Serenade: C’est un ballet abstrait.
Everything sounds better in French. That’s a given. But beyond sounding beautiful, the lovely and poetic program note posted below tackles the hard job of putting the ephemeral into words. What’s the subject? “Serenade,” a ballet that in its making, and in the viewing of it, touches God. C’est un ballet abstrait. C’est- á-dire, sans intention ...
Why art matters: Eiko & Koma and photographer Johan Elbers on lower Manhattan sand dune in 1980 2
Photo featured in Eiko & Koma: Time is not Even, Space is Not Empty Photo credit: (c)Johan Elbers (1980) Like this? Read more: Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” at the landfill created for the World Trade Center, 1980
Eyman hits a bull’s eye; his “Empire of Dreams” wins prestigious theater book award
Not just because he’s a friend of arts•meme, and a fellow toiler in the bowels of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, the resting place of the massive Cecil B. DeMille archives… [… a humongous trove of cinema-memorabilia prodigiously overseen by archivist James d’Arc...] The well regarded film historian, Scott Eyman (Lion of Hollywood: ...
The Juilliard School tells you everything you always wanted to know about Swan Lake but were afraid to ask
The survival, let alone the mystique, of the ballet, Swan Lake, is a phenomenon few would have predicted at its premiere in Moscow in 1877 — which was a flop. Wikipedia notes [with added commentary]: The premiere of Swan Lake on March 4, 1877, was given as a benefit performance for the ballerina Pelageya Karpakova ...
At Jacob’s Pillow, with dance writers
Drawn to the Berkshires by an touching inter-generational mix of post-modern-dance artistry — Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrating its fortieth anniversary year at the Ted Shawn Theater, Jodi Melnick & David Neumann in the Doris Duke’s black box — a parade of dance writers sojourned to Jacob’s Pillow this weekend. We have: Jenny Hansell, Lakeville ...
Pillowtalk.2011 release 4
Beyond giving me a life-long hankering for a pink counter top, “Pillow Talk,” the Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedy, is not to my liking. Made in 1959 right when I was hitting little girlhood, I find the film’s fifties innuendo and double-entendres, well, nauseating. My ’50s guy is Jack Cole — hard core, provocative, sexy, ...
Colonoscopy 3
Everyone’s jumping on the high-speed train, oh wait, we don’t have one … everyone’s powering north in their cars on the killer Golden State Freeway. Destination, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. The much-admired Gertrude Stein show adds to the ever-growing dump of evidence that ...
Elo elicits elevated illumination
Very pleased that HuffPo arts page found the tale of Jorma Elo, the Finnish-born freelance choreographer who’s about to premiere a new work commissioned for the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, sufficiently newsworthy to grant banner headline status ! Read it here.
Forget it, Jake, it’s China[town].
Robert Towne’s great line was my mantra on the recent China trip. At least one time every day, there was good reason to say it. Not one of the 20-something dancers on the bus knew the meme — or the film reference.
Mao & Gu: twins separated at birth?
Jun
18
2011
In China for three weeks, the only television I watched was the dramatic series about the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Airing nightly around 11 pm, the show stars an actor named Gu Yue, uncanny as a Mao Tse-tung lookalike. I enjoyed my daily dose of communist propaganda … a nice way to cap-off ...