This Sunday I went to a lecture demonstration given at the Guggenheim as part of their Works & Process series.  The Art of Teaching: Participation & Perception consisted of a talk by Damien Woetzel, principal in New York City Ballet 89-08, and Proffesor of Government and Rhodes scholar, Michael Sandel.

I found the whole affair highly problematic.  This is a good thing.  It means I was engaged and the performance was an authentic experiment in process.  The piano accompaniment by Cameron Grant and the dancing by Tiler Peck, Joaquin De Luz and Robert Fairchild were not only beautiful but also incredibly intimate in the small Peter B. Lewis Theater.

The presentation started with Damien who opened with the question to the audience.  What is performance?  He spoke about a “ladder of engagement” for the viewer.  He then introduced Tiler Peck who danced the opening of Balanchine’s famed Serenade.  Afterwards Damien “taught” the opening choreography to the audience who then “danced” it with music.  There was not enough room for the audience to do the arms so the exercise, for me, was a bit forced and uncomfortable but I am always one for traumatizing audiences.  I did appreciate the attempted accention of the “ladder of engagement.”  My mind also grumbled when Damien described turning the feet out into first position as “becoming a dancer.”  Pardon my French but ballet is not the only dance on the block.

Certainly this is a separate issue, though the performances by Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz (of various openings from Robbins ballets) made a good case for ballet being “the dance.”  Maybe first position is the best way to become a dancer.  If that’s how these two did then they have a strong arguement.  While the dancing was all beautiful I found the lines of thought offered by Damien to be difficult to incorporate into what I was seeing in the bodies.  Granted, he teaches the great ballets and I do not so I would expect our interests to be quite different.  Perhaps I wanted to watch the dancing without intellectualizing it.  Very unlike me.

After a short video introducing Michael Sandel, he emerged to give his talk.  It was good in that it again, like Damien’s call for our participation,  transgressed the comfort zone of the audience.  It too made me rather agitated.  In an attempt to probe our ideas about “justice and equality” Sandel went straight to the hot button issue.  What do you think about record bonuses immediately following the largest transfer of debt from private to public the world has ever seen?  (Not his words exactly.)  What do we think about 50% tax on bonuses for investment bankers?

Everyone certainly had an opinion.  Some thought the tax should be more, others like Stuart Cohen thought society might collapse if investment banking “talent” be forced to take up their proffesion in another field.  I wonder?  As a physicist I know Wall St drains many of our PhD’s to work on options pricing and algorithmic trading schemes over the development of new physics and technology.  A burping gentleman behind me kept muttering, “it’s the market stupid, it’s not justice, it just is.”  A woman in back framed it as a public relations issue and thought it dangerous, with regards to civil unrest, if people percieved the wealth inequity to be as high as it is.  Finally a woman in front explained that following the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand the fully unregulated free market, and the distribution of wealth which it generated, was the just one by definition.  Rand, of course, was the fountainhead of much neoliberal market philosophy that shaped the aggresive deregulation schemes during Greenspan’s reign at the federal reserve.

Clearly I have an opinion too.

Sandel then showed the wealth disparities between, the average public school teacher and David Letterman, and Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Judy.  After showing each income disparity he’d ask, “is this just?”  In the end he tried to draw a connection between the wealth disparities between celebrities and public servants and the gap between regular working shmoes and the financial oligopoly.  The big error I see in his logic is that though David Letterman maybe overpaid while public school teachers are underpaid, David Letterman is not hurting anybody.  David Letterman does not get rich by selling to pension funds financial products that are set to self destruct and then betting BIG that they explode.  Big invesment banks enrich themselves this way.  This is vampirism.  David Letterman, on the other hand, gets our attention because he is funny.  He then sells that attention.  Letterman has no victims.

In the end Sandel and Woetzel sat down together and discussed the similarities and differences in their seperate discursive modes.  It was Sandel’s contention that the classroom, or public speaking forum, was much better suited for creating meaningful participation by the audience.  Though I don’t agree I can understand his thinking and that is enough for me.  Congratulations to the Guggenheim for presenting this kind of work.  I would never have thought I would be in the midst of New York’s most well bred, read and cultured discussing banking in a spirited and physical context.  Bravo to that.  Also cheers to Damien Woetzel who continues to put dance where it does not belong.  Which is exactly where I believe it belongs.