Oregon Ballet Theatre's Swan Lake

Heading out into the lobby of the Keller Auditorium at first intermission of Swan Lake last night, Stephen said, "The corps de ballet is very... together, very..."

Looking for the right word and I anticipated it and jumped in with that tiny pride you have every time you one-up your partner in linguistic prowess.

"Tight?" I said.

"Yes, tight. That's the thing you often hear in reviews, that the principal dancers are good but the corps de ballet was sloppy. I was very impressed."

"So, corps de ballet...?"

"That means the members of the company who dance together in a group, as opposed to the soloists."

"Can I use that term in my blog post? I'm going to use that term in my blog post!"

So, there's my full disclosure: Linguistic excellence? Balletic knowledge? Not so much. But I love ballet, the skill, the beauty, the strange magic of learning a story almost completely through movement, and I particularly enjoyed Oregon Ballet Theatre's production of Swan Lake. The word I kept using to describe things last night as we were leaving the theater, a word that sprang easily to my tongue, was delightful.

It's an interesting production because it is not the classic Swan Lake based on the 1895 revival with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, and it's not the classic Tchaikovsky ballet updated with completely new choreography. Artistic Director Kevin Irving's adaptation is an amalgam including input by Petipa and Ivanov and modern choreographers Nicolo Fonte, Kevin Irving, Anthony Jones, and Lisa Kipp. Not only that, but the storyline has been changed to add a completely new element and that takes the story in a completely different direction and toward a different ending.

I'll only say that about the changes, because I hate spoilers, but what I can say is that I felt all the aspects of OBT's Swan Lake, the old choreography and the new, the classic story elements and the new, were assembled beautifully so that the whole production felt seamless and integrated.

And the orchestra under the direction of Niel DePonte was - I'll use my initial not-very-ballet-chic word again - tight. Beautiful. And the dancing, led last night by Xuan Cheng and Peter Franc, was quite good, with particularly lovely use of the corps de ballet. The white swans swirled and churned like a murmuration across the stage. At times, to me, they seemed to symbolize more than enchanted swans, becoming, here, a hint of storm, there a spread of fog as a night moved toward morning.

One of the most surprising things to me was the humor. The scene of the ball in Act 2 is rife with it, fashioned beautifully through the use of both choreography and storyline. I didn't know I could laugh so much in a ballet. And there was one particular moment I never thought I'd see in a ballet - and of course, that spoiler thing, again: I can't say what that moment was. I wish I could. All I can say is that between that moment and the burst of laughter that followed was a half second of silence in which I think the only sound in the auditorium was the surprised "Oh!" that jumped out of my mouth.

Here are three final words in my parade of words about OBT's world premier production of Swan Lake: go see it. It's a gorgeous and delightful evening and you don't need to know any fancy ballet terms in order to come out of the theater feeling smart and full of a little more joy.

More info and tickets here.

Photos of  Xuan Cheng and Peter Franc and the company members of Oregon Ballet Theatre courtesy of Randall Milstein.

christmas revels

I've wanted to go to a Portland Revels show for a while, now. A great lady I know has been involved with the group for years and yet I've never made it down there. Well, this week, I scored myself some tickets to their winter show, the Christmas Revels, and had myself a very nice evening, out at the beautiful old Scottish Rite building in downtown Portland.

The Christmas Revels is like that old tradition where carolers come to your home and sing, except that in this case, you're invited into their home. And asked to stay a while. What I like the most about it, though, is the historical aspect. Each year, they pick a new time and place from which to regale you. This year, it's nineteenth century Appalachia - my old stomping grounds. Kind of. Not the nineteenth century part, but a lot of my kith and kin came from or settled in Appalachia. Kind of. Maysville, Kentucky, where my Dad grew up and Cross Junction, Virginia, where I used to go visit my grandparents, are right at the edge of the purple on the map, so close that I can't tell whether they're officially in or out. But still. I'm claiming it.

You can't help but want to claim that area when you're treated to lovely banjo and fiddle music and even clog dancing. The music was by the Blue Mountain String Band, and it was loads of fun. One member of the band, Leela Grace, who played banjo, was one of the cloggers as well. The show also featured the Portland Brass Quintet, a troupe of mummers, sword dancers and a huge chorus of singers.

I love harmony and choral music, so the back and forth between that and the string band was really a treat. Lovely, lovely singing. Some highlights of the show for me...

~Soloist Suzannah Park singing the old traditional version of the hymn "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah" in a beautifully ornamented style that the program says comes from eastern Kentucky's oral tradition.

~Nedra Schnoor Egan playing the possum in the theatrical staging of the Native American story of how light was brought into the world.

~Suzannah Park and Leela Grace's duet of Say Darlin' Say.

~Clog dancing, you guys!

~Ithica Tell. Every place she appeared in the program. She was wonderful and dynamic.

There was also one song performed by the big choral group that particularly knocked my socks off, and I have no idea what it was anymore. So much of the music, I'd never heard before, so I couldn't hold onto it. Shaker hymns and shape note songs and Appalachian tunes. But I have a nice, little printed program full of interesting, historical info on all the different offerings of the evening, so I can learn more, which I love.

The Christmas Revels is playing through December 16. You can check out showtimes and get more info here.

beautiful

Back to back theater nights, back to back body. Friday night it was The Body of an American at Portland Center Stage, and last night it was Body Beautiful at the Keller Auditorium for the opening night of Oregon Ballet Theatre's 2012/2013 season. I have to say, the ballet was the perfect complement to the play. Complement's not the right word - I first thought antidote, but that would make it sound like I didn't enjoy The Body of an American, which I did. But after you fill your mind with human suffering and complex characters and conflicts and the whole art/death/respect conundrum [which I wrote about here], it's lovely to go to the ballet and let go, be transported.

Body Beautiful is being produced in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's Body Beautiful exhibit, which takes a look at the influences of classical Greece. [The paintings I include below aren't in that exhibit - not that I know of - but I thought in keeping with the theme, I'd put a few in.] The ballet Body Beautiful consists of four different pieces, most of which also take their influences from classical Greece...

Apollo and Two Muses -
Batoni Pompeo - 1741

"Apollo"
Composer: Stravinsky
Choreographer: Balanchine

The story.

Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, god of music, poetry, oracles, plague, etcetera, dances with three of the muses - Calliope [epic poetry], Polyhymnia [sacred poetry - although Stravinsky identified her as mime] and Terpsichore [dance]. The muses each try to garner Apollo's attentions, and he chooses the one you'd expect him to choose in a ballet.

The execution.

Balanchine, man. He's like the Busby Berkeley of ballet. At least that's the feel I got from his Apollo. Stephen says it's kind of heretical to compare Balanchine to Berkeley, but I mean it with full respect, knowing that in Balanchine's case, we're talking about real dancing. His Apollo was full of tableaux created of the human body, geometric and flowing. I enjoyed the story aspect when the muses were vying for Apollo's eye, but my favorite parts were when all four bodies were working at once, creating lovely patterns of body.

*

Le Nouvel Orphée -
Stephen O'Donnell - 2009

"Orpheus Portrait"
Composer: Liszt
Choreographer: 
Kent Stowell

The Story.

Eurydice dies and her love Orpheus descends into Hades to try to bring her back. The only way he can do this is by never looking her in the face. Eurydice, not understanding, is distraught and tries with everything she has to get him to look at her. When she succeeds, she dies, and he loses her forever.

The Execution.

Lovely presentation of two dancers alone on stage, particularly poignant when the two danced without looking at each other. I actually wished that portion of the ballet were longer - there were so many opportunities for interesting moments between the two as one moved toward and one moved away from the other. Nice stage effect at the end when Eurydice died and Orpheus laid her body in the rippling fabric waves of the River Styx and let her go.

*

Narcissus - Caravaggio - 1599

"Ekho"
Composers: 
Bach and Gluck
Choreographer: 
Christopher Stowell

The Story.

The nymph Echo falls in love with the beautiful hunter Narcissus. When he rejects her, she wastes away until all that's left of her is her voice. Then Narcissus, resting by a spring, falls in love with his own reflection in the water, and, unable to pull himself away from the image of his own beauty, wastes away, himself, until all that's left is a flower.

The Execution.

For this ballet, they changed the story up, folding the two parts in together so that as Narcissus dances with his own reflection, Echo fights to get between them, to break his obsession, and fails. As a fruit fly from way back, I couldn't help but love this sensual dance between two men. And the three dancing together, with the beauty of the two men mirroring each other offset by the woman's very different moves, made for lovely geometry. The dancing was very fluid, and the towering, at times hanging, at times moving, jellyfish-like shapes made of tyvek all around the stage made it feel like the story was taking place underwater or maybe trapped in the reflection across the water's surface.

*

"The Second Detail"
Composer: Thom Willems
Choreographer: William Forsythe

The Story.

There's no story for this one. It's the one piece of the evening not locked into a classical myth, a modern piece that had its world premier in Toronto in 1991 - but OBT concluding Body Beautiful with this ballet reminds us that even far flung dances have their roots ultimately in classical times.

The Execution.

Fascinating. When the music started - modern, synthesized, highly rhythmic and yet disrhythmic at the same time [I guess that's not a word, but I like it, so I'm keeping it] - I worried the piece would be too jarring. Sometimes I feel put off by modern dance, but I found myself grinning throughout this one. It was a large group, alternately dancing and sitting on chairs lined up at the back of the stage. The ballet was like fourteen different ballets shuffled together into one. [I could have the number of players wrong. I believe they said fourteen in the preview, but it looked like more.] The dancers executed different moves at the same time, all rhythmically lined up, often similar moves so that somehow instead of coming off as random, it all felt completely connected, completely dynamic.

One of the things Stephen noticed about this piece was the way the dancers, when not in motion, relaxed. They walked off stage, they sat in the chairs, they stood with a hand on a hip, waiting. Then in an instant, when it was time for each to dance, that relaxation sprang into lovely motion again. He found this really intriguing, although to be honest, I didn't even notice it. I was so riveted on the dancers in motion, trying to figure out just how the seeming randomness came together into something so cohesive. Like leaves in a wind - that's the image that kept coming to me. This flashing, trembling, beautiful thing.

Body Beautiful is playing at the Keller Auditorium until October 20th. Check out all sorts of other interesting stuff about the ballet on the OBT blog here.

giselle

Probably a pedestrian question, but is the ballet Giselle where we get the phrase gives me the willies? Or at least are the willis in Giselle the same willies we’re sometimes given? In last night’s production of Giselle, put on by Oregon Ballet Theatre, the willis [specifically the spirits of women jilted before their wedding day, who rise from their graves  to seek revenge upon men by dancing them to death] were something beautiful - ballerinas in white floating en pointe through the muted shadows of the graveyard. Like death is something soft and lovely. Delicate. As they made their first appearance as a group onstage, the willis were shrouded in white veils, which added a delicious creep effect to that lovely. Then Giselle herself appeared at the mouth of her crypt, and the moment that her own white veil was yanked away, I gave a little gasp of appreciation in my seat and embarrassed myself.

When we first arrived and found our seats, Stephen said it was so refreshing - surprising - to be seeing a completely classical production of ballet. "It's not a language people know anymore," he said. "Or at least that they expect." The expectation of the modern arts is innovation, reinvention. Taking Swan Lake and relocating it to the 1950s Jersey Turnpike. But classical ballet is a beautiful language, to me a perfect language, and forgive me for sounding overzealous, but it's sumptuous to be steeped in its particularness.

[our principals for the evening, haiyan wu and chauncey parsons. interestingly, in this production there will be different sets of principals throughout the run.]

Oregon Ballet Theater did right by that classical language. It was a lovely production, with beautiful sets and costumes shipped in from Italy, all soft colors. Beautiful choreography and dancing. I was interested to read that Giselle originated only about a decade after the technique of dancing en pointe was introduced, and there are moments in the ballet where the technique is used to quite a spectacular effect, both in group numbers and in solos. Some fantastic moments in solos. And of course you also get willis dancing in a graveyard and new love and death and madness. 

Giselle goes mad like a tiger in a circus ring. Or at least that was what came to my mind. The way she danced into madness in a wide loop around the stage took me to a moment during my lighting director days when I watched the rehearsal of a very new tiger act, and in a leap over the trainer, the tiger took off low and completely plowed into her. As the trainer collapsed on the floor, the panicked tiger did the only thing a panicked tiger can do in the big cage - run in circles and circles and circles. Giselle had tiger grace and tiger panic as she danced her circles, sometimes skirting the arc of dancers who stood watching like the bars of the big cage, sometimes slamming through and scattering them. I was so caught up in the beauty of the ballet that the fun fiendishness of this drama, which closed the first half, took me by surprise.

Lovely evening. Giselle is playing at the Keller Auditorium and runs through March 3rd.

new year's picture

And one more picture, to finish up my last post. Actually, this doesn't completely belong, as it was taken after midnight on January first.

We spent New Year's just the two of us, doing what we like to do. Champagne and good food and a movie. For me, the food was cheese. For me the food is always cheese. A bit of delice de Bourgogne, (more than a bit) (and then more), a bit of mimolette, a bit of morbier. Stephen had two things. The first was bacon-wrapped steak. The second was bacon. Oh, and plantain chips. The champagne was two kinds. Cava, actually, for most of the watching of the movie and Veuve Clicquot for the New Year's toast. We opened the Veuve Clicquot at the start of the movie to be ceremonious, had a toast and a glass, and then saved another glass for the end. [hmm, that sounds like we drank two bottles. i want to go on record saying we didn't finish either.]

The movie was Yankee Doodle Dandy, the James Cagney biopic of George M. Cohan. Maybe it seems like a better movie for the Fourth of July, but the pageantry of musicals is always good for New Year's Eve, and there's nothing like ringing out the old year with James Cagney tap-dancing down the White House steps.

I like to play a game where the image that's on the screen when we clink glasses for a New Year's kiss is going to represent the coming year. I did it last year and got Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing cheek to cheek. [wrote about it here.] This year, this is what Stephen and I got.

If you look close, in the foreground are two glasses of the good stuff, and in the background are Cagney and costar Joan Leslie as an old couple drinking tea.

Two toasts for 2012. If you wanted to interpret this image, you might look at the whole film and note that in this moment this couple is looking back on a lifetime of accomplishments and about to embark on their greatest accomplishment of all. Or you might note that they're two old people drinking tea. Either way, it's cozy.

shadow dancing

I have to give Stephen total credit for one of my favorite aspects of our little performance with the Richard Foreman Mini Festival. Since the main song we were singing was Shadow Waltz, he had the idea of having shadows waltz behind us during the song. The Performance Works Northwest folks told us they could project still images or film sequences on the stage wall, so we set about figuring how to create a little shadow film. Keeping in mind that we had only ten days (and very few nights together) between getting the prompt and performing the complete piece, it was squeeze to fit this in with writing the piece, putting together the background music, practicing and practicing. Oh, and going to work. Oh, and a computer crash in the middle of it all.

Monday night: Stephen and me in the back room of the apartment with the couch up on its end and leaned against the closet door, an art lamp affixed to a tripod shoved in the corner and Stephen's iPhone (camera) propped against the computer. In the wide spot of light beaming against the wall, Stephen and I waltzed in a circle. Trying to stay inside the tiny square marked out with tape on the floor. I banged into the corner of the desk. The blurry shadow figures on the wall were elongated and every time we turned, my butt looked like an attached beach ball.

We tried all night, moved furniture around, pointed the lamp from every angle, but the room was just too small. No way to get the shadows sharp in the frame and keep our real bodies out. I kept saying what we needed to do was go find a blank wall somewhere and project the car's headlights on it, and dance in front of that. Then Stephen came up with the idea of the shadow puppets.

He spent part of Tuesday and Wednesday drawing and cutting out of stiff art board three sets of dancing couples--modeled after Astaire and Rogers from pictures in a book.

Lovely, detailed silhouettes with delicate profiles and fingered hands. On Thursday, I stayed home from Dangerous Writing, and we set up the lamp and camera again. By then, Stephen had attached some chopsticks to the bases of the paper puppets and glued it all down. He'd also added a final touch to his dancing couples, using some parchment paper, with hopes that the light through the parchment would give a gauzy effect to part of the costuming. When Stephen does something, he does it to detailed perfection.

This was my job.

Then, when the sun went down, we started filming, shining the light across our stick puppets and against a thin piece of Bristol set up on Stephen's artist's easel.

He filmed from the opposite side, which gave us the sharpest possible shadow dancers. Sadly the parchment paper didn't give us the effect we wanted, so we had to take a little time to remove those pieces, but then we got back to choreographing the dancers.

I knelt down in front of the easel screen and twirled my silhouette duo, and Nicholas came over and curled up on the backs of my calves.

All night, Stephen and I played the music of Shadow Waltz and were two-dimensional dancers in a circle of light.

fingerdance

On October 9th (hey, isn't that John Lennon's birthday?) Stephen and I ( or Madeleine and Penny) will be performing in the Richard Foreman Festival. Which you can check out here. We won't get our prompt (which the theme of our performance will be based around) until ten days before, but as Madeleine and Penny don't come with an orchestra, we figured we'd better take a look at our music.

Stephen had an idea about what our musical accompaniment should be, but first we need a tape with the basic tunes on it. I figured maybe I could take the sheet music and work it out on piano (OK, what we have is an old electric keyboard) and then record that, and that would give us something to start with. Let me play around with it Tuesday night, I said, and I'll see if I can learn how to play the songs.

It's been a long time since I've played piano. I am not sure when the last time was that I played piano. I don't sight read very well--I know most of the notes inside the lines of the treble clef and about five of the ones inside the lines of the bass clef, and for the rest I have to stop and do math. But I have a good ear and figured if I studied the lines and notes and rests and knew the basic songs, I could piece it together and then memorize it.

I'm not great at memorization.

Tuesday after I left work, after I went to the grocery store and put away the food, I sat down on the couch with the keyboard in front of me balanced on a chair, and Nicholas curled next to me (when he wasn't trying to get on my lap), and I stayed there for probably four hours poking my fingers at the keys.

I'm not saying I expected to turn into Oscar Levant in four hours.

(I tried to find a clip of Levant playing Sabre Dance or something else from the movie we watched Monday night, which is The Barkleys of Broadway, but i can't find a thing, so I'll have to just say that when you watch him play, you understand how piano fingers dance. His fingers dance as much as Fred and Ginger do in that movie.)

I didn't expect to turn into Oscar Levant in four hours, but I worked pretty much straight, just getting through one song. So many black keys. Black keys mean you can't play it by ear and logic, you have to more or less memorize the song note for note. But it's strange what happened with my fingers on keys for the first time in years. When I didn't think too much about them, they mostly remembered where they were supposed to be - and stranger, they started dancing. Not something you could see by watching my clumsy work, but I could feel it - some sort of magic thing that moved my hands as much as I was moving them. There's a bit of dance in everyone. I used to feel it when I was clowning. And even at times when I had my hands on a light board. The impulse is in me even when I'm an everyday body in space, walking to work, going down steps, sliding books onto a shelf. If it were socially acceptable, I'd probably dance everywhere, in some small way.

My fingers on the keys was a dance I'd forgotten with all the years that have passed since I used to play. That dance kept me sitting there on the couch until ten o'clock through a thousand wrong notes. I don't know if I'll be able to pull off playing the song sufficiently in the time we have, but the evening was worth it for that tiny awakening.

[goodnight, oscar levant, wherever you are.]

song and dance

On Thursday night, Stephen and I went to the ballet. Very exciting. We see a lot of theater when we can, but I, at least, don't have a lot of experience seeing dance. Unless Fred Astaire movies count.

It made me think a lot about the discussions we had been having as Stephen prepared for his symposium at the Tacoma Art Museum, actually. Back then, the talk was about how the body on the canvas tells the story. Last night, it was about how the body in movement tells the story. My brain always wanting to find story--but story isn't always the most important aspect of an art. What's interesting to me about dance is how minimal the elements of story become. Or can become. And they hit you as viscerally as if you were given a narrator and a plot to follow. They go to the fundamental. The body moves, the body interacts with another body, and it gives you something to feel.

We saw Song and Dance, presented by Oregon Ballet Theater at the Newmark. Part one was a square dance set to Vivaldi and Corelli. With a square dance caller, even. Choreographed by Ballanchine and originally performed in 1957. Somehow, I never realized that dance choreography could live in the same way music lives. How it can be created and written down and used again and again. How if you saw Square Dance done by the New York City Ballet in 1957, you'd see the same dance as I saw last night.

I was pretty rapt when Julia Rowe and Chauncey Parsons danced alone. Everything was so exact. And of course so light. The only way you knew they were touching the floor was that little clunk of the toe shoes against the stage. During the first intermission, Stephen told me Ballanchine was known for his very exacting choreography. I found it fascinating to watch.

Part two was called Speak and took from hip hop. It was totally cool to see this on the heels of Ballanchine. Completely different body story, movement story. About the lovely way culture can create a dance that lives in the bodies of people in their everyday lives, a way bodies communicate through movement. I think when dance goes modern it can sometimes turn out hokey, but Speak was totally great. True. Different kinds of subtle from the Ballanchine. And pretty exhilarating.

Left Unsaid was something gorgeous. Something almost surreal about the way it played with the relationships of the people on the stage. As it started, I realized I didn't know what to expect of it. I'd remembered the first one was going to be a square dance, I'd remembered about the hop hop, but I went into this one with a blank slate. And what I got was like anonymous story being born. Because I didn't have any expectations of theme, I tried to let my eyes just watch the beauty of the dancing, but it was always hints of story in my head. During one of the dances, I actually found myself letting that story take the form of one of the novels I've been following as it takes shape in my Dangerous Writing workshop. And it was another revelation of what dance can do. And I'm pretty sure I know who's going to die at the end of that novel. Well, maybe not, but beauty of movement, well-choreographed use of dramatic tension, became complete story in my head.



Stephen noticed that the woman from Speak was the principal woman in Left Unsaid. I thought everyone danced beautifully, but he has the eye for singling people out, remembering faces, and he has a more studied eye when it comes to dance. And he said she was outstanding. Anne Mueller - who apparently has been a part of Oregon Ballet Theatre since 1996.

The music was Bach. And contrasting with that, another element in Left Unsaid was apparently yoga. Which I don't know, so I can't speak for it, but I'd love to have had the knowledge to be able to pick out the "asanas" (OK, I don't even know what that is) that I read were a part of the choreography.

Last up was Eyes on You, which was all Cole Porter music. Sometimes piped in, sometimes live with a vocalist and piano. It was really cool, getting these very different types of music and of dance in these four different segments. Really reminded you of all the many worlds you can get to with just bodies and music. Well, bodies and music and a simple bit of costume and stage set. The use of color and contrast, visually, worked really nicely in Eyes on You. I liked the costumes all in white against the changing color of the backdrop. It seemed like the costuming was a successful reference to the Thirties - didn't seem like a bad imitation, which most imitations of that time period seem to turn out to be. Stephen's the expert on time and costume, and if he says something is successfully period, I figure it must be.

Overall, a lovely evening. Here's another picture I found on OBT's Flickr site:



Anne Mueller from Speak. Can't you just tell how cool she is?

Song and Dance goes until May 1st. Here's a link to their site if you want to check it out!