Big Range Dance Festival, Program D, June 16, 2005, Barnevelder Theater

I'm writing this from the 38th floor of the Sheraton in New Orleans. My room has a floor-to-ceiling window with a spectacular view of the river and some bridge I don't know the name of. I wonder from how many other downtowns in America you can see the flare of a refinery. (Ah, Louisiana.) The view is mesmerizing, and I find myself compelled to look at it and think about my life. Which, let's face it, makes writing this review seem less important. Also, this performance has passed the statute of limitations for writing a real review; I figure if I haven't gotten to it in a week, I probably won't ever. So, since food is such a big deal in New Orleans, I'm going to write this like a menu.

Rebecca Valls's Facade: Four dancers perform three sections to music with two creators; if you like spoken poetry combined with music, you'll love this three-course meal performed to the work of Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir William Walton.

Erin Reck's Let Me Fall: A duet for two women, one supporting the other both emotionally and physically. Danced with flair by Bonnie Boykin and Ms. Reck. Erin Reck's Ashes to Ashes: A tasty duet for Lindsey McGill and Joe Modlin. Ingenious use of table and chairs as ingredients. Who knew Joe could fit on a table that small by himself, much less with Lindsey? The excellent chemistry between the two creates a story without a storyline.

Leslie Scates's A Bun Dance: Left in the oven too long, or not long enough? What's the point of improvisation in performance? Assuming the audience only sees the dance once, they only knows if it's improvised if you tell them. That said, good energy at the end between JoDee Engle and Julie Fox might be missing in preset choreography.

Jane Weiner's 'S (A Tale of Possession): High heels are ironic on Penny Tschirhart when she dances with Joe Modlin. Sounds and snippets of song combine to make a gumbo of sound. For good measure, the voice of the automated checkout at Kroger is included. "If you have any coupons, please scan them now."

Mark Dendy's Night Moves: Jane Weiner turns a rainbow of flavors into a powerful performance. Suprisingly touching, although it could be 1/3 shorter without losing the effect.

Jane Weiner's The Cooking Show: Take one part flour, one part singer, and nine parts dancers; combine. The excerpts shown here will whet your appetite for the full performance to be staged later this year.

I'm Not Making This Up

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Dancing with the Stars, week 4

Lots of excitement this week. Rachel lost her place in the competition, and Kelly almost lost her costume. All four couples did the Samba, and a few of them included the famous Samba roll, which is how I identify this dance. It's an interesting move, but it always struck me as somewhat awkward. I thought the judges were a little harsh with John and Charlotte's dance; it had the most interesting choreography, and while John's footwork could have been a little sharper, there was quite a bit of it and it was far from sloppy. Bruno did have a point about John not using his hips. Rachel got the lenient judging this week; her strength is her line, and I knew that when she got to a fast Latin dance she'd look less sure of herself. I'm sorry to see her and Jonathan go, although if I had to eliminate someone based on this week's performance alone, it would be them. Kelly had to deal with a real wardrobe malfunction when the strap to her dress came undone. If she didn't always wear outfits that accentuated her two biggest assets, she might have been less worried about the whole thing falling down. That said, she did a remarkable job finishing out the dance. While it was obvious that at times she was holding up her costume, she never stopped and didn't really falter. The judges were polite enough to not comment on it. At the end of the show all four couples came out on the floor for the Viennese Waltz. I loved the dresses, particularly Rachel's purple gown. Theoretically we got to see all the couples dancing at once, but most of the time the camera zoomed in on the couple taking their turn in the middle of the floor. This dance wasn't judged, although you'd think they could have come up with a way to add a few points to someone's score.

Mad Hot Ballroom, June 17, 2005, Greenway

Let's face it, kids are cute. The directors of Mad Hot Ballroom use that to full advantage. This documentary has all the elements to tug at our heartstrings: kids from a working-class neighborhood, a contest with several stages, teachers who love to teach, and bouncy music. To be more specific, Mad Hot Ballroom follows teams from 3 1/2 public middle schools in New York City as they learn ballroom dance and compete for the big trophy. (One school doesn't become part of the story until the middle of the film.) It's sobering to see the contrast between the gyms in which the working-class and upper-middle-class kids practice. Notably, the producer/director/writer/photography team is all female. I don't know how it is in the documentary world, but elsewhere in the movies it seems there's a serious lack of women in authority positions. A glance at the Oscar nominees for 2000 through 2004 shows men with a 3:1 advantage over women. (Due to a missing comma, the producer/writer's husband is twin daughters. Sorry, pet peeve.) Enough about that, what about the dancing? you say. The kids learn the Foxtrot, Merengue, Swing, Tango, and Rumba. (I finally got to see the basic steps of the Rumba!) Some of them are clearly natural dancers. Some of them are not. They all make a real effort, so it's sad to see some of them left behind at the quarter- and semifinals. Some of the girls really let loose with the 'tude while dancing, which delighted both the judges and the audience. The teachers (both public-school and ballroom) have tremendous patience and obviously love working with the kids. To tie it all together, one of the judges at finals is Charlotte Jorgensen from Dancing with the Stars, and the foxtrot music in the finals is Sinatra's "The Way You Look Tonight," which is on my new CD. (That answers THAT question.)

Dancing with the Stars, week 3

I don't like the Jive. I don't have anything against its predecessors, truly; I've even choreographed a dance incorporating Swing movement. I just don't like the way all those elements go together. However, I tried not to let that influence my judgement of the dancing in this show. This time the dances were assigned randomly to men or women. The other dance that was presented was the (far superior, IMHO) Tango. Joey, Evander, and Kelly did the Jive, while Rachel and John did the Tango. This was Kelly's best dance to date, and she convinced me that she deserved to stay on the show longer than Evander, who got voted off. Rachel really had it going on, too; there was one shot that was just right to show her rolling through her gorgeous foot. You don't learn that in six weeks. (Huh. She was "Stacey's Mom" in the video.) But she needs to look up! John was his usual smooth, charming self. There was an interesting bit in Joey's intro where we saw him trying to convince his professional partner that they needed some showmanship. Whaaaa? The dresses on the show are provided by Chrisanne, a popular dancewear company that also provided dresses for the UK version of the show. Unfortunately for them, this is mentioned neither during the show nor on the website (although I confess I have not watched the credits). This week I actually liked a few of the dresses. This wasn't one of them. I have to say that I generally like what Charlotte wears. I wonder how much say the dancers have.

Wow, DWTS was ranked 1st in the Nielsen ratings during its first week!

[6-22-05] Saw a bit about DWTS on Good Morning America today. (Hey, I was at the doctor's office.) Best part: the correspondent was sitting in the audience watching John and Charlotte practice a dance without music. He made a comment to the effect that since there wasn't music playing, he could imagine his own. Then he starts in on "I....like....big....butts and I cannot lie." ROFL

There was another article in the New York Times this morning. A great quote from John: "We left every step in the shoes."

It's everywhere, everywhere!

Today's New York Times has an article by John Rockwell about the recent prevalence of ballroom dancing. I've found that reviews written by John Rockwell, a dance critic for the Times, are well written, so I was curious to see his take on this phenomenon. In addition to calling the glitz of the movies and TV shows "Las Vegas meets ice dancing," he makes this comment:

"Aside from our fox-trotting Republicans, most of whom (like most Americans) would probably now prefer Vegas-style flash, the new popularity of ballroom dancing suggests a possible decline in free-form, solo self-expression on the dance floor. A Bush-era rejection of the dreaded 60's, if you will. To be sure, John Travolta's disco dancing was plenty rehearsed, plenty flashy. But dancing by yourself, opposite a partner but only sketchily interacting with that partner, is a lot easier than learning a real partnered dance, and hence more democratically open if less artistically interesting."

I'm not sure I buy the connection with democratic self-expression. It could be that our society has gotten so homogenized and impersonal that people are looking for ways to connect more directly with other people. What better way to get a feel for someone than to feel them? Like Frank Sinatra sings on a CD I just bought:

Strangers in the night, two lonely people We were strangers in the night Up to the moment When we said our first hello. Little did we know Love was just a glance away, A warm embracing dance away...

[The CD is called Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years. The first song is "The Last Dance," kind of a strange choice, but the CD is ordered chronologically. This song was recorded in 1960, and it's yummy. One begins to understand why he was so popular with the ladies.]

Dancing with the Stars, week 2

This week the men did the Quickstep while the women did the Rumba. It's unfortunate that Trista and Louis got voted off, because that means we have to watch Kelly and Alec again next week. To be fair, Kelly and Alec did have the sexiest Rumba. Someone apparently forgot to give the women the other halves of their costumes. (I know that's normal. It just seems unfair.) Critique this time of the choreography rather than the dancers, who performed pretty much in the same order of competence as last time. In the Quickstep, it was easy to see what the dance was about: "dancing while running" as someone put it to me once. Maybe it's because I'm not as familiar with the Rumba, but I couldn't really identify any basic steps; it all seemed to be flourishes. One of the judges commented on this, so I guess it wasn't just me. I was amused by one thing in Rachel did in her number with Jonathan, or more correctly, something she did afterwards. She did a great job with the dance, and the final dip that took her almost to the floor was dramatic and smooth. Unfortunately Jonathan forgot to tell her how to get up from the pose gracefully once the dance was finished. In fact, he should have helped her out of it! Young dancers always have to be told to move like dancers onstage, even when they aren't dancing. At least nobody "adjusted" their costume, if you know what I mean. Cool - pictures of tech rehearsal!

This morning I read in The New York Times about a new ballroom-dancing robot. It's no surprise that it was made by Japanese engineers.

[6-20-05] I'm told that Joey's butt was sticking out during the Quickstep, a real no-no!

Dance Made for Video, June 8, 2005, Aurora Picture Show

This program is part of the Big Range Dance Festival. Six films were shown, ranging from 5 minutes to 26 minutes in length. These were not videos of stage performances but works created for and integrated into the filmmaking. The presentation was curated by Louie Saletan of Suchu. I liked all of the works for one reason or another, but I think my favorite was Measure (US), choreographed by Dayna Hanson and directed by Ms. Hanson and Gaelen Hanson. The film was shot entirely in a hallway of a dilapidated building that nonetheless had bright blue paint on the walls. I can't recall for sure, but I don't think the camera moved, except maybe for brief closeups during transitions. Two dancers, a man and a woman, moved up and down the hall and in and out of the many doorways while having a "conversation" through their dance steps. There was no music, just the rhythm of their feet tapping and sliding across the floor. (If the word "foley" means anything to you, I'm told that's what they did with the sound. If it doesn't mean anything to you and you would like it to, check out this website.) My second-favorite piece was Reines d'un Jour (Switzerland), with choreography by Marie Nespolo and Christine Kung and direction by Pascal Magnin. Filmed in the Swiss Alps (drool), the film featured six dancers moving about and around a small village. There was a lot of gentle humor in this work, including a sequence in which the dancers take inspiration from the interaction of bulls in a field. ("I gotta have more cowbell.") In another great sequence, the dancers move in response to puffs of air from other dancers. I'm curious to know if that part was entirely set or if there was an element of improv. The dancers also interacted with the landscape, first by rolling down hills and later when the three women dance in a pond with graceful reverence. Other works on the program included The Village Trilogy (Canada), of which we saw parts 1 and 3. Part 1 showed a woman dancing in a war-torn town "inspired by the displacement and destruction of WWII." Here the film medium played the biggest role, as our attention was directed to specific movements of the dancer. For some reason I really liked a moment where the dancer moved out of the picture and then back in; by not following the movement, the camera was given its own inertia. In contrast, in Cornered (Canada) the camera's movement was almost the whole point. A single dancer moved around a corner of a cube, and the perspective was contantly changed so that "up" shifted to different axes. According to the program, this film "redefines gravity as an attractive force of right angles." Unfortunately my interest ran out before the film did. If they could redefine gravity as a repulsive tangential force of the sine of a second-order Bessel function, now THAT would be something. That leaves Contrecoup (Switzerland), a film that loosely tells the story of young city dwellers. Sorry to use this analogy, but it's kind of like Friends in that there are several characters that act independently but also sometimes connect with each other. This film had a constructed set that provided several surreal moments such as the scene in which all of the furniture suddenly had 10-foot legs. It was dark and violent but had some interesting choreography for the couples. In one dance, the man uses himself and his partner as something of a subsitute for castanets, clapping and slapping in time to the music. Although far cooler and more serious, it made me think of Monty Python's fish-slapping dance. I seem to have TV on the brain, but it makes sense given this was dance on film. You may have noticed that most of the pieces came from outside of the US. It's nice to know that art is funded somewhere else in the world, because it sure isn't here. Today a House Appropriations panel cut the funding for public radio and television almost in half. Tell me, how do you justify cutting funding for Sesame Street?

Houston Ballet, June 4, 2005, Wortham Center's Brown Theater

Some dances I can watch again and again and never get bored; for others, once is more than enough. Saturday's program included an example of each. Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Houston Ballet's production of The Firebird is something of a snoozer. I saw it when it premiered a few years ago (before my blogging days) and didn't like it then, so I didn't expect to get much out of it this time. The ballet is hampered partly by Stravinsky's subtle music, and partly by the wooden choreography of James Kudelka, who among other roles has served as Artistic Director of The National Ballet of Canada. I was pleasantly surprised to find Leticia Oliveira playing the Firebird as she's one of my favorite dancers in the company. I believe last time I saw Lauren Anderson. The role favors Ms. Oliveira's size (she's quite short) and movement, so I enjoyed that character much more this time around. The costumes are extravagant, but with the exception of the Firebird's tutu are unflattering to the dancers and hide their lines. Sets and costumes were designed by Santo Loquasto. By the way, it's worth it to sit through the entire score just to hear the finale played live. We played a suite from Firebird in orchestra in high school, so it means more to me to hear it than some other pieces. The main thing that I remember is that the time signature changes roughly every two measures in the finale. In stark contrast with Firebird's elaborate costumes and sets, dark lighting (is that an oxymoron?), and serious subject was Mark Morris's Sandpaper Ballet. This gem is being presented for the first time outside of San Francisco Ballet, for whom the piece was choreographed. It was disconcerting hear the orchestra start playing "Sleigh Ride" in June, more so because I'd gotten it into my head that Firebird would be first, but as I sat listening I realized how well that piece shows off the orchestra. The music for Sandpaper Ballet consists of 10 works of Leroy Anderson; in addition to "Sleigh Ride," there's also "Jazz Pizzicato," "Jazz Legato," "The Syncopated Clock," "Fiddle-Faddle," "A Trumpeter's Lullaby," "Song of the Bells," and "The Typewriter." There's also "Sandpaper Ballet" - the title refers back to old Vaudeville days when dancers would spread sand on the stage for their soft-shoe dances. (Ok, that's only 9. Those are the ones I could identify from the Leroy Anderson website. The tenth is quite possibly "The First Day of Spring.") Anderson's music is happy, whimsical, and energetic, and all of this is reflected in the choreography. The costumes, which have the dancers in bright spring green from the chest down (including hands and feet) and clouds and sky from chest to neck, were designed by Isaac Mizrahi. (Yeah, the Target guy. I don't really like most of his clothes, but these costumes are ingenious.) The ballet starts with all 25 dancers on stage in a 5 by 5 grid. Morris returns to this grid at the end of each section, usually with the dancers getting there at the last second through some convoluted means. It's a striking image, especially from the Grand Tier, and demonstrates how effectively Morris has used the strengths of a ballet company. There was a nice pas de deux between Erin Patak and Nicholas Leschke, the only slow (tempo-wise) section of the ballet. Throughout the ballet Morris integrates quirky, playful movement with the classical ballet vocabulary. This piece is a delight, and I hope to see it again in the near future.

I think this post sets a record for number of links!

Big Range Festival, Program A, June 2, 2005, Barnevelder Theater

So here I was feeling like death warmed over last night, but I still dragged myself to this performance because I'd already spent the $12 for the ticket, and dammit, I was going to see the show. That put more pressure on the show to deliver, because I really wanted to feel like it was worth the pain! Fortunately, I was not entirely disappointed.

There were seven works in the show, five of them solos. The best of the solos were choreographed by Lisa Gonzales, a Houston native who dances in New York City. Ms. Gonzales performed the things themselves, which included words periodically projected on the white backdrop. The words cajoled the audience to think about themselves and about the dance they were watching. Personally, I have to admire any dance that works in a reference to neutrinos, but I didn't quite get the connection with broken hearts. Ms. Gonzales is a fluid dancer with lovely lines and portrayed her dance with a clear intent. Also enjoyable was her brave brave bull, performed by the intruiging Roberta Cortes. This dance included spoken words, an umbrella, and a chair, props that Ms. Cortes seamlessly integrated into the dance.

The other three solos, which were danced by the choreographers, were less rewarding but still had their moments. Chrissy Leach made some interesting shapes in Light. Salt (Roxanne Claire) included some great gestural sequences, and it was an admirable if less-than-successful exercise in staying on a park bench for the duration of the dance. Lisa Gonzales opened the show with Silt, which used compelling music by John Oswald (performed by Kronos Quartet) but lacked a central idea.

Works performed by FLY Dance Company and FrenetiCore stood out not only because they were the only two group dances in the show but also for their charm. FLY did their usual (but highly entertaining) thing with street dancing in TRIAD: Yellow, Blue, Red. FrenetiCore premiered Rebekah French's The Little Peasant, which included dancing to original music by Two Star Symphony and text by, well, the program doesn't say. The piece alternated between spoken word and music. Much of the dancing was for four men and four women, and while it was quite enjoyable, it shortchanged the development of the characters in the story, among whom was a raven played with twinkling eyes by Eleanor Price. Pancakes play a bigger part in this story than you might expect through Robert Thoth's inventive film projections.

Episode I

No, not Star Wars. Last night was the first installment of Dancing with the Stars. (see previous post here) We saw six competitors, three men and three women. The men did the "Cha cha cha." (Is it just me, or does that seem like one "cha" too many? The USABDA calls it the "Cha-cha," and they should know. Even the show's own website calls it the Cha Cha. And why stop at three? If it's a long dance, why not call it the "Cha cha cha cha cha"? But I digress.) The women did the Waltz. The men actually outshone the women, which leads me to believe that the Cha-cha is easier to make look good than the Waltz. That makes sense; most of what the men did in the Cha-cha was posing and moving their partners around, while the women were required to be graceful and controlled. By the way, it's amazing what you can tell about a dancer just by looking at their shoulders. After a second viewing I decided that Rachel Hunter actually did quite a good job. She and Jonathan Roberts are well matched; both have classic lines. I thought John O'Hurley gave the best performance, followed closely by Rachel Hunter, and then Joey McIntyre. I'm somewhat surprised to find that I'm in agreement with the judge's rankings. The professionals all looked great, although I was unimpressed when Alec Mazo introduced himself as "a living legend among ballroom dancers." His routine with Kelly Monaco was also not very true to the waltz style; it was more about posing than movement. I found the segments showing the rehearsals of the individual teams to be the most interesting part of the show, and the most revealing. I'll definitely be watching next week!