of music pieces from the longer ballet, assembled to meet the needs of everyone from adult classes down to the toddlers. There was one scene where a girl in the littlest class, barely two years old, freaked out, started crying, and then gathered herself up and kept performing anyway. Yet the teacher still rescued her off the stage.

We gathered Kouryou-chan up after she was out and took her to The Cheesecake Factory for a mega sugar overload. Note to self: the "strawberry shortcake" there isn't your routine home-made thing; it's a megacalorie monstrosity with ice cream added.