Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Fifteen
NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...
Unpredictable chaos might ensue when a dance is choreographed to highlight the idiosyncratic talents or charms of a particular dancer regardless of what those may be or how incredible they may be and thus forgetting the nature of the music and how the dance is intended to be organic, a natural element interwoven with the set and the sound and the costume, not to mention the other dancers.
Take, for example, The Nutcracker, a standard which regularly pleases many audiences in so many places annually, with its dramatic highlights so often misplaced by simpering, romantic dancers’ steps because they are stepped upon by audaciously untalented amateurs.
At a poetry reading at my grad school one of my compatriots stood up in the middle and decided to do the unexpected. Not reading. He began to turn it into a dance recital, tossing himself around upon this old wooden auditorium stage, and when I say old I do mean old. The floorboards were creaking audibly under his loud thumps as he tossed himself through the air. To the best of my memory of such performances it appeared to be a rendition of the beginning of Nijinsky’s Spirit of the Rose. I say this implying that my friend might have been talented enough to give that impression, or that my knowledge of the dance might have been, simultaneously, worldly enough and horrendously bad enough to carry such a conclusion. Anyway, it would have been, if such were the case, the part where the spirit enters the room before the maiden awakens and just sort of prances around, and that’s what my friend was doing, or more attempting to do, prancing and flying around, but certainly not with any amount of Nijinsky’s grace, or even any basic talented amateur’s, nor with any shame. And he certainly wasn’t making any money. As far as creativity was concerned, allow me to express in Meli’s inimitable style: Bleh. Afterwards, the young lady sitting next to me—who I was that day attempting to make a play for, by the by—turned to me with a cautious smile and asked what I thought.
“What do I think? I think he has no talent. I think he showed no sense of flexibility or grace. I think he threw himself around there like a piece of Silly Putty. And all without the benefit of any music, only the accompaniment of his grunts and groans.”
She shivered for a second. “Well, that’s being harsh.”
“Harsh? If I were being harsh, I would have run up there and thrown him off the stage. Which is what he deserved. This is a poetry reading, Dori. I don’t see Martha Graham anywhere, do you? We call ourselves The Lazy Poets Society.” I stood up and pointed to the stage where my friend was toweling himself off and people had been shaking his hand, but now were turning to look at me, probably because I was raising my voice. “Did that look lazy to you?”
I never went to another reading. And no, we didn’t, by the way. Thank you very much, Dori. And thank you, too, Burke. I thought you loved Wordsworth. Son of a bitch.
Hey, guess what? Terpil told me he paid the Dean of Admissions there two lousy grand to get me in...
So, what’s different about me now? What’s different in who I was when I was in my teens or thirties now that I am in my sixties? In essence I am probably just a little bit more confused in general. A little bit less confused about how little confused some people are about anything important in their lives and how completely stupid those people must be to go through life thinking they now understand the world. How radically fucked-up those people are to believe they understand what they do from one moment to the next.
Still, whenever I imagine or see The Nutcracker, or any other formal dance, all I can think about is “The Rose Adagio,” an integral aspect of an entirely different work, The Sleeping Beauty, no weak sister where this matter of dancing is concerned. It is not only a dancer’s challenge but a choreographer’s nightmare because that master must find a dancer who is up to that challenge. No children’s cakewalk, no amateur’s introduction to the ballet. A singularity of the purest expertise.
When I was much younger I was no great fan of ballet, neither ballet nor any other form of dance — except where I was doing the dancing, usually some messy kind of soft-tap or sloppy whatever type of current pop favorite, and the dance was merely a means to an end of my own choosing, a way of drawing people to me — but I kept this to myself for the sake of my relationship to my great love, my cousin Jean. Jean went on to become the professional, relocating to Paris for a life of dancing. Jean held my hand, sometimes metaphorically, and introduced me to the method of the dance as art. She danced with me, literally, as often as possible. I played along...you know how it works. You play along cynically as a joke. You can be cynical even when you are five years old. But the method works on you. Cynicism is only a paper fortress, and that fortress can only stand against the siege of art and love for so long, the siege of art, truth, love and other battlerams that shatter its flimsy walls over time.
She had me watch “The Rose Adagio” in rehearsals, in recitals, when it appeared on television. She dragged me to The Met countless times. We finally saw it on film together one afternoon with Margot Fonteyn dancing. Then, between glances at Fonteyn and the look on Jean’s face watching Fonteyn, I saw it, that magic moment. Not only mastery of the form, the balance of all the elements embodied in perhaps the greatest ballerina of the modern age, but the stillness of her poses, the stillness of the room, the air in the room, the particles of dust floating in the manner Fonteyn floated through the narrow beams of light in the room, Jean and myself in that room together, sitting next to each other on my grandmother’s old floral divan, my hand in hers, in that moment in time.
I wasn’t completely aware that I had seen and found this great magic. So I didn’t know that I had begun to look for it in other places. Thought later, when I began to find this magic moment of form meeting substance in other places, other works of art, then in life itself, and in people, in moments of time, after a while, I was able to connect to that first moment again, that current of transcendence, over and over. You can find it anywhere, moments of complete stillness and balance. Sometimes you can even bring them about, force them into being, if you will, work them through processes of your own mind, like working clay. Learn through various methods, artistic and metaphysical.
They say it requires discipline and in the arts this is true, no doubt. Yet...
Sometimes the universe simply drops them into your lap. Love.
No matter how you look at them or how they arrive, it is fleeting because time is a bastard. You may want to grasp them, hold them forever but they will be gone soon, as will you, as will “The Rose Adagio” despite its beauty. So cherish them, love them with your memory, and do with them what you can. Keep them in your memory for their next visit so the recognizable elements remain.
And then, then, you can see with clearer eyes the clumsiness of amateurs, their missteps and failings for what they are, in The Nutcracker, even in “The Rose Adagio,” and in anything else. Violations of style in attempts to find creativity. In other work as well. As shocking violations against the forms at times, yes, but also as acts of love. Someone else’s love, perhaps, only not yours. And in yours. In every moment of balance. In every moment of love.
No shocks mean no wasted moments? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
And yet, you know, balance... In ballet it is a must. Don’t want those dancers falling on their tutus. But in the Universe?
Unpredictable chaos might ensue when a dance is choreographed to highlight the idiosyncratic talents or charms of a particular dancer regardless of what those may be or how incredible they may be and thus forgetting the nature of the music and how the dance is intended to be organic, a natural element interwoven with the set and the sound and the costume, not to mention the other dancers.
Take, for example, The Nutcracker, a standard which regularly pleases many audiences in so many places annually, with its dramatic highlights so often misplaced by simpering, romantic dancers’ steps because they are stepped upon by audaciously untalented amateurs.
At a poetry reading at my grad school one of my compatriots stood up in the middle and decided to do the unexpected. Not reading. He began to turn it into a dance recital, tossing himself around upon this old wooden auditorium stage, and when I say old I do mean old. The floorboards were creaking audibly under his loud thumps as he tossed himself through the air. To the best of my memory of such performances it appeared to be a rendition of the beginning of Nijinsky’s Spirit of the Rose. I say this implying that my friend might have been talented enough to give that impression, or that my knowledge of the dance might have been, simultaneously, worldly enough and horrendously bad enough to carry such a conclusion. Anyway, it would have been, if such were the case, the part where the spirit enters the room before the maiden awakens and just sort of prances around, and that’s what my friend was doing, or more attempting to do, prancing and flying around, but certainly not with any amount of Nijinsky’s grace, or even any basic talented amateur’s, nor with any shame. And he certainly wasn’t making any money. As far as creativity was concerned, allow me to express in Meli’s inimitable style: Bleh. Afterwards, the young lady sitting next to me—who I was that day attempting to make a play for, by the by—turned to me with a cautious smile and asked what I thought.
“What do I think? I think he has no talent. I think he showed no sense of flexibility or grace. I think he threw himself around there like a piece of Silly Putty. And all without the benefit of any music, only the accompaniment of his grunts and groans.”
She shivered for a second. “Well, that’s being harsh.”
“Harsh? If I were being harsh, I would have run up there and thrown him off the stage. Which is what he deserved. This is a poetry reading, Dori. I don’t see Martha Graham anywhere, do you? We call ourselves The Lazy Poets Society.” I stood up and pointed to the stage where my friend was toweling himself off and people had been shaking his hand, but now were turning to look at me, probably because I was raising my voice. “Did that look lazy to you?”
I never went to another reading. And no, we didn’t, by the way. Thank you very much, Dori. And thank you, too, Burke. I thought you loved Wordsworth. Son of a bitch.
Hey, guess what? Terpil told me he paid the Dean of Admissions there two lousy grand to get me in...
So, what’s different about me now? What’s different in who I was when I was in my teens or thirties now that I am in my sixties? In essence I am probably just a little bit more confused in general. A little bit less confused about how little confused some people are about anything important in their lives and how completely stupid those people must be to go through life thinking they now understand the world. How radically fucked-up those people are to believe they understand what they do from one moment to the next.
Still, whenever I imagine or see The Nutcracker, or any other formal dance, all I can think about is “The Rose Adagio,” an integral aspect of an entirely different work, The Sleeping Beauty, no weak sister where this matter of dancing is concerned. It is not only a dancer’s challenge but a choreographer’s nightmare because that master must find a dancer who is up to that challenge. No children’s cakewalk, no amateur’s introduction to the ballet. A singularity of the purest expertise.
When I was much younger I was no great fan of ballet, neither ballet nor any other form of dance — except where I was doing the dancing, usually some messy kind of soft-tap or sloppy whatever type of current pop favorite, and the dance was merely a means to an end of my own choosing, a way of drawing people to me — but I kept this to myself for the sake of my relationship to my great love, my cousin Jean. Jean went on to become the professional, relocating to Paris for a life of dancing. Jean held my hand, sometimes metaphorically, and introduced me to the method of the dance as art. She danced with me, literally, as often as possible. I played along...you know how it works. You play along cynically as a joke. You can be cynical even when you are five years old. But the method works on you. Cynicism is only a paper fortress, and that fortress can only stand against the siege of art and love for so long, the siege of art, truth, love and other battlerams that shatter its flimsy walls over time.
She had me watch “The Rose Adagio” in rehearsals, in recitals, when it appeared on television. She dragged me to The Met countless times. We finally saw it on film together one afternoon with Margot Fonteyn dancing. Then, between glances at Fonteyn and the look on Jean’s face watching Fonteyn, I saw it, that magic moment. Not only mastery of the form, the balance of all the elements embodied in perhaps the greatest ballerina of the modern age, but the stillness of her poses, the stillness of the room, the air in the room, the particles of dust floating in the manner Fonteyn floated through the narrow beams of light in the room, Jean and myself in that room together, sitting next to each other on my grandmother’s old floral divan, my hand in hers, in that moment in time.
I wasn’t completely aware that I had seen and found this great magic. So I didn’t know that I had begun to look for it in other places. Thought later, when I began to find this magic moment of form meeting substance in other places, other works of art, then in life itself, and in people, in moments of time, after a while, I was able to connect to that first moment again, that current of transcendence, over and over. You can find it anywhere, moments of complete stillness and balance. Sometimes you can even bring them about, force them into being, if you will, work them through processes of your own mind, like working clay. Learn through various methods, artistic and metaphysical.
They say it requires discipline and in the arts this is true, no doubt. Yet...
Sometimes the universe simply drops them into your lap. Love.
No matter how you look at them or how they arrive, it is fleeting because time is a bastard. You may want to grasp them, hold them forever but they will be gone soon, as will you, as will “The Rose Adagio” despite its beauty. So cherish them, love them with your memory, and do with them what you can. Keep them in your memory for their next visit so the recognizable elements remain.
And then, then, you can see with clearer eyes the clumsiness of amateurs, their missteps and failings for what they are, in The Nutcracker, even in “The Rose Adagio,” and in anything else. Violations of style in attempts to find creativity. In other work as well. As shocking violations against the forms at times, yes, but also as acts of love. Someone else’s love, perhaps, only not yours. And in yours. In every moment of balance. In every moment of love.
No shocks mean no wasted moments? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
And yet, you know, balance... In ballet it is a must. Don’t want those dancers falling on their tutus. But in the Universe?
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