Back to School

 

Tomorrow, the trainees come back to “Trainee Class.” They have been taking class with the students at the school for the past week, but it isn’t quite the same. In their own class, the attention is focused on THEM and the things they need to work on. So the stakes are just a bit higher. The class cam also go on past the scheduled time, as their are no parents waiting to pick them up :) Sometimes I also use the trainee class to start working on steps that will be coming up in the next ballet. At this point in their training, they pretty much know everything. But if say a ballet, like the past Nutcracker has lots of sauce arabesques and arms in 4th position, it is nice to get a headstart on getting them all to do the steps they way that I personally want them done. Even in such a regimented art form as ballet, there is always a bit of leeway on steps according to personal taste.And it is important that everyone in the ballet company shows that. It is what gives ballet companies their own specific look. The audience may perceive it as “cleaner” or “faster” or “more generous,” but a lot of that comes down to specific physical choices. Case in point, Maria Tallchief (Principal Dancer of the New York City Ballet and all around trailblazer in dance) being given a very specific placement of the head, hand, and arm while she takes her daily barre.

Rudolph

 

In the world of ballet, there is really only one Rudolph. Nureyev. But in the world of Tango, there is a different one. Valentino. In preparation for resetting Tangata, I have been rewatching his performance in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (a silent movie). And I have been reminded of the interplay between dominance and submission that make the tango what it is. There is a particular swooping quality that I am fascinated by that modern tango dancers seem to have lost. 

Juggling

Today, I had a lovely zoom chat with the director of a play happening this early spring/summer. The show goes into rehearsal roughly around the same time as Romeo et Juliet, but I am 99 percent sure I can swing both. As R et J is a remount and was done fairly recently, its a good ballet to let the dancers take some responsibility and initiative on. I wouldn’t have been able to do double duty while I was remounting Carnival of the Animals because so much of the piece is being re-imagined. But in the case of R et J, even much of the cast is remaining the same as when we did it before. As I get older, these opportunities to do plays and musicals, harkening back to my beginnings in musical theatre, do become more of a two way street. As a young choreographer it WAS very much a one-sided job interview. Now, it truly has become just as much about me feeling as if the director/project is a good fit for me as it is the director feeling I am a good fit for them. Not because of my status or because I am financially well off. It’s just that now, I can’t take outside projects that distract my work at the ballet, unless they are truly going to excite me so much that they are worth the distraction. So come May, hopefully I will be juggling not just one foray into Shakespeare, but two. 

Classwerk

Dancers have to take class. 

If you are a doctor/lawyer/rocket scientist, you learn your trade and then you (hopefully) keep up on the latest cures/laws/discoveries, but you don’t go to class every morning and plow through the same exercises, day after day. 

There is an old quote. “If you miss class one day. you notice it. If you miss class two days, your teacher notices it. If you miss class three days, the audience notices it. And it is true. Not just physically, but mentally. Dancers are hyper sensitive to their physical state and their mental state. So even though we aren’t currently under contract, our dancers need to keep themselves in shape. As for our trainees, well they are currently taking school classes, but next week I start up the trainee class again. So that means 2 or 3 classes a day for them. 

The life of a dancer.

A Study in Equilibrium

I recently won this piece of ephemera from 1910 on eBay. It is currently being matted and framed so it will shine in all its 4 inch by 8 inch glory. I  can remember as a young boy having my parents tell me about a show they had seen on a recent trip to Las Vegas. They referred to one of the acts as “Living Statues” I later found out it was a celebrated hand balancing act called David and Goliath. When I finally did see the act a few years later, I understood the original description. In their little gold bikinis, covered from head to toe in gold paint, and moving through a series of gravity defying poses, they indeed looked like something Michelangelo would have hewn out of marble or poured from liquid bronze. But what really struck me was the tension that they were building and the slowness at which they moved. As if they were literally carving their bodies into shapes. In the moment, they WANTED us to know exactly how difficult it was. In ballet, when we do pas de deux work, the point is often to make it look NOT difficult. NO one wants to see a male ballet dancer grunt or grimace when he is lifting his partner overhead. Likewise, we do not want to see ballerina’s muscles popping out from the strain of holding a pose. But sometimes it IS necessary to show the audience that there is some bit of tension between the dancers in order to make the dancer’s poses seem as if they are connected to each other. A visible shared energy. This is especially important in one of the ballets in our upcoming show, TANGATA. Without tension, a tango is nothing. Oh and just to be clear that isn’t a picture of David and Goliath (Fred Randall and Jerry Howard). The turn of the century duo are Ottley Coulter and Charles Shaffer, whose act was billed as A Study in Equilibrium.  

Deep Thought

Today, I had a lovely early afternoon chatting with a friend overlooking San Diego’s beautiful bay. As we were chatting about spending the holiday season alone (contrary to popular belief, you actually see more people than usual because everyone is worried about you being alone on the holiday), general theatre gossip, and specific San Diego dance gossip, I found out something that I had never known. Her long deceased husband’s brother had been a dancer… a ballet dancer to be precise. Since I have known her for years and have often spoken about our families, I was quite surprised this had not come up. Like many artists, it seems that he had toiled over the years, barely making a living in his pursuit of the artistic life. Unlike my personal history, his parents were not supportive. Neither was his brother. Only his sister offered a safe harbor. My friend told me that she had often encouraged her husband (who was pretty well off) to maybe send him a small sum (like $100 weekly) to help out. The answer was always No. He was not going to encourage his sibling’s foolish endeavor. She finished by saying that she always felt sorry for her brother in law and his unhappy life. That was when I said, “Oh, no. You shouldn’t assume that he was unhappy. Maybe he was (I certainly didn’t know), but… he had something that many people never get in life. He had a passion. He had a connection to that thing that we call the divine. He had that spark to pursue something that inspired and elevated him. Maybe he was never ‘comfortable’, but I don’t think he would have traded his ‘discomfort’ for all the security in the world.” Either way, the thought seemed to be a comfort to both of us as we sat in the sun and looked over the sun dappled wavelets in the harbor.

 

Dancing with a rhinoceros should not be attempted be attempted lightly

Happy New Year to All!

Hope you like the dancing rhino, I promise he is there for a reason.

Carnival of the Animals is coming up in February (see there was a reason) so we are gearing up for that while the dancers are still on a break. 

This is an important time for us.

Although we just finished up our Nutcracker season (which meant 6 different venues in 3 different states) and our New Years appearances (3 different venues in 5 days) meaning we have been go-go-go since Thanksgiving, we really can't take a break in the office.

We have to just reset and attack the next performance which takes place in about a month. While a month seems a long way off, it really isn't when you are marketing a show that is so different from what you just did. We go from a very family friendly holiday entertainment to more serious adult oriented programming in a serious venue with serious commissioned score paid for by the very serious National Endowment for the Arts. And yes, it includes a dancing rhino. :) Wish me luck!