Mirror, mirror

I try to avoid looking in the mirror all the time in class. Not only is it bad form, but it seems somehow morally reprehensible to me. I'm sure that this is some kind of manifestation of the hypocritical anxiety about narcissism that haunts our solipsistic society (after all, I'm no different than any other blogger/social media user in that part of the pleasure of engaging with these things is knowing that one is out there, visible). But it is also about how hard it is to concentrate on what your body is doing when your watching your body doing it in a mirror (the reversal of the image, etc.). On the other hand, the mirror provides the primary tool for self-correction. It may be I do not look in it often enough.

So, it was weird, this morning, to find in my e-mail inbox some photographs that were taken during one of the adult classes I took in New York. The photographer, Arthur Coopchik, has been compiling images of his wife's students in class, just their faces and upper torso usually, presumably in the interest of studying the moods or expressions of people absorbed in a deeply bodily discipline. Here is his website: http://www.acoopchik.com/. I won't post any of his photos, since you can see them there under "Kat Wildish Class," -- he was kind enough to send me my own pictures, though I very much doubt he will post any of them, since they're not really very lyrical.

Some of the photographs he has taken of other dancers seem to me deeply moving; my own photos, however, just made me feel a bit elderly and unbeautiful. I look so awkward!

Naturally, like most dancers, I am probably my own cruelest critic. But all I can see is my stiff neck, my high shoulders, my bent elbow, the way I stick out my thumbs like a hitchhiker, and the crepey skin on my triceps. Oh, and also how dumpy I look in my favorite leotard and knit shorts. Why are photographs so unkind?

However, as the fashionista Tory Burch says, "negativity is noise," I am going to try to mine these pictures for a positive outcome. There is this -- if I can see the error of my ways, I can work on improving. So, tonight, I will focus on my shoulders. I will look in the mirror and I will ask myself, "are you really standing up straight, or are you still at the keyboard?" I will dance to liberate myself from the mouse pad! And next week, I will move on to extending my arms. In the meantime, perhaps I should start doing some pushups.

Quality and Quantity!

This has been an exceptionally ballet-rich week in my life.

Last weekend, I took the offspring to see BalletWest do their Swan Lake, with the ordinarily gamine BeckAnne Sisk as Odette/Odile displaying a new depth and maturity to her dramatic interpretation of both roles, some great stage effects, a dose of arched-eyebrow comedy in the third-act court scene, and Christopher Ruud more tolerable to me than he has been in the past – he had toned down his melodramatic airs (though not eradicated his hammy quality entirely, thank goodness, as it is in small doses somewhat endearing) and was actually landing his jumps in clean positions.

Tuesday, since I am in New York for the College Art Association Annual Meeting, I went to the Intermediate Ballet class at Peridance with the wonderful Graciela Kozak, from whom I took a class two years ago. Her choreography is so fun and danceable, and so challenging! I jotted down some notes about the adage, because I absolutely want to bring it back to Logan.

Tuesday evening, I had my birthday present to open. My birthday was in December, and my dear, dear mother bought me a front-orchestra ticket to NYCB’s last performance of a triple bill of Peck/Wheeldon/Ratmansky. Oh, it was soooo tasty. I know I’m kvelling a little here, but honestly, every time I go see that company it just takes my breath away. The combination of speed, technical precision, and élan is just so, so, so ineffable! Here's a link to the video content about this season's ballets: http://www.nycballet.com/Explore/Multimedia.aspx

The Peck piece was particularly memorable, since it seemed very personal; that is, here’s a young guy who is a corps member, and he choreographs a ballet (set to the iconic Copeland Rodeo suite, so often dressed up in chaps and ten-gallon hats for Agnes DeMille’s setting) for men, mostly dancing in ensemble. And how they dance! The piece has this quintessentially Balanchine-esque ludic quality, but it does not stray into the silly or the merely humorous (in this it reminds me of Mark Morris at his best). Peck digs into the music’s own range of expression, from jazzy insouciance to tender, lullaby melodies, to that wonderful last movement with its brassy fanfare shifting into a polka, and then the strings and horns coming back in all bright and topsy-turvy. I love that he does away with the need for a narrative and yet still captures a sense of character – one of the male leads, danced on Tuesday by Daniel Ubricht, has this great swagger that quotes DeMille’s puffer-pigeon cowboys, but then his braggadocio gets transformed into a kind of collaborative athletic endeavor with his “team” (the costuming suggests three vaguely athletic affiliations). 

Team sports

There is a ballerina, too: Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar featured in a beautiful pas-de-deux in the third movement which has that lyrical feeling. But the very atypical treatment of male/female ratios and the way in which all the men, to some extent were Tiler Peck’s partners throughout all four “dance episodes” made the pas fit into the whole seamlessly. Oh, and can I mention that Amar Ramasar is really fantastically beautiful and has divine legs?

She is standing on his chest.
And he walks off stage with her like that.

The other pieces, Ratmansky's recent Pictures at an Exhbition (juicy) and Wheeldon's Mercurial Maneuvers (juicy and moody) were also great, and I got to see one of my favorite dancers, Sara Mearns in the former. What I liked best about the Ratmansky was the way color figured into the choreography -- not just the beautifully luminous projections or the delicate, floating, costumes, but also in terms of an almost synaesthetic channeling of color-sense into the "characters" enacted in the various passages; yellow, for instance, strains upward, like a shoot, moves at angles, like a ray of light, melts, like butter. Also, "yellow" gets the best lift in the whole ballet, maybe the best lift ever. I cannot even describe it. Here it is.

 

This afternoon, the main business of conferencing having wound up, I went and took a second class at Peridance, this time from the highly energetic and dynamic Kat Wildish, who specializes in teaching adult beginners. The class was more “real” grownups than “aspiring professionals” (the usual Peridance crowd), and she led a long and inventive barre that included, among other things, a barre stretch that involved at one point doing a handstand in pike position with one’s feet on the barre. Yes. That. She also gave me a fantastic correction – she said, “You’re rising to relevé on someone else’s time. Go on your own time.” I didn’t get it right away, but then it clicked. I was popping up to three-quarter pointe fast, on the beat, and wobbling as a result. So she got me to slow down in the transition, and presto – I was solid, and somehow, miraculously, still right with the music. I love those aha moments. 

Okay, and now I am going to brag a little. For once in my life, I actually not only got but also enjoyed the petite allegro on the first try – two changements, echappé, jump to coupé back, chassé back, chassé side, reverse and chassé back on the angle, chassé en tournant, tombé, pas-de-bourrée, echappé, jump to fifth). Afterwards she singled me out to say I had done well and asked where I had been trained. I told her that I went to an RAD school, and she said that she thought that might be the case. That was really nice; all those days, weeks, months, years of sweat! It made me as happy as the time Patricia Godfrey told the class I had nice dance quality. Sometimes I just get so wrapped up in worrying about whether I’m turned out enough or closing my fifths or whatever, that I forget how much just enjoying the dance, becoming the music, or whatever, really grounds the whole thing.

You can watch the trailer online.

After dance class I went down to the Sunshine Cinema in the East Village and saw the recently released documentary “Ballet 422” about the work that Justin Peck choreographed in 2013 to Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s Sinfonietta "La Jolla.” Shot in a verité style with no voiceover and very little in the way of contextual titles, it opens a series of windows onto the creative process, both the individual work that Peck does as he begins to frame his ideas, and the collaborative work with the dancers, the ballet master Albert Evans, the costume designers Reid Barteleme and Hannah Jung, the conductor and musicians, and the lighting designer and techs. I suppose it might be a bit dull for those not familiar with the dancers or the style of ballet associated with NYCB, but still, the way in which this very young man produces this very layered work exercises a seduction of the imagination.

 

Do I have deep and connective thoughts to share about these activities, embedded as they were in the matrix of my professional life? No. Not really. I just feel grateful to have been able to do these things, and to get energized by New York.

And I will work on relevés on my own timing.