Lessons From A Legend

On Monday night's PBS Newshour, correspondent Jeffrey Brown put together an excellent piece on an American dance legend - Judith Jamison, who just announced that she'll step down from her post at the head of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2011. Ailey has long been America's leading African American dance troupe, and both its namesake and Jamison have been widely celebrated for embracing a staggeringly wide variety of dance styles and traditions.

My favorite part of the interview with Jamison came when Brown asked about modern dance, and how some people often come away feeling like they don't "get it." Her response, uttered with a broad, easy smile: "That's okay! That's just fine! All we want you to do is just get in the theater, [because] there's just nothing like live performance. And you have to remember: there's no test at the end of it... There's nobody strapping you in your seat and saying, you've got to get this!"

So true, and so applicable to music as well. Because so many of our entertainment choices these days are commodities that we know well before we ever walk in the door, it's possible that we've lost some of our willingness to take a chance on the unfamiliar, and by extension, some of our patience for new works that fail to fully connect with our hearts and minds.

Jamison's dead right, though - there's nothing like live performance. Here's one of the many she's created over the decades...

Cirque du...?

Whatever happened to this contortionist version of the Andrews Sisters? And what does "Solid Potato Salad" mean? Questions aside, it's three minutes and fifty seconds well spent - I particularly like their big close. Hang in there until the one-minute mark, where the real magic starts...

Cutting Room Floor: This Is A Dance, Isn't It?

As I mentioned in a previous post, finding enough material to fill the first halves of our Inside the Classics concerts is never a problem - the challenge comes in deciding what will have to be left out due to time constraints. In fact, after each of our first two concerts this season, Sarah and I have had several people ask, "Why didn't you talk more about...?", and the answer is always that we simply ran out of space in the show.

However, since we have no such limitations here on the blog, I thought I'd spend the next week or so offering up bits and pieces related to Appalachian Spring that we're not going to have time to explore in our upcoming concerts. These "cutting room floor" posts will have their own tag, so if you want to wait until after the concerts to read the extra material, you'll be able to click cutting room floor in our list of tags over in the right-hand column, and you'll get everything on one page.

The most glaring omission from the concerts is going to be any sort of prolonged focus on the fact that Appalachian Spring was originally composed not as a work of concert music, but as a ballet score written for the revolutionary 20th century choreographer Martha Graham and premiered in 1944. Those who attended our Firebird concerts last fall know that we spent a good chunk of time examining the interaction between Stravinsky's score and the dancing that it was written to accompany, but for various reasons, we decided not to do that for the Copland concerts. The major reason is simply that, while Stravinsky's ballets told a very definite story and managed to revolutionize the world of ballet as well as the world of music, Appalachian Spring is somewhat vague in its storyline and was more or less forgettable as a ballet. The piece took on a second life in the concert hall once Copland rewrote it for full orchestra in 1945, and it's that version that we'll be focusing on.

Still, anything choreographed by Martha Graham can't be dismissed entirely, and while the ballet version of Appalachian Spring is rarely performed these days, Graham's influence on both classical and modern dance is with us everywhere. Her signature style is unmistakable, whether accompanying Copland's wide-open scores or, as in this clip from "Night Journey," the sharp, angular sounds of William Schumann.



I find Graham's commentary on this clip fascinating. She talks about "the weight of the body against the floor" being emphasized, rather than minimized, as it would have been in an earlier era. Think about a 19th-century ballet like Swan Lake, in which all the dancers seem to be doing their best to convince you that they are, in fact, weightless, floating about the stage as easily as if they were on the moon. Weight is most decidedly the enemy in traditional ballet, and an almost ethereal style of movement is the goal. Graham turned that philosophy completely on its head, demanding that audiences embrace the raw humanity of her dancers, warts and all. People are heavy. Gravity weighs us down. Deal with it.

This, of course, is why Graham's choreography tends to make some viewers uncomfortable, just as attending a production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? makes us squirm in recognition of the everyday malevolence of people just like us. Rather than offer a vision of human movement that seems godlike and idealized, Graham gives us humanity as it is: endlessly complex, frequently awkward, but beautiful in a raw, earthy sort of way. To me, it's a fascinating contrast with Copland's idealized musical view of America, which we'll be getting into in depth at the Appalachian Spring concerts.

For more on Graham's technique (as well as a few musical clips from the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring,) check out this short clip from the Martha Graham Legacy Project. (They've disabled embedding on this clip, for some reason, so I can't include it on the blog.)

Dance, dance

Yes, we are in the thick of preparations for tomorrow night's Inside the Classics concert, and I'm happy to report that we all survived this morning's rehearsal intact (Peter sounds fabulous). There are, however, other concerts going on this week as well, and this afternoon the orchestra rehearsed for tomorrow morning's Young People's Concerts, a full performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Scheherazade" with dancers from the University of Minnesota and professional dance ensembles. All four movements have been specially choreographed for this show, and it's really quite fascinating. Instead of taking the obvious path of creating a "story ballet" to go along with the programmatic elements of the music (Sinbad's ship, the tale of the prince and princess, etc.), the choreographers have instead devised abstract pieces that are reactions to the sound of the music itself.

The result is at times positively kaleidoscopic, with groups of dancers whizzing across stage in opposite directions - it's a really kinetic piece, which I think will suit the audience (upper elementary kids). The dancers often have gestures that accompany a certain melody, and the return of the gesture when the tune comes back puts a spotlight on melodic repetition and musical structure. To me, the dance effectively amplified the expressive content of the music, often highlighting certain emotional elements, often reflecting the fluctuating energy of the piece.

Adding visual elements to "concert" pieces always has an element of controversy. The argument, usually, is that these works were meant to stand alone without any "extras", and doing so somehow detracts from the music. I really think it depends on how it's done - in this case, not only are there dancers, but also projections above the orchestra of words used by elementary school students to describe the music in each movement. Thus, we are given several different perspectives - the thoughts of students via the projected words, the expressive motions of the dancers, and the glorious aural sweep of the music itself. I found myself totally engaged during the rehearsal.

What I'm very curious about is how this will translate to a hall full of students tomorrow morning, particularly as each movement of "Scheherazade" clocks in at over 10 minutes - a pretty long time for young attention spans. It's an unusual show (and very abstract when compared to most of our other Young People's Concerts), but I'm delighted that our education department is willing to take the risk to try something utterly new, which really is the only way to find out if it works!

Not your grandmother's "Nutcracker"

Well, 'tis the season, and musicians all over the world are buried in ballet pits for the billionth production of the "Nutcracker". But trust me, you've never seen a production of the holiday favorite like this one, a production of the Bejart Ballet Lausanne choreographed by Maurice Bejart. Wow. I particularly like the accordionist (a leitmotif throughout this production.)

The ballet world mourned Bejart's passing last month. I first saw his work as a kid in Hawaii when Rudolph Nureyev came for a one-night engagement and performed Bejart's "Songs of a Wayfarer", which left a deep impression on me, and I've been an admirer since. Bejart managed to be both artistically adventurous and widely popular, not an easy feat in any field. And by all accounts, he was a hugely successful man who lived modestly, was generous with his dancers and was never above praising the work of his fellow choreographers.

One more link for you of Bejart's Nutcracker - a beautiful "Arabian Dance with an extraordinary dancer.