Tonya Plank's Blog, page 18

Jose Carreno in "Swan Lake" on Dancing With the Stars

Did you guys see it last night? I don't know who choreographed but it's obviously a version created for fans of Black Swan the movie, showing both black and white swans vying for Prince Siegfried's attention, and shortened for the allotted time. Lorena Feijoo from San Francisco Ballet and her sister, Lorna, from Boston Ballet, danced the white and black swan. Interesting that they didn't have Jose in tights. I hate it when male ballet dancers don't wear tights. You can't see the movement at all; it just doesn't look like ballet. Still, I think our Jose looked better than Jose Martinez in pants.

Also, regarding yet more Black Swan controversy: E! is now positing that because Sarah Lane and Isabella Boylston are both in ABT, Lane's statements to Dance Magazine about the amount of dancing she did for the film were motivated by sympathy for Boylston. This is becoming just a little absurdist.

Black Swan White Swan

Art work by Jane Fire. It's actually called Swan Song of the Mute Swan and is a digital photo (though up close, it looks like a watercolor to me). I was going through paperwork (for tax preparation) and I found this postcard I'd taken earlier from a gallery – way before the Black Swan movie – back when I was trying to get ideas for a logo for my Dark Swan Press. It really caught my eye.

Rhea's Favorite Hiding Place

Where she can sun as well.

Maira Kalman at the Jewish Museum

Last week my friend, Alyssa, who's an independent art curator, invited me to an art / law celebration at the Jewish Museum. The Jewish Museum really knows how to put on a party! They had the most splendid array of hors d'oeuvres, two big carving and sushi stations, and a full bar (not just wine and champagne). I hadn't been to the Jewish Museum since I saw a Marc Chagall exhibit there I don't know how many years ago. So, in between nibbling on mini Tuscan pizzettes and sipping Glenmorangie, I wandered into the main exhibit, which is currently featuring the work of Maira Kalman.

Kalman's mainly a painter and illustrator but is also an essayist and performance artist; kind of an artist at large. She illustrates a lot for the New Yorker. The top picture is from an illustration from that mag.

I really love this one, though. It's called Grand Central Station. I love it because it evokes the kind of sentiment I was going for in the closing line of Swallow (which I'm not giving away )

Then I came across a couple of illustrations of dancers, which of course excited me.

I don't know who the dancer in the first illustration is, but the bottom is of Pina Bausch. The little explanatory caption below the illustration said that Kalman had a deep admiration for Bausch, got along well with her, and, before Bausch's death, had wanted to collaborate with her on a dance.

As I walked through the exhibit, I happened upon a couple of sets of videos. In one Kalman, who seems to be quite a character, was collaborating on a performance piece with Nico Muhly and an opera star (whose name I forgot). Muhly was his usual slightly whacked self. Fun! Kalman's also been involved in a lot of social projects, such as helping to design and create art work for a new library in Harlem. And, much of her work features her dog (below).

Hehe, I was so excited when I saw this. I actually have this picture, clipped from a old New Yorker copy, hanging above one of my bookcases at home. That'll teach me to look at the name of the illustrator more often!

Anyway, it's a very good exhibit, and I recommend it. It's at the Jewish Museum through the end of July.

Delicious Kumato

I recently found these in the produce section of my local Food Emporium, near the tomatoes. I guess they're a different kind of tomato – plump and juicy and very mild, not acidic at all.

They're very deep red, almost brownish in color, both inside and out. Citrus with high acidity tends to give me a stomachache, which these didn't do at all. I loved them. Not too expensive either. Very happy find!

Hide and Seek with Rhea

Sorry, love my new kitty and can't resist! It's hard to believe she was so shy in the ASPCA and when she first came to live with me because she's now into absolutely everything. Which kind of worries me because this apartment is perhaps a bit dangerous for an inquisitive cat. She loves to run up the ladder / stairs to my bedroom loft and then run all around its pretty small perimeter, peeking out from time to time between the little pillars.

It's a long way down though and I'm a little scared she'll fall.

And she loves to play with this small leather mask I bought one year at a festival in Toronto. She loves to try to bat the thing down.

And the other thing she loves to do is jump back and forth between the corner of the loft and the top mantel of the fireplace. I had to clear everything off of the mantel so she'd have a place to step. Worries me! I've tried to put soft mats and things all around under the mantel and around the edges of the loft. I guess you just can't worry about all that cats will get into…

Finally tired, and taking a little rest.

And now, in the laundry basket. Everything, she gets into everything!

Rhea!

I finally got a new kitty. My beloved former cat died of congestive heart failure several years ago and it took me a while to get over it. Finally, a couple weeks ago I went to the ASPCA, where I met Rhea. I love the ASPCA by the way – they are wonderful people there who do wonderful things. Anyway, Rhea's a sweet little Abyssinan mix. Of course she was very quiet her first few days with me, but now she's a nut, particularly at nighttime of course, running up and down the ladder / stairs of my bedroom loft, doing gymnastics around its pillars, playing basketball down on the floor with some little toy balls with bells that were given to her by her friend, Lula, who lives across town. And yes, I meant basketball, not soccer or hockey. I have no idea what she does with the balls to make them bounce the way they do… because whatever it is she's doing it's in the dark when I'm trying to sleep…

She actually makes me nervous when she plays on the stairs / ladder, because she most enjoys the top rung, and it's a long way down to the floor. I kind of feel like this high ceiling-ed apartment, which is good for housing my art work, is a bit dangerous for a cat. My old cat never even tried to get herself up in the loft, nor has any cat I've cat-sat here since. But Rhea's very inquisitive, and very small, which I guess makes her more inclined to acrobatics than the average cat.

She can also sit on my narrow windowsill, which no other cat has been able to do:

She sleeps in the oddest places, like on top of the book spines. A copy of Swallow was on top of Turow's Presumed Innocent. She apparently thought nothing of smacking mommy's novel down to make herself a little step to her "bed."

Paris Opera Ballet's Dark-ish Coppelia

So, did anyone see the live-stream of POB's Coppelia last Monday? I went but was extremely tired, so I guess my review should be read with that in mind. I was working a contract job with crazy long, graveyard shift hours and though the movie was at 1:30 in the afternoon Manhattan time (7:30 p.m. Paris time) I really should have been at home sleeping. But I had to miss POB's earlier Caligula, so really wanted to see this.

It was different from the versions of Coppelia I've seen by the American companies. It was darker, not at all cutesy and Nutcracker-ish with doll-like movements of humans imitating toys and silly people mistaking dolls for girls. The program notes say the choreographer, Patrice Bart (after Arthur Saint-Leon) wanted to give "a bit more psychological depth to the characters and feed the drama of their relationships, including finding plausible motivations / reasons in certain passages."

I'm all for darker ballets exploring human drama in greater depths than many of the classics do, but unfortunately, I just had a hard time grasping the story here and understanding the characters' motivations despite Bart's intentions. I think part of the problem was that Bart used the language of classical ballet, rather than modern. Tudor is probably the master of revealing psychology through movement, but his movement language was wholly unique. Here, Coppelius, for example, would do basic ballet turns, jumps, an arabesque, etc. – all very lyrical, within the classical ballet vocabulary, then would do some kind of intentionally awkward port de bras, jabbing an arm out this way and that and twisting his torso unnaturally. I guess that more modern, angular arm movement was supposed to show angst, and it did, but it was just so inferior to movement someone like Tudor would have used to show a psychological state.

I assume everyone knows the story and I probably shouldn't – especially this version: Coppelius is haunted by the image of a woman he loved and lost. Swanilda evokes her memory for him. Frantz, a student, is in love with Swanilda, who kind of returns his affections but not as completely as he would like. Spalanzani is a toy-maker who seems to have some outlines of a doll he's in the process of making, which also haunt Coppelius, reminding him of the woman he loved and lost.

According to the program notes, Coppelius is a seducer, not at all the silly wobbling clown from the American productions. He tries to seduce Swanilda, who seems, from what I could tell of the onstage action, to be a bit taken by him, but only to a point. She and her girlfriends break into Spalanzani's toy factory, play with the toys – like in the American productions – but then Swanilda sees how taken Coppelius is with the outline of the doll Spalanzani is in the process of making, and for some reason, she decides to don the doll's costume and dance for Coppelius. It's unclear whether she is pretending to be the doll come to life – her movements aren't at all doll-like, as in the American productions. But at one point, things get too serious, Coppelius gets too impassioned with her, and she runs off, somewhat afraid of him. Then she accepts Frantz and the two end up together, their silhouettes wandering off into the tunnel of light, as in the photo above.

Swanilda was danced by Dorothee Gilbert, whom I'd never seen before and really liked. Both she and Mathias Heymann, as Frantz, had a lot of presence, showed a lot of facial emotion, were good at miming. They told the story as best as they could given what I felt was limiting choreography. Heymann's lines didn't always seem to be all there though, and I just couldn't stop thinking how much more clean and physically magnificent David Hallberg would have been in that role. Sometimes Frantz's male friends seemed to outdance him with their precision, height of jump, etc. It was odd, but his dancing seemed to be a bit sloppy. I've seen him dance before though (can't remember whether it was with NYCB or Trisha Brown or at the Guggenheim) but I know I didn't think that about him before.

Gilbert's dancing was much cleaner. She definitely didn't focus on athleticism, like Natalia Osipova. But her dancing was lyrical and lovely, and she had a strong personality and clarity of intention. Her Swanilda was at times a tease, at times inquisitive, longing, fearful, confused. She always had something going on behind her eyes – which is one of the things I value most in a dancer and which there's not enough of these days, imo.

My biggest problem though was with Jose Martinez, who danced the part of Coppelius, which is a dance role here, not a character role. I know he's a big deal, longtime principal in Europe, and is on the verge of retiring and taking over the Spanish ballet company Nacho Duato currently helms (Martinez is Spanish as well). It well may have been his costume – he wore a long top coat, pleated pants that bulked at the pelvis, and black soft jazz shoes – so not at all ballet costuming. But his lines were not clean at all, his movement looked very sloppy, he was completely lacking sharpness and precision. Could be I just couldn't see the precision because of the bulking pants, but still – I couldn't stop thinking about how much better Marcelo Gomes, who I could really see in that role, would have been, despite the pants and coat.

I don't know if you can still get the NY Times reviews now that the paper's behind a paywall, but Macaulay has an interesting explanation: he says the POB ballet dancers of late (ever since Nureyev, actually) are trained that way – to not give so much attention to line, amongst other things like musicality and expressive phrasing.

I don't know. It was my first time seeing POB perform as a company and I really wanted to  like them. Overall, I was unimpressed, unfortunately. I did really like Gilbert though and I will definitely want to see her dance again.

More BLACK SWAN Controversy, and The Paris Opera Ballet's COPPELIA

I'm still crazy busy but just wanted to point out two things. First, if you haven't already heard, there's now a storm of controversy over how much dancing Natalie Portman actually did in Black Swan. Dance Magazine EIC Wendy Perron wants more credit given to Sarah Lane, Portman's ABT double (whose dancing I love; for image credits above, click on the photos). Portman didn't mention Lane in her Oscar acceptance speech (though she did mention the dancers in general) but, further, there was apparently also a special effects video produced about the making of the film in which Lane's face was never shown, though her dancing body was, and in which Lane was never credited. Lane seems not to want to say too much, says she was asked to remain silent on the issue, to not talk about the film, particularly before the Oscars. Lane gave an interview to Dance Magazine in December about her role in the movie, saying she wasn't "looking for any sort of recognition." Millepied of course defends his muse, saying Lane did "just the footwork."

Lane also mentioned in that Dance Magazine interview that Maria Riccetto did some of Mila Kunis's dancing, which I didn't know. Both Portman and Kunis must be very petite women!

Anyway, will the controversy surrounding this film ever end? Hopefully not! It's keeping ballet in the minds of the public, if you ask me…

Thanks to reader Jeff (who I noticed is also mentioned in Perron's blog, linked to above) for pointing me to the controversy.

Also, this Monday, March 28th, the Paris Opera Ballet will live-stream its Coppelia, via Emerging Pictures' always excellent Ballet in Cinema series. Curtain is Paris time at 7:30 p.m., which is 1:30 p.m. here on the east coast. In Manhattan, it's showing at the Big Theater again. For other times and locations, visit the Ballet in Cinema website.

Okay, all I have time for now. Thanks for continuing to read my blog while I remain swamped

Dancing With the Stars

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Oh no, did I miss it last night? I don't even know what night — or day — it is anymore. Still working on this project… Anyway, maybe I'll catch the good parts online. What did you guys think? Was anyone good? How was Ralph Macchio? Sugar Ray Leonard? The first day is usually my favorite since you can get a pretty good feel of who's going to do well and who's not.