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The Cooking Show, November 6, 2005, Wortham Center's Cullen Theater

This work by Hope Stone is eclectic, suprising, and delightful. I saw excerpts of The Cooking Show back in June, so I already had some idea what was coming, but I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the show. A one-act performance, each section went in a new direction. It started with an "appetizer," as the program called it: Swedish Meatballs, choreographed by Jane Weiner and Lawrence Keigwin and performed by Ms. Weiner and Rob Davidson. This back-and-forth duet evoked the experience of sharing a kitchen with a spouse, where different habits lead to minor conflicts that are resolved by mutual affection. (Think of your significant other drinking juice straight from the carton or leaving a bag of chips open to get stale. Not that it's ever happened to me or anything.) The music, by Caterina Valente, was swingish and created a playful mood. The "main course" was The Cooking Show proper, which featured all of the Hope Stone dancers as well as some children from the Hope Center school. Each section presented a different aspect of how food affects our lives, from cookbooks to chefs to problems we might have with eating it. After the initial section, in which the dancers threw flour onto the stage, Alicia Moore Chew entered wearing a long, hooded cape and carrying a Betty Crocker cookbook (yes, the one your mother bought you when you went to college) in the manner of a medieval monk. As she chanted a list of ingredients, she proceeded slowly around the stage, the train of her cape sweeping aside the flour. It might not have been significant, but by the end of the section there was very nearly a peace symbol marked out on the floor. One of my favorite moments came in the "snack food" section, which was accompanied on piano by Stephen Tran, an accompaniest at the Houston Ballet Academy, in fact a very fine one. The dancers entered the stage carrying bags of popcorn, potato chips, and the like. In one swift move, Lindsey McGill placed a bag of Lays potato chips on the stomach of Joe Modlin and then swung up and into Mr. Modlin to pop the bag in a rather striking manner. The sharpest comedy came when Susan Blair, Amy Ell, and Penny Tschirhart brought purses onto the stage from which they each produced a sizeable raw steak. Placing the steaks on a table, each woman proceeded to tenderize her steak with a small mallet. There was no music except the sound of slapping the steaks and pounding the mallets in a complicated rhythm that the dancers did an excellent job maintaining. After one of the women had a rather more satistfying experience using a salt shaker, jealousy ensued. The women progressed to one-upwomanship, producing larger and larger mallets from their purses. In the end the steaks were left in tatters and the audience was left in stitches. The bios in the program had a rather unusual feature, with each company member including a comment about food. Ms. McGill includes a recipe for a concoction of chocolate, butterscotch, peanut butter, and butter; my only question is what does she call it? (probably "dessert") Ice cream and sushi were popular choices among the other dancers. Four-year-old Claire Carothers professes to wanting to be either a farmer, an astronaut, or Cinderella when she grows up. Hmm, me too!

A world of pure imagination

On Saturday I took a master class taught by Dominic Walsh. It was the second time I'd taken his class, and this time I actually got some corrections. I'm usually not nervous when a teacher watches me, but I'm usually not taking from one of my favorite dancers ever, either. I tried to remind myself that he's just a regular person, like the Nobel Prize winner with whom I once shared an elevator. (I take it back. That guy was a practically a force of nature. It's the other Nobel Prize winners that I knew whom I saw as regular people, because I first knew them as professors.) I was so distracted that I totally blew the arms on one center combination. Geez, you'd think I was some nerdy guy trying to speak to a female. Anyhoo - the point of my story is that DW talked a lot about dance as imagination. In giving a correction on grande battements, he likened the feeling first to having lasers shoot out of your hands and feet, then to being a hose and having water gush out the end of both appendages, and finally to having paint on your fingers and toes and reaching for the canvas. He stated that in order to develop as a dancer, you had to use your imagination to guide your movement. It's true that ballet classes are filled with corrections that start "Imagine that...", but I never thought of imagination as an important skill for technique. Maybe that's why some students don't get my corrections no matter how many times I explain. If they can't see it in their mind, how can they feel it in their bodies? We did a lot of improvisation in my modern classes in college. The teacher quickly dispelled the notion that we were trying to "be" trees or bees or whatever. Instead he said to use the motion of the tree to inspire movement; don't be the tree, move like the tree. Although frankly, there are some days I'd rather be a tree. The moral of this story? Dance is a simile, not a metaphor.

I meant to do that

Last night in ballet class I did a perfect double attitude turn. It was just like when I turn perfectly in my dreams. I felt like I was on a pole. So there I am, gliding around, thinking, "Am I good or what?" when I come around the corner of the second turn and realize that I didn't pay attention to how we were supposed to finish. I ended up falling forward most ungracefully while looking at the person next to me to see what she did. So much for my delusions of grandeur. I also dream that I have great extension....at least with the turns, there's some hope.

If you say so....

I've started taking Latin classes and have come up with a few additions to my "ballet and ballroom" list. I thought learning to step heel first was hard, but it was nothing compared to having the correct posture for Latin dances. In every style of dancing I've studied, be it ballet, jazz, or modern, or even yoga, the one constant was the posture, the alignment of the pelvis with respect to the spine. The butt's brought in without being tucked. As a natural swayback, this has always been one of my biggest weaknesses and one of the most common corrections that I get in ballet class. So when I get to the Latin class and the teacher tells me to, in effect, stick my butt out, well, it's not so simple. I'll start out that way, but I'm having to put so much attention on where to put my feet and which way to swivel my hips that my posture automatically goes back to what my body has known for 29 years. The teacher keeps explaining the correct posture to me as though I haven't understood him. He doesn't understand that while my brain knows what to do, my body has other ideas! I took a few master classes last month, introductions to Cha Cha and Samba. The teacher was great and imparted a ton of information vocally and also by example. I've found Cha Cha very frustrating thus far, so when the teacher called out "Turn out your legs and point your feet," I thought I was in heaven. Finally something I'm supposed to do in a Latin dance that feels natural. After practicing what I learned for a few hours, I discovered that tilting my pelvis forwards seems to make it easier to produce the correct hip movements. If that's wrong, for goodness sake someone tell me (here! now!) before I get that in my body. If that's right, I can think in terms of "this is where my pelvis needs to be to get my hips where they need to go" and not "do the opposite of what you've been told your whole life." Just got back from Hawai'i, which has nothing to do with dance except that I watched Mad Hot Ballroom again on the flight back. Those kids can dance!