From the closing three days of the Balanchine Celebration
at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts:
San Francisco Ballet danced "Symphony in Three Movements"
to a score by Igor Stravinsky. It's a quirky piece from
1972, with a central movement that hints at Fokine bracketed
by movements that have more to do with Broadway and Robbins
-- jazz hands and everyday gesture. Lucia Lacarra does well
once again.
San Francisco's "Prodigal Son," a story ballet from 1929,
is not really my cup of chai, but the Drinking
Companions (dancing louts, really) are effective and the
Father's closing gesture of reconciliation (covering the
Son, who has crawled onto this chest, with his cloak) is
affecting.
Pennsylvania Ballet closed the festival with one of those
"On your feet, people of Annandale" pieces, "Western
Symphony." Someone named Hershy Kay arranged American folk
songs for orchestra and called it a score.
When the five-year-old girl sat down two seats from me,
in her pink Mary Janes, I had some anxieties. But she proved
to be better behaved than the pair of middle-aged women
sitting in front of me.
It's the story of Diana, an angry Latina high-schooler
from Brooklyn who finds release in amateur boxing. The film
leaves too many loose ends to be tied up (Diana's
relationship with her father) and is thin on motivation, and
the cardboard dialogue put into the mouths of Diana's
teachers is stumblebum. On the positive side, Michele
Rodriguez floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee in
her film debut. Her physical strength is on display, and she
shows emotional depths with her love interest. (And a hat
tip for naming the boyfriend Adrian, pace
Rocky). Like most sports genre pictures (and dance
pix), the sports performances just crowd out the rest of the
story.
On Saturday, Suzanne Farrell Ballet performed
"Divertimento No. 15," a lovely, fluffy raspberry trifle of
a piece. Midway through this piece I realized how lucky we
were to have music performed live for the run of the
festival. Miami City Ballet brought in two of the black and
white ballets, and for me, these are what Balanchine is all
about: purity, innovation, dance that don't give up their
secrets quickly. Jennifer Kronenberg and Eric
Quilleré perform the heart-stopping pas de deux from
"Agon." This eloquent duet has as much to say about the
course of a human relationship as any novel. Miami also
performed "The Four Temperaments." For the Joffrey, Tracy
Julius brings a huge grin to the "Tarantella Pas de Deux."
At Tuesday's performance to open the second week, rumor
had it that the President was in the house. I wasn't
positioned to see his box. At any rate, traffic patterns
outside the center were disrupted, but we only started seven
minutes after posted curtain time. Pennsylvania Ballet
performed the beautiful "Serenade," the ensemble work with
the funky false ending. Balanchine's emphasis on precise
gesture here -- the point of a hand, the early sharp turn
into first position -- oddly suggests Bob Fosse to me. San
Francisco Ballet brought "Bugaku," which I found easier to
take on my second viewing, what with its bombastic score and
distracting trailing gowns in the second section. Soloist
Yuan Yuan Tan has remarkably flexible limbs, as if she were
made of wire pipe cleaners. San Francisco also performed
"Symphony in C" (to music by Bizet). Lucia Lacarra shows a
lovely long line in the second movement. But I think I saw a
couple of partnering problems later in the piece.
Heaven, by George F. Walker, directed by Howard
Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
A departure for Woolly: no blood packs in the
killing scene! A departure for Walker: hallucination scenes
and an explicit dealing with spiritual issues. Rick
Foucheux, with a demented laugh, is nifty as Karl, a
sublimely evil person who gets into Heaven on a
technicality. Mitchell Hébert's closing monologue
that doesn't end so much as walk away is effective.
The House of Breathing (stories by Gail Jones)
shows the author's gift for closed, rich prose, dark like a
vowel or a piece of fruit. Her experience-based stories are
more successful than those driven by research. The title
story, with its allusions to The Tempest, is also
worthy.
The rhythm of A. R. Ammons' book-length poem
Garbage is propelled forward by the stopping of
nearly every sentence with a colon instead of a period.
Referential to the craft of writing, but never overly
reverential, "no use to linger over beauty or simple
effect:/this is just a poem with a job to do:"
Art Spiegelman's biography in comics, Maus, finds
generality in its specifics. It tells the story of his
parents' survival of the Holocaust in Poland, as remembered
by his father Vladek in Rego Park, New York, in the late
1970s and 1980s and written and drawn over thirteen years.
Spiegelman sees his father's flaws all too clearly: his
racism, his miserliness, his passive-aggressive behavior;
and this serves to heighten the pathos of the main
narrative. Having endured nearly a year in Auschwitz, Vladek
is transported to Dachau as the Reich shrinks before the
advancing Allies. With characteristic understatement, Vladek
says, "I had a misery, I can't tell you... Here, in Dachau,
my troubles began."
14 sep '00
Early returns from the Balanchine Celebration at the
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts:
The Bolshoi Ballet brought the pleasant showcase piece
"Mozartiana." In the "Thème et Variations" section,
the man and the woman trade overlapping pirouettes, which is
a pleasant effect. The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is to be
commended for taking the risk of reinstating the Caller's
role in "Square Dance," but unfortunately the idea is too
clever by half: Balanchine was right to delete the part in a
1976 revival.
Miami City Ballet is represented by "Stars and Stripes"
and the "Rubies" section of "Jewels." The former piece,
pleasing enough, looks like half the dancing population of
South Florida was recruited to muster the regiments called
for. And now we know what baton twirling on pointe looks
like. The hard-edged, circus-like "Rubies" is much more
satisfying. Dancers move into balance positions that
threaten to topple them over, but never do. Jennifer
Kronenberg is flirtatious in her pas de deux.
Strong film programming continues at the AFI Theater.
Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) is rightfully famous for
its 30-minute central section that tells the story of an
overnight jewelry store burglary with no dialogue.
And the new print of Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985)
is simply awe-inspiring. With each shot composed like a
painting, perhaps it's not surprising how little movement
Kurosawa's camera makes. In another brilliant soundtrack
stroke, the first half of the first bloody battle unfolds
without diegetic sound, only with the musical score. Tatsuya
Nakadai's face (as Hidetora, the Lear analogue) is
incomparable mask of disaster, and Mieko Harada is a
formidable, cold-blooded opponent in Lady Kaede.
A retrospective of Ed Ruscha's work is just closing at
the Hirshhorn Museum. He has created a large-format oil
(about 2'x14', from 1982) that captures the idea of Southern
California for me. An apocalyptic sunset of toxic orange,
smudged and streaked with yellow, white, and teal green is
sandwiched between a black horizon line and clouds of
midnight blue and more teal. The sun's ball is not visible,
and where it should be, at the horizon, in glowing
sans-serif capitals half an inch high and luminous, is the
painting's title, ETERNAL AMNESIA.
Also effective are a group of soft-focus black and white
acrylics from the same decade; in each, a sharp-edged white
rectangle appears in place of a caption. The only overtly
political piece is the often-reproduced Los Angeles
County Museum on Fire. Rightly so, if we are to judge
from the painting's rendering of the kleenex-box building
complex.
The exhibit travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago, the Miami Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort
Worth, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, U.K.
Also at the Hirshhorn is a collection of disturbing
pieces from 1996-2000 by Cathy de Monchaux. de Monchaux's
spiky organic forms are constructed from fabric, brass,
leather, rusted steel, and other soft/hard materials. At
their most alarming, the works evoke the vagina dentata.
Trust your sanity to no one consists of nine
turtle-like sculptures of copper and glass that clutch the
edges of the gallery walls and huddle in the corners.
Scott McCloud's new book, Reinventing Comics, a
follow-up to his Understanding Comics, is exciting,
accessible, and compelling -- I hurtled through it in a
weekend. In the first part, McCloud describes nine
revolutions in comics: goals that creators are striving for
and that they have achieved (in small part). His discussion
of the progress yet to be made in minority representation,
gender balance, and diversity of genre helps me understand
why I feel nonplused by the average comic book store, with
its racks of adolescent power fantasies. (While the earlier
book explained why I feel drawn to this medium.)
McCloud shows superb command of his visual vocabulary:
his page is dense with an iconic structure for his
developing arguments and echoes of his previous ideas. An
example may help: he uses a old-fashioned dollar sign, an S
with two vertical strokes, to illustrate discussions of
changes in business relationships between creators and
publishers. The S-stroke becomes a snake, and then a bloated
python, as the greed of each side enters the story. And then
the tail of the python becomes the entrance to a stairway
that the beginning artist ascends.
The second half of the book looks forward to digital
production and digital delivery of comics, and then to
comics as an intrinsically digital creation. McCloud shares
Jakob Neilsen's faith in micropayments.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©2000
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
