First Day Back

Started up again with the dancers.

We restaged the finale of Joplinesque. I am happier with it. I have to do one final tweak to the corps girls. Tomorrow, I'll fix the second to the last number and all will be set with that.

We also started (and finished) a prologue for Romeo and Juliet. Had a little problem getting Pali to stand like a piece of Renaissance sculpture. He has such good posture, that getting the curvy S shape in his body is difficult.

As for our continuing "gems' from YouTube segment...



Here is a segment from the Eddie Cantor TV show. As silly as the number is (Its all about a "clean sweep!") there is some great dancing AND stylistically it is wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KGeHKHJcPw



Shows like this generally rehearsed for a few days and were then shown live. No retakes. So that poor guy who drops his broom probably never thought it would come back to haunt him.



I LOVE the guy in this blues pas de deux. I didn't even notice that the female dancer was doing all this broom sweeping mime at the beginning. I was just watching the male dancer doing his great forward camel walks.

TA-DA

So we have come to the end.

The piece finishes with a fairly standard classical finale.



All of the dancers re-enter, in corresponding groups, perform a few flashy steps and finish.

I was happy with it for the most part, but will be tweaking a few of the steps at the end. I don't think it was as legible as it could have been.

So I think we will see both this finale and the finale to Carnival of the Animals re-visited and presented at our In Studio series in February.

Magnetic Rag - Solo

And now we have the final solo of the piece, danced to the Magnatic Rag.

This piece is danced by Bernadette Torres, along with the 4 girls who backed up Jillian in Elite Syncopations. It features lots of tricky changes of directions... along with some very twisty-turny eccentric work with the legs.



Two things of note in this piece...

The first is the timeline. As I said before, 3 of these numbers were choreographed years ago. Then this year, I used them as the basis for an expanded work. So 2 more pieces were developed for the Spring Studio series. Then one of the older pieces was reconstructed for our fundraiser. This piece was developed after that as part of a joint summer program we had with John Malashock and Jean Issacs.

I have used summer programs to develop pieces before. Since Bernadette was taking part in the workshop, I figured that I could develop something for her to be used as acounter to Jillian's already choreographed solo.

The second thing of note is that it is too long. For the summer program, it needed to have some length, as it was performed by itself. But in the ballet, it is supposed to balance out another solo. I left it long, because I was expirementing with form. I was trying to see if a longer solo could be sustained (not by the dancer, but by the audiences attention) at the end of the ballet.

Because the audience does register that the ballet is almost over since they have seen each of the principle couples takes stage and dance. When Bernadette comes center, they do register "Oh yes, its that other girl who was separated from the rest." and the shape of the ballet makes sense to them.

The problem was that the dance is 4 minutes and 46 seconds long, compared to Jillian's 3 minutes and 6 seconds. A minute and a half may not seem long to you, but on stage it is forever. Especially near the end of a piece.

The good thing is that I know where the cut in the piece is going to be and I am sure that it will make the piece stronger.

A "Classic" Two - Step

The final piece for the couples is accompanied by Sugar Cane (A Classic Two-Step).

This piece features Chelsy and Askar.



It has a little more "bite" than the other two versions. Whie both Chelsy and Askar can be quite romantic when they dance, I wanted to play up a little more of the bravura element of their dancing to contrast with the previous couple dances.

This dance features a lot of assisted jumps on point. Jumping and hopping on point is a crowd pleasing feature of ballet. Seeing a girl bouncing around on the tips of her toes is exciting because... it looks hard... and it looks painful. Well, it is hard and it is painful. But in the case of this piece, the men were basically holding the girls off the floor, so that no weight was coming down on the toes.

So it was rather fun for the girls to "pretend" that they were jumping on point.



Since Chelsy and Askar are also our Sugarplum Fairy and Cavalier in Nutcracker, some of the steps that were put in their dance echo the traditional grand pas de deux from Nutcracker.

As I had mentioned before there is a teeny, tiny shred of a "story" in this piece.

It really is just that the guys are dealing with the girls much as the Poet figure in Les Sylphides dances with the sylphs. They are the visions of an artist. In this case, the guys are standing in for Scott Joplin and the ladies are the classical form. It begins by being elusive (Rachel's pas), then he begins to manipulate it (Abby's pas), and finally he is able to confidently present it (Chelsy's pas.)

I never told the dancers this because I didn't want them to over interpret it.



I also took a cue from Joplin's own subtitle of this piece. A Classic Two - Step. Stress the classic.

Pas de deux (which is the ballet term for a duet) literally means Step for Two.

So we are doing a classical Step for Two to A Classic Two-Step. Nifty.

Elite Syncopations - Solo

First, I would like to welcome anyone who is coming to the blog for the first time, thanks to the nifty, new San Diego Ballet newsletter. You have all caught me in the middle of a dissection of one of our premieres from this last season... Joplinesque.

We are now smack dab in the middle of the piece and are coming upon the first of two solos.

A fairly bouncy tune titled Elite Syncopations, danced by Jillian Nealon.



The piece was put together along with the Bethena Waltz for a studio performance in the Spring of 07. It was our inaugural show in our new studios.

Many times, I will choreograph a solo for a specific person. Sometimes, I like the whole group to learn it and pick from among them. The latter was the case with both this solo and one that was created for Jazz Suite #1. I didn't set out to make difficult dances. But somehow I did. At the end of the process, there was really only one dancer who was able to move as quickly in some of the movement phrases as this ballet demanded. And that was Jillian.



As you will notice, these photos were taken at two different run thrus. In the top photo, Jillian is still wearing her watch (a no-no). In the second, she has removed it (thank you). The solo feature lots of little jumps, hops on pointe, back bends, bends to the side, bends forward, pirouettes, and a fair amount of strutting on stage. Through out she is backed up by the 4 corps girls from the first movement, who were dancing on either side of her and the other soloist.

Since all of the dancers had learned the piece, it was fairly easy work to set up the corps girls, as they echo Jillian's steps as she does them.

My favorite part of the piece came at the end, when the 5 girls just marched on point towards the audience in unison. It was a fairly simple step, featuring an exaggerated arm swing and head tilt, but it always made me smile when it happened. The all just looked so happy and confident!

Pretty Two-Step

After the quartet, the trio of couples stroll back in. Now Abby and Pali take center stage and the other couples echo them to the tune of The Strenuous Life.



Their dance takes advantage of Abby's delicacy and clean positions. She has a very crisp, clear, piquant style which makes her a joy to watch because her dancing is so "legible."

"Presentation" is a quality that dancers must always be aware of. It doesn't mean that a dancer must be constantly mugging at the audience. But a dancer must always be aware of the effect they are making to an audience.

Are they presenting (communicating) the dance in such a way that the audience "gets" it? Otherwise, you might as well just be dancing in your living room alone. Which is great too, but why go onstage if you don't have something to "say."



So unlike the previous couples dance, there isn't any drama in this piece. It features the girls using their legs very much like scissors. Tight and straight. As they switch from position to position, they are manipulated by the guys to change direction as well.



There wasn't anything particularly difficult about setting this pas. The only thing of note was that a step had to be changed after the piece had been staged.

When you are setting something, you tend to do so in stops and starts. Towards the end of the dance, there was a diagonal of releve's for Abby that weren't a problem when we did it in pieces.

Abby looked very nice doing it.

But when we put it in the framework of the entire dance, it was just too much for her ankle at the end of four minutes of dancing. We kept it in for awhile, to see if it was a matter of endurance, but it wasn't. Given that there are so many other steps that could easily take its place, we changed it to an off balance releve into 4th, that was equally pretty. And more fun to perform.



Here we have another example of "presentation." Even though Abby is facing back (this is actually a turning lift), her arms and legs are still making a clearly legible line to the audience.

Quartet - The Entertainer

After the couples first number, the quartet of girls who danced upstage center in the opening return.

They dance to the very popular, The Entertainer.



Back in the 70's, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing this piece being played somewhere on the radio. We can credit the uber-popular team of Robert Redford and Paul Newman for that.



Before they were hawking salad dressing and independent movie festivals, they made a string of insanely, profitable films (from which they made an insane amount of profit and became the beloved philanthropists we all have come to know. Love that Newman's Limeade.)

One of these flicks was The Sting (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year).



The movie featured The Entertainer as its recurring theme. The popularity of the movie (and its ubiquitous theme song) started a ragtime craze, that contributed to the playing of ragtime in ballet classes and Kenneth McMillan's Elite Syncopations.

See how the real world influences art!

Anyhow, this particular piece was originally choreographed for Stephanie Aubuchon, Amy Kaplan, and Khristina Kravas. Three of the company's principal dancers. It was also one of the pieces reconstructed from the performance with the San Diego Chamber Orchestra. We didn't perform it at the studio performance in the spring, rather we redid it for our fundraising event in June. So it was ready in plenty of time for inclusion in the ballet.



Here is Kirsten at the beginning of the dance. The movement begins with a soloist setting a theme. The other girls then join in, as she begins to develop variations on the original theme. Through the piece they take turns as soloists and explore different permutations of duo's, trios, and a quartet.



For anyone who can count, you can see that our original trio has become a quartet. So some of the architecture of the dance had to change. When the dance was originally performed it was also half as long. That was because that was all the orchestra wanted to play. So there was some amount of new choreography that was developed for the new quartet version.



Here is one of the pitfalls of photography. It looks as if the two forward facing girls have either fallen off point or are ahead of the two girls facing the back. In actuality, they are doing a different movement phrase altogether. The girls facing back are executing an attitude turn. the ladies facing front are transitioning from hops on pointe.

The Lovely Waltz

So the basic form of Joplinesque is that the 3 couples alternate with the corps of ladies from number to number. The first piece was performed to The Rag-Time Dance. Now the couples re-enter to the haunting strains of the lovely tune entitled Bethena.



Bethena is subtitled A Concert Waltz. Taking that as a cue, I kept the choreography fairly distilled and deliberate (although there are moments where the girls are cartwheeling in slow motion.) This section of the piece was first worked out and shown at a studio performance in the Spring of 2007. I had just decided that we would do the piece in the 2007-8 season, so I started working on two new sections. I hadn't looked at the archival video, but I remembered which 3 musical pieces had been previously used and stayed away from them.



The pic above is from that studio performance.

The number is filled with fairly deliberate drama. There are no fast movements and there are quite a few movement phrases done in canon.



As well as ballet technique, there is a hint of the tango in the dips and lunges that the dancers present. There is also a moderate amount of dancing in a classic ballroom hand hold position. If you notice Askar is dancing with Gabriela Ley in these images. Gabriela always brings an interesting soft strength to everything she does and she was very nice in this piece.

However, "the best laid plans of mice and men"... Gabby became pregnant and had to sit this season out.



So she was replaced in the ballet by Chelsy, who did an equally lovely job. The good thing is that we had only choreographed this one piece in the spring. I knew that I was going to be setting 3 adagios for the 3 couples. They would all dance in all 3, but a different couple would take the lead in each dance. This first dance featured Rachel and Chris.



Rachel and Chris (seen in his rehearsal wife beater t-shirt) took center stage in this piece. So there were plenty of plaintive develope's a la seconde and collapses on point (which Rachel does so well). There was also a great deal of "searching."



Here (again from the studio performance) Rachel has been separated from Chris and is taking a bit of comfort in Pali's arms (before Abby comes to pull him offstage.)

So luckily, the piece choreographed did not feature Gabriela as I probably would have rechoreographed it to suit Chelsy. Now, at the studio performance we were only showing works in progress, so we only performed half of the piece. We came back after a few months... watched the video... picked up where we left off (with a new dancer)... and finished it up.

Joplinesque

So the next piece, I am going to talk about was the Scott Joplin ballet.

Choreographing to Joplin is nothing new. When I started dancing in the 70's, entire ballet classes were being set to Joplin rags. The Royal Ballet has a lovely piece called Elite Syncopations, chorographed by Sir Kenneth McMillan, set to Joplin's music. And one of Martha Graham's last pieces "The Maple Leaf Rag" utilizes it as well.

So you have to ask yourself, "What can I bring to this music that hasn't already been done?"



Well, I had already set a few pieces for a concert with the San Diego Chamber Orchestra, a few years back. A solo, a group piece for ten girls, and a trio. I pulled out the old archival VHS to look at it and I liked alot of what I saw.

When performing at an orchestra's show, you don't want to be so interesting that they don't pay attention to the orchestra. That isn't why they are paying you. You are there to add to the orchestra's glory. Not detract. If you are hiring an orchestra to play for your ballet company then it is a different matter.

So looking at the tape, I felt that the old stuff was perfect for the corps de ballet. I would just need to add some "interest" in front of the dance, rather than behind, as the orchestra had been.



So I came up with the idea of three central couples. The girls are seperated from the corps costume-wise, in that they were black tutus under their scarlet tunics. Again these are rehearsal shots. Eventually the guys would be wearing red vests and white dress shirts. Like banjo players at old time ice cream parlors.

I think this juxtapsotion of men's contemporary and women's classical costumes is important. Joplin saw himself as a classical composer, not a pouplar one. He took his pieces very seriously.

There are various pieces (like Balanchine's Western Symphony) which take the classical idiom of ballet and mix it with orchestrated folk tunes to create a fun sort of pastiche. "Oh look at the dancing cowboys and saloon girls."

Don't misunderstand me, I enjoy these types of dances (and there is an image of Tanaquil Le Clercq in Western Symphony that haunts me to this day), but I don't believe that is what Scott Joplin would have wanted. The idea that the ballet dancers were suddenly dancing with a patina of "down homey" style.



Which is not to say that there are not some jazz and ragtime influences in the steps of the piece. There are.

But they are presented in a classical way.

What that means is that we are dealing with an aesthetic of line. Think classical Greek columns. Now, the line doesn't need to be straight, but it does need to be clearly and cleanly defined. And the relationships of lines created need to be knowingly harmonious or dissident.

Well enough of that.

Joplinesque was a fun ballet to set (aren't they all?). It is made up of 8 movements.

The first movement starts with my three couples standing in front of my ten corps girls. Then ten corps girls are actually split into 3 groups. A quartet in the middle, and on either side is a soloist with a retinue of two corps girls each. All of the groups move independently of each other, coming together at various times in the music and then spliting apart again. Towards the end of the first movement, the lead couples exit leaving the stage to the corps.



Here are the corps girls in a moment of relaxation. We are probably setting some lights, which explains why they are all in a line. Sometimes we need to stop to fix a certain light cue. We need the dancers stand in their places on stage so we can see what is going on, but they can relax while they are there. We try to set as much as we can without the dancers (as it can be a very time consuming process), but fine tuning always needs to be done.

The first movement of the piece had a great deal of music visualization. Music visualization is a term for choreography that visually matches what is happening musically. It can either be rhythmic, where it matches the exact rhythmic figure of a song (&1,2,&a3,&a4) or tonal, matching high notes with high steps and low notes with low steps.

Having started as a musician (10 years on the clarinet and in choir) music visualization comes naturally to me. But it isn't always the BEST choice. Dance is NOT just visual music. It is an art form unto itself. And if all you do is slavishly follow another artform, you are not a thinking artist.

In this case, because there WAS so much going on previously... when the groups came together, I wanted the audience to feel bolstered and comfortable. So there were huge plies in 2nd position on point on accents, big kicks on high notes and slides into splits on musical slides.