All I Want For Christmas...

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. Then came the shopping mayhem days: Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. Today's Giving Tuesday, a day to make a difference.

And, though you're surely inundated by pleas from this great organization and that terrific non-profit, let me tug a little at your heartstrings.

Since sometime in the last century, more than 18 years if you really want to know, I've worked at a small awesome unique tuition-free ballet school. In a nutshell (though we don't put on a Nutcracker), we audition kids in the NYC public schools, and we teach them to dance. And, so that training is frictionless, we have an on-site public school for our students, we help them with transportation, we provide an after school program for working families, and did I mention that there's no tuition for the ballet program? If I may say so myself, we do great work.

In order to conduct auditions, we rent cars - lots of Zipcars - and send teams of people out to the elementary schools. Over the course of a year, we'll audition about 30,000 kids - kids who would never otherwise get a chance to dance. Crunching down the numbers, it ends up costing us just under $13 for each kid that we audition.

Do you have $13 to spare? If so, we'll put it to good use.

Here's a link. It's really fast and easy.



Think of all the people who ask you to sponsor them in walk-a-thons or the like. This is my walk-a-thon. Thank you. Really, thank you so much.

Let's Review: The Prima Princessa Nutcracker

A big part of my childhood was seeing the New York City Ballet Nutcracker every couple of years. For me, it's the ur Nutcracker: the sets, the costumes, the choreography, the specifics of the plot. I love the movie of it that was made in 1997, even though Macaulay Caulkin should have been left on the cutting room floor - all he does is mug for the camera - but I guess they felt that they needed a "name" "star" for a theatrical release. I digress.

The child has been captivated by the Prima Princessa Swan Lake that I brought home from BlogHer, so I was happy when they offered to send me their new release: Prima Princessa Presents The Nutcracker. I'm happy to report that their Nutcracker is equally as charming as their Swan Lake.

Again, there's the animated fairy as narrator - intercut with pre-schoolers dancing around on the lawn and in the snow, serious young ballet students from the School of American Ballet demonstrating steps like passé, glissade and sauté, and clips from the San Francisco Ballet's Nutcracker.

You get the flavor of the ballet's story, in a kind of Cliff Notes way. I was interested in seeing the bits of the SF Nutcracker - the differences between it and NYCB were fascinating to me (the mouse king gets done in by a mousetrap, Mother Ginger has a pet bear). There's a little education going on - you see ballet steps as demonstrated in a classroom, as attempted by the little ones, and in the choreography. And while the DVD is likely to appeal to little girls, the producers were careful to include male dancers: there are little boys cavorting around, and boys demonstrating steps in ballet class, and plenty of men in the stage production.

I was disappointed that the credits didn't identify any of the dancers (or if they do, I completely missed it) and I couldn't find that information on the Prima Princessa website. But I'm the kind of geek that wants to know who's who - most people probably don't care. (I'm guessing that all of the SF Ballet footage was from their fairly recent DVD of The Nutcracker.)

The verdict from the five year old? "I love that movie."

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Disclosure: I got a free copy of this DVD from the producer. If you buy it on Amazon, it'll cost you about $11.49. No one paid me for this review.

Things Learned From My Mother: Ballet

Missing my mother is something that I feel in unpredictable odd moments, though the stabs of absence last week were all about the ballet.

We've kept, for now anyway, her tickets to City Ballet. This spring, Romeo+Juliet turned up on the subscription, and I promptly turned them in for a matinee of Coppelia - I figured that a comic ballet about dolls and trickery might be better for a five year old than a bastardization of a Shakespeare tragedy.

To brush up on the story, I started in my own bookshelves where I've got a copy of Balanchine's Festival of Ballet that my mother gave me years ago. I then trotted off to the public library and found two picture books and a DVD. One of the books was Margot Fonteyn's telling of Coppelia; once when my mother had taken me to something at the New York State Theater, she spotted Fonteyn in the audience and sent me over for an autograph - and Fonteyn refused! Bitch. The DVD starred Fernando Bujones as Franz; back in the day, my mother used to take me out of school to see stuff, and we were in the audience when Bujones brought down the house as a 15 year old at the School of American Ballet workshop.

So not only did I use her tickets to take my daughter to Coppelia, my mother made her presence felt each time I turned around.

Moky, thank you for having introduced me to the ballet.

Wistful

Full of wist? Well, yes, though wist is now obsolete, and the meaning of wistful has morphed over time – from closely attentive to yearningly eager to musingly sad.

We went to the ballet the other night – to see New York City Ballet, and to sit, perhaps for the last time, in my mother’s seats. She’s had a subscription to City Ballet since they moved into the State Theater in the sixties, and for most of that time, she’s had the same seats – a pair in the third row of the center section of the first ring. In other words, she had great seats.

When she started going, she was still married to my father, so they’d go to the ballet together. She’d get dressed up and wear Youth Dew, and we kids stayed home with a babysitter. Later, after she was divorced, she’d take one of the kids, or go with a friend, but she always went. She knew the people in the seats around her; she knew all the repertory and all the dancers. She observed Edward Gorey holding court at intermission in his fur coats and sneakers and rings. And this spring season was the first time she hasn’t gone to any of the performances; she’d renewed the subscription back in the winter, before she started her decline.

So, my brother and his wife went to two of the four performances, my sister went to another, and W. and I went on Friday night. I looked around and recognized the man to our right, and Clive Barnes across the aisle. We saw Tom Gold’s penultimate performance and I saw Joaquin de Luz dance for the first time.

And I was wistful.

I thought back on how many times I’d sat in those same seats. And how many times I’d been to other performances in the same theater. I thought about the times that my mother took me out of school to attend a dress rehearsal - like the 1973 dress of Cortège Hongrois and the 1971 dress of Goldberg Variations. I remembered that my mother and I had been at the performance the night after Lincoln Kirstein died – when Peter Martins gave a little eulogy and everyone in the audience got a shot of vodka at intermission.

My husband said “why don’t you keep the subscription?” But it’s ferociously expensive, those tickets, and, it feels as though the moment has passed. That was her thing, her constant extravagance. But I don’t know. The renewal for the winter season hasn’t come in yet.

Maybe I’m wistful in the “yearningly eager” sense of the word, and not just “musingly sad”.

Ballerina, Not.

In news from the department of cartoons, both Strawberry Shortcake and Angelina Ballerina have gotten makeovers. I don't care if the powers that be want to reinvent cartoons to "modernize" them; I certainly don't have any strong attachments to these characters.

But in the case of Angelina Ballerina, I have a strong and visceral reaction to the fact that she's no longer a ballerina.

On the left is the old version. She's on pointe, her back leg is in a lovely well-turned out arabesque, she's making a beautiful line.

The updated version is on the right. Look at her! She's no longer on pointe, there's no arch to her standing foot, her working leg isn't turned out, and her head and neck are lumpen.

In short, the original Angelina Ballerina was drawn by someone who understood ballet, who knew what a dancer should look like. The new one? That person has never seen a dancer. Period.

Reading the Paper

They keep saying that the printed newspaper is going to go the way of all things. If that really happens, I will be in a saddened condition, because reading the physical paper is a far different experience than reading the news on a computer screen. I know that I would never have seen this gem of an AP story had I not been holding the good grey lady in my hands on the train this morning:

When the meal a man was cooking at his aunt’s house in Hartlepool caught fire this week, he grabbed the nearest thing from a pile of laundry to put it out: his aunt’s billowing, powder blue, size XL underpants. He ran them under the faucet and tossed them onto the flames, smothering the fire and saving the kitchen, according to a spokesman for the local fire brigade. The fire official said that using a large, wet cloth to cover a grease fire was a sound principle and that with underwear, “clearly it depends on what size you are.”

On the other hand, I probably would have read Marie-Jeanne's obituary with or without newsprint in hand, just because she was a Balanchine dancer and I pay attention to that sort of thing. In case you missed it, she had rather a marvelous entry into this world:

Marie-Jeanne Pelus — she dropped her surname professionally because she thought balletgoers might find it awkward — was born in Manhattan on her family’s kitchen table after her mother, a French milliner, went into labor while her father, an Italian chef, was preparing dinner.

I wonder, though, what happened to the placenta?

Damned Cablevision

I watch hardly any television, but I got all excited reading the paper this morning. In December, Ovation is running the Battle of the Nutcrackers: four different versions with a chance to vote on your favorite. I'd watch that in a minute, and so would the little girl. But, our cable provider doesn't carry Ovation. I am bereft.

Watching the "same" thing over and over again is a terrific way to train the eye and sharpen one's critical faculties. In this case, two of the productions are pretty traditional (New York City Ballet and the Bolshoi), while two are a bit more out there (Mark Morris and Matthew Bourne). But they all use the same music, and the same basic story line.

Again, I am bereft. We'll have to make do by listening to lots of "covers" of the Tschaikovsky score and dancing around the kitchen ourselves. Damned Cablevision.

Boys in Ballet

Through work, I came by a copy of a new kids book by Denise Gruska called The Only Boy in Ballet Class.

It's quite sweet - it's written by a mom whose son loves ballet - but other parents looked at her disparagingly, "how could you let your son take dancing lessons?". In the book, the boy takes ballet classes, and his schoolmates tease him - until the day he gets roped into playing football because they're short a kid, and he saves the day because he knows how to move. And the day after they win, all the boys from football turn up in his ballet class so that they too can learn to move.

Ballet dancers are athletes, and awesome athletes at that. They train hard, they take care of their bodies, and they have a grace about their movement that can enhance other activity. See here and here if you don't believe me. Remember Lynn Swann, football player?" He credits dance classes with his grace on the gridiron. How about Edward Villella? He played baseball AND was a welterweight boxer.

I read the book to Miss M. last night and realized that the book's message - that boys can be ballet dancers - is a good message for both boys and girls. Both need to understand that ballet isn't just pink and tutus and pink and sparkles and pink. It's hard work in the service of music and beauty and line. Hard work. You can't do it without being a superb athlete.

(PS - #2 for Children's Book Week)

More Reviewing of the Reviewer

Yesterday, Alastair Macaulay reviewed a performance of Hell's Kitchen Dance in which Mikhail Baryshnikov danced. Macaulay's reviews are all so personal; he always references other performances he's seen, other performers, other art forms. It's all about him.

But the review yesterday included a parenthetical that was just over the top:

(Trivial footnote: At no point in his career have I known him not to have the most beautifully cut hair.)

Really. Misha may indeed have great hair, and may have always had great hair. But, this is a DANCE review. Not a hair review, and especially not a personal recollection that "every time I've seen him, Misha's had great hair". Doesn't Macaulay have an editor?

Will wonders never cease?

The New York Post, of all things, now has an infertility blog - documenting the IVF journey of a male writer and his wife. My head exploded a little bit.

Of course, the reason I was reading the Post on line this morning was because I was looking for the review of ABT's new Sleeping Ugly, evil bitch that I am. Ah, the joy of other people's bad reviews.

Review the Reviewer

The New York Times, my paper of record, of choice, of metropolitan area, has a new dance critic, one Alastair Macaulay. He started in April, and has been ramping up to speed. It’s been fascinating to read his pieces, and watch as they reveal his likes, dislikes, knowledge, interests. His first review of the new City Ballet Romeo & Juliet was decidedly lukewarm, but he came round in a piece several days later in which he compared and contrasted the four principal casts. It was almost as though he’d been reached; that someone at City Ballet said “hey, that wasn’t nice, what about all these other folks?” and Macaulay responded with a much more favorable review.

Last week, American Ballet Theatre opened their spring season with a hodge-podge gala, which Macaulay started off by comparing to “pig slurry”. It went on, and in a thrill of schadenfreude I chortled on the train at phrases like: “soon trite”, “unpromising in more ways than one”, “almost, but not actually, interesting”, “a tempo so funereal that it would have put the watching Prince to sleep too”, “bland delivery”, “much labored intensity”. To his, and their, credit he did like more of what happened after intermission, and ABT’s marketing department will have some stuff to use in press kits and marketing materials: “exceptional freshness”, “a marvel”, “a heart-catching alternation of capriciousness and surrender”, “true ballerina decisiveness in her timing and phrasing”, “the corps de ballet proved poetic”, “stylishness and skill”. A lot of the review was pretty harsh, but it was balanced with some praise, and so my initial schadenfreude was tempered. [However, Macaulay’s comment about the guest appearance by star pianist Lang Lang was devastating – though he’s a dance critic, not a music critic, so you have to take it with a grain of salt: “The pianist, Lang Lang, then remained onstage to dispel whatever tender atmosphere the Chopin had established by playing an account of Liszt’s best-known Hungarian Rhapsody with a vulgarity to engender long-term Lisztophobia.” Ouch.]

The next day, Macaulay gave the single most eviscerating review that I think I have ever seen from a dance critic. Painful. Sad. Horrific. Not a single kind word in the piece. His concluding sentence?: “Not one moment here is fresh.” If I were Doug Varone, I’d want to cry. Hell, I wanted to cry and I’m not Doug Varone. If I were a choreographer, I might want to cancel my next season.

On the other hand, his reviews of both Sara Rudner (last week) and Mark Morris (today) had nothing but sheer praise - not a harsh word in either review.

It will be interesting to watch this continue to unfold. He’s certainly a more pointedly opinionated critic than the Times has had, dance-wise anyway, in quite some time. And he knows his dance history, so he can’t be written off as a know-nothing.

More Gorey

No drawings this time, but Slouching Mom had a comment on my recent Gorey post which reminds me that my mother called him "Sneakers" for the longest time.

I don't know where in the theater Gorey sat for the ballet - probably first ring, maybe orchestra. But he always held court at intermission on the house left side of the promenade. And he was there A LOT. And, like some characters in his drawings, he was always wearing fur coats, and sneakers, and rings. For years, my mother would come home and tell us that Sneakers was there again. And then one day, there was an article in one of the New York papers about Gorey, with a photo. Lo and behold: Sneakers.

Gorey at the Ballet

My mother used to take us to the ballet a lot, and to the Nutcracker regularly. We were also great fans of Edward Gorey, who was a perennial audience member at the New York City Ballet for a long time. From time to time, he drew for them. This was ripped out of a Nutcracker program, taped together, and pinned to the bulletin board in my room for the longest time. It's almost impossible to see now, but he had been in the audience, and I'd gotten him to sign it. He crossed out his printed name, and signed above it, apparently in disappearing ink.

Misha's Toddler Appeal (or lack thereof)

I showed Miss M. this nice clip of Misha leaping about in Don Quixote. About half way through, she said "when are the ballerinas going to come out?"

The Times takes up Ballet?

What is it with Times columnists taking up ballet? Today's paper has Harry Hurt sticking his toe in the studio, and Judith Warner started dancing a few months ago.

Hurt's piece made me nuts - I wanted to get out the red pencil. Let's start with the crazy irresponsibility of beginning ballet classes by attending New York City Ballet's company class - even if just pretense for the sake of an article. That is a sure way to get hurt. The way to start is to gently ease into basic ballet classes meant for adult beginners, at a place like Steps or Peridance or the 92nd Street Y. Then, the pieces was full of inaccuracies, like these:

• Ballet slippers have elastics, not "ankle straps". They get sewn on across the instep.
• The morning class is not a "workout" class - it's just class, or company class.
• It's not a "ballet belt", it's a dance belt.

I don't read Warner's column very often, but that ballet piece struck a chord with me. Some number of years ago, I started ballet classes, and continued once or twice or three times a week for several years. It was wonderful - it was a time to think about nothing but where my feet were, what they were doing, how my arms and hands were behaving. The physical exercise was great, but the mind-clearing nature of the ballet class was the revelation - it's better than therapy for calming the brain and sweeping away the day's debris.

Ideas for Choreography

When I was a small person, my mother used to take me to the ballet. Not only did she take me to performances, she took me out of school to attend open rehearsals and the like.

In 1973, I wrote a letter to George Balanchine, suggesting an idea for a ballet:



Little did I know that Jerome Robbins had already made that ballet - in 1953. He called it Fanfare.

I never got a response to my letter.