“We should do this more often!”, says Malakhov.
FUN! I agree, they should!
Flashmob begins at 20:00 minutes
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Quote of the day – Boris Giltburg
It is a musical quote: no need for words, Boris Giltburg plays.
When one of the “real ones” is creating something special, I know it, you know it, he knows, all know. The clip shows the two final minutes of Rachmaninof’s 3rd Piano Concert, genius Giltburg playing. Look at his expression, and look at the maestrina also.
Why Sports Should be Considered a Form of Dance
A fresh and original view on the “Is Dance a Sport?” subject.Really worth reading!
If you’re a dancer, you have probably heard various forms of the “is dance a sport?” argument for longer than you can remember. You probably got into debates about it at some point and even used it as an essay topic in middle school (with a quote from Martha Graham, Balanchine, or Einstein thrown in for good measure).
It got old, but somehow people are still regurgitating “Dance is a sport”/ “No it’s an art” like it’s new.
Whatever. Yes dance and sports have some similarities, but I say they’re asking the wrong question. Sure, I get why people would want to align dance with something which has more funding and social support in our society, but what if dance was the standard which we compared other things to?
You know what’s more fun and mildly subversive than arguing why dance should be considered a type of sport? Arguing . . .
Why Sports Should be Considered a Form…
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Quote of the day – Tennessee Williams
“Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive – that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims.”
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One of Tennessee Williams’ most powerful plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), became a movie (directed by Elia Kazan) that earned various Oscars at the time – a raw, heart-wrenching and desillusioned affair… and an absolute must-see!
Two choreographers did a great job translating it to dance: Neumeier for Marcia Haydée and Stuttgart Ballet, in 1983, and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, working together with movie director Nancy Meckler, for Scottish Ballet (2012).
Neumeier play is in Stuttgart’s regular repertoire (scheduled next in May, 2015), and an item in my wish-list!
There was some dismissive nose-wrinkling, once more, on these kind of story-telling ballets, “a lesser kind of dance art”… If Tennessee Williams’ were to write a play equivalent to a ballet without narrative, it would be made of meaningless sequences of beautiful words… and THIS should be some kind of “higher art”? Oh, spare me!
Quote of the Day – Tamara Rojo
“I thought being a dancer meant being in a pool of creative people always discussing the meaning of the art and where it should go towards, and what it is that we should be creating and what we mean for the larger society, how we defend, lobby and fight for it. Those discussions very rarely happen. And that was disappointing for me.”
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Tamara Rojo is Artistic Director and Principal Dancer in English National Ballet. She is doing an amazing job as AD. In her interviews I always find sentences that give form to what were, in me, just vague feelings until then. I love the way she thinks about Dance and about dance professionals.
Make Dance World-Wide Available – Please!
It is REALLY frustrating! There are, all around the world, ballet lovers that do not have the means to travel thousands of miles to those few cities and countries where everything that is important about Dance is going on. Like me, for example. All we have are terrible jumpy, unfocused illegal 2 minutes videos, often recorded using just smartphones, to follow the new ballets in every season, the important choreographers and the dancers we admire. If at all.
Why so few performances are recorded professionally? Why are ballet companies so jealous about their copyrights, if they do not release recordings they could profit from? There must be some serious business issues well beyond my scanty understanding, because it does not seem to make any sense. I heard about staggering Union fees to record inside theaters, but is this the decisive motive?
Are they afraid people would buy a record instead of a ticket? Not ONE ballet lover I know will trade a live performance for a recorded one, if there is ANY way he could be there! But maybe he would buy a recording too, afterwards, to see it again and again… And all those for whom a live performance is out of reach? It doesn’t make sense!
DVD recordings have an aditional problem. There is something called DVD Zones, that divides the world in 5 regions. A Zone-1 DVD cannot be played in any other zone! The Zone you live in is hardwired into all DVD-Players you can buy there, and it cannot be changed.
But it is possible to release an “All Zones” DVD, like Ratmansky’s Flames of Paris with Osipova&Vasiliev&Savin. Why are not all Dance DVDs All-Zones ones (at least those about performances)? After all, Dance is not limited by language as Theater, it is universal… It doesn’t make sense!
Performances live streamed to Movie Houses? Don’t reach my country. Performances available on specialized sites for a fee? “We are sorry to inform you that our streamlining/cloud/downloads are not availabale in your Region…”.
So it’s illegal videos or nothing…
Have companies/producers no interest in widening their virtual audience? Maybe the virtual audience is too small, from a cost/benefit point of view? Can be, but if it is true, I suspect a falacious circular logic could be at work: if they don’t make records available, they don’t have virtual audience; if there is no virtual audience, there is no point in releasing records… In YouTube, terrible quality videos, when featuring great ballet stars, are viewed hundreds of thousands times!
To be fair, eventually an important company includes my region in one of it’s tours. Then I can watch my n-th Sleeping Beauty performed by first soloists, because, if they come that far at all, they always bring us either Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty… I suppose we are seen as too ignorant about Ballet to appreciate anything else. And maybe we are, considering how difficult it is to lessen our ignorance! Even when we fiercely seek to know more!
Of course important ballet productions cannot travel often around the whole world, we know that. But they can be recorded! Any new staging, any break-through performance, any new choreography in it’s first season, any performance by great dancers should be recorded!
Then they could be offered at whatever price, as DVDs or on the web, or published on the web for free if adequate funding were found. A way must be found, for there so many benefits!
They would please ballet fans, constitute historical record, help all kinds of professionals involved with Dance to improve their skills…
We are in the 21st century, for god’s sake, the communication age, the information age! So DO INFORM! DO COMMUNICATE!
Please, make Ballet, make Dance available to us all! Please!
Quote of the Day – Clement Crisp
“I am haunted by the impermanence of ballet. I find it tragic that in the century of the cinema, when newsreel film has preserved eighty years of nonentities, from the greasiest political opportunists to pop-singers, there is not one frame of the Diaghilev Ballet in action; that Nijinsky is to be seen only in five seconds of film that show an old man walking from his Vienna hotel. Even in the past thirty years a dismaying number of great ballets and great dancers have been lost to posterity.”
Quote of the Day – Cambridge Dictionary Online
For those readers, like me, whose native language is not english:
“to blow/knock off your socks”: If something knocks your socks off, you find it extremely exciting or good.
or in Free Dictionary: to completely surprise or please you very much, … to say that something is done in an extreme way or to a great degree
Quote of the Day – Sir Frederick Ashton
“I should say that a knowledge of technique is essential to the full understanding of ballet but not necessary for its appreciation; for the latter I think that emotional or intellectual reaction to the music, movement and decor is quite enough. For my own part, the less I knew of ballet the greater was my enjoyment; too carping an attitude is a great hindrance to enjoyment and a little knowledge can mar a lot of pleasure.”
Swan Lake – Some Tones Deeper…
I was hoping this partnership could bring a special magic to Swan Lake, but it seemed too much to ask… when performing Swan Lake!
If this picture is in any way indicative, however, they did it!
Full of Dance 