what to do this weekend
If you happen to live in/be near San Francisco this weekend, I urge you to hurry over to ODC Theater and see Imprint, the newest work by The Foundry. The Foundry is directed by two of my teachers, Alex Ketley and Christian Burns, and they are collaborating on this work with video artists, Anthony Discenza and Torsten Burns, and Les Stuck who previously composed for the Frankfurt Ballet. Two of my friends, Hallie and Chloe, are dancing in the work and from what they’ve told me, it sounds very exciting and odd and interesting. I can’t wait to see it! I’m probably going on Friday, so if any Winger readers are there, come say hello! For a little taster of the genre of movement, Christian has a few videos on his website and here’s the link (again) to Careless which Alex did for us last year.
I actually had an amazing dance weekend. I’ll write more later, but in list form it went like this: Friday- benefit at a gorgeous house for the Conservatory, Saturday- Sacred Monsters with Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan, Sunday- Muriel Maffre’s (who is one of my favourite dancers of all time) farewell performance with SFB. It was amazing, fun, wonderful, and inspiring.
Chicago
Hello everyone! I’m just back from a very quick trip to Chicago, where I auditioned for Hubbard Street 2. Hubbard Street Dance Company is one of my favourite companies in the world, so I was excited to have the chance to audition. I found out about the audition last week, so it was a last-minute trip, but definitely worth going (it also made me appreciate the wonders of frequent flyer programs!). Chicago was beautiful: warm and summery all day and into the evening, flowers everywhere, interesting old buildings… I stayed with my friend, Olivia, who lives near the University of Chicago and I felt like I was wandering around an enormous park because there were so many trees everywhere.
The audition was actually… fun. I wasn’t sure what to expect because it was the first time I’ve ever auditioned for a contemporary company, but it was interesting and challenging. We started out with barre. There were too many dancers for everyone to dance together, so they split us into two groups alphabetically. I was in the first group and we did a nice, basic barre, nothing too tricky or difficult to learn. They eliminated people after every few exercises, which is a bit scary as you tense up, then breathe a sigh of relief, only to have to tense up again a little later. I think this is why I feel so exhausted after long auditions… All that tension just kills you! We finished barre and they sent us into another studio to stay warm while the second group went through the same process. Then they brought us all together for center and gave some fun combinations, eliminating throughout. If it hadn’t been for the whole, “am I going to get cut because I just made a fool of myself and nearly fell down?” I think I would have had a great time.
After class we learned some rep. Philip Orsano, who is a dancer with HS2, taught us two excerpts from Brian Enos’s Dipthong (there’s a short video at the link). The movement was very idiosyncratic and full of specific contrasts: a short, jerky movement going into something floaty and pulled out, or something low to the floor that suddenly pops up in the air. Philip is an amazing dancer and it was so fun to watch him demonstrate all the details; at the same time it was hard to absorb them all as quickly as possible while being nervous and having people look at you from behind a table. It’s hard for me to really dig into choreography in an audition situation, but I enjoyed trying.
We also learned a fragment from Edwaard Liang’s Sight Unseen, which was much more lyrical and gentle. The movement felt more familiar to my body and there was this great backwards, twisty fall to the floor that I absolutely loved! I have a bruise on my hip though from not realizing how much you actually have to brace your arms to keep the weight of your body from crashing into the floor.
At the very end they kept four dancers back to talk to individually (not me, unfortunately!). It was nice to get through the whole audition (about four hours) and to feel as if you were being judged on something a bit more personal than just ballet class. No job, but a good experience anyway. And aside from a very weird cab interaction, I had a great time in Chicago. I feel like I need to go back someday and spend more time exploring.
pictures by julia
My friend, Julia Hollas, takes gorgeous photos. She’s also a really fantastic dancer who’s recovering from knee surgery. And she’s working in arts administration… Basically, she’s an amazing person of many talents.
Here’s a photo Julia took of Melanie in a rehearsal with Alex:
And one of Hallie:
And here’s the link to her photos on flickr in case you want to take a look round. I’ve just discovered how deceptively addictive flickr is. Click click click. Endless photos to see… Wow, it might be worse than youtube.
Auditions?
Here are some random pictures. My friend Heather and I took a road trip down to Southern California and stopped in Carmel. This is the sort of thing that makes me happy that I live in California.
I haven’t been doing much of anything lately.
Let me clarify: I haven’t been doing anything out the ordinary lately. All of our rehearsals and classes day to day are terribly interesting and important to me, but don’t make for very compelling writing. I could say that we’ve been working with Andrea Flores, who is a dancer with ODC/Dance, and making movement phrases based on lists of words, which are then morphed into something which could be a very interesting piece… but it’s not much fun without being able to show you the process. Hmmm… It might be time to break out my video camera.
It is really interesting to get ten words (crave, opposition, control, fluid, elongate, balance, sway, float, gesture, air) and go off to a corner and explore (in my case, struggle over) how you can make those words into a phrase, and then—this is the best part—to come back and see how different everyone’s work comes out. It’s like a bunch of people looking at some of those Rorschach inkblots and painting whatever they see.
I saw Symphony in C for the first time last Wednesday. I am in love with the second movement pas de deux.
I know when I first joined the Winger I was all gung ho about auditions (small detour: did you know that “gung-ho” is an adaptation of a Chinese phrase adopted by U.S. marines during World War II? Honest). I had a whole list of companies that I was going to research and plans to put together an audition video. I was excited about meeting new people and doing a bit of traveling. My, rather embarrassing, admission is that, as of today, I have done exactly one audition. The truth: I hate auditions. They’re completely bizarre experiences. It’s normally just ballet class, maybe some choreography, with a bunch of strangers so it’s nothing especially torturous or unusual or scary, but I always find this weird compulsion taking over me. I suddenly want to be someone else, whoever it is that Important Person Who Makes Decisions has in their mind, so badly that my dancing goes flat. I try so hard to be correct and to fit into a set of imagined expectations that I even start to bore myself. It’s this weird combination of being revved up and constricted.
So I’ve been putting off auditions and now it’s rather late in the season (most American companies audition January-March or so). But, just so I can feel a little proactive, I’m going to be sending out a video to a few places within the next week, so I’ll let you know how that goes. Actually, I’m telling you this so that I don’t keep “forgetting” to do something about the situation. No more procrastination!
Time to close some tabs. In honor of Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote what was my favourite short story for a very long time (there’s a ballerina in it!), a link to “Harrison Bergeron”. And has anyone in NYC played the Canal Street Station murder mystery game? It looks amazing.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder!
Hullo everyone. I haven’t written anything in a long while, but I have had the chance to get very excited about a few things dancewise in the meantime! First off, I got to see the Forsythe Company, which was completely AMAZING. Three Atmospheric Studies prompted these visceral feelings—horror, discomfort, sadness—and made me think, coming out of the theater, in a way I haven’t for a while. The dancers are so committed and intelligent and active in making choices… It was immensely inspiring and reminded me how important it is to be responsible for your own artistic work. It’s such a huge commitment to work in an exploratory manner all the time; I get frustrated sometimes and am just dying to do something cut, dry, and ready-made, but it really is satisfying to work flat out.
I went to see San Francisco Ballet on Wednesday night. They did Wayne MacGregor’s Eden/Eden, which I had heard much about and seen pictures of odd costumes so I was dying to see the piece. It was the last piece on the program, so the audience came back, all giddy from intermission and waited for the curtain to go up. Which it did, once the music started, on an empty and black stage and… nothing… nothing… technical difficulties! There was an announcement and chattering (meanwhile, I’m sure, someone was running around madly backstage) and then it all started again, this time with full music and the film, which hadn’t worked the first time around, projected onto the stage.
I really liked the piece. It’s a spectacle: extreme, absurd flexibility; bizarre, dehumanizing costumes; film fragments; and constant snippets of dialogue voiced over the music. But it’s a dense and odd spectacle with interesting movement ideas pouring out at insane speed. It also looks really, really hard. Muriel Maffre was spectacular, but all the dancers impressed me. They looked like they were eating the choreography up.
I foundthis interview with Steve Reich (the composer for Eden/Eden). It’s an interesting little NPR bit.Here’s a completely random picture. This car was parked around the corner from the theater, in front of a fancy restaurant. I love that such things still exist!
And that’s it for now. Happy dancing, happy art consumption, happy living and etc!
one show, two show…
Hello! I’m extremely happy to say that I made it to TWO performances last week. I caught SFB’s Program 1 on Wednesday evening with my friend, Miguele. We got to see Divertimento No. 15 by Balanchine, Aunis by Jacques Garnier, and Artifact Suite by Forsythe. It was the first time that I’ve seen Divertimento and it didn’t make a huge impression on me. It’s a very sparkly, pretty, fast ballet, but nothing about it grabbed me except the 6th variation which Lorena Feijoo danced. Her feet seemed to be moving so quickly that they really should have been blurry, except they weren’t. She looked like she had an “I can slow time down and fit in way more steps than mere mortals” superpower. I thought Aunis was kind of funny because it looked like a cross between a modern class and an Irish jig. It’s a piece for three men and they have white shirts with black trousers and suspenders (tricksy little buggers… one set came undone and flapped around the poor guy for half the piece). The dancers (Garret Anderson, Rory Hohenstein, and James Sofranko) are all really great movers and they put so much conviction and energy into the work. The piece that I liked the best though –actually, the entire reason that I went to this program–was definitely Artifact Suite. I LOVE this ballet. It has a bunch of weirdly incongruous elements: two pas de deux couples, a corps of dancers in mustard-colored unitards and white socks, a fire curtain that drops over the stage unexpectedly, and a single tall woman who walks around the stage in bare feet. Then Part 2 is this incredible group dance with an ending that is so simple but actually gives me the chills. I don’t know that I can even describe it properly without making it sound completely bizarre. Muriel Maffre (who is one of my favourite dancers, ever) did the “single female figure” part. Somehow, while striding around barefoot or standing in place and conducting the corps dancers’ arm movements, she was the most compelling person onstage. Genius! I am just in awe of her.
Random, but fun tidbit: we also saw Robin Williams. He was sitting a few rows in front of us and jumped up to give a standing ovation after Artifact. It made me think of this clip from The Birdcage. I love that movie! I’ve never seen the original French one though. Something to add to my Netflix list?
On Friday I went to see a show at ODC Theater that my friend, Ashley Taylor, was dancing in. It was called “The Shape of Poison” and was choreographed by Manuelito Biag. The ODC Theater is pretty small and it has a much more informal feel than most theaters. Here’s a picture of the stage pre-performance:
It’s interesting what you notice when you’re so close to the dancers. There’s hardly any separation between the stage and the start of the seats so you feel as if the whole audience and the dancers are enclosed in the same space. Tiny little changes in gestures show up like huge semaphore flags. I’d love to see a really aggressive piece in that space. It might be a bit intense, like those movie cattle stampedes. Ashley was great, by the way. Her dancing is especially detailed and she has this wonderful, fluid way of shifting her weight. It all showed up beautifully in close up!
Watching dance makes me happy 
So does this. Because being able to do 16 turns on your elbow is just bonkers.
gala!
(I LOVE this light fixture)Yesterday I went to San Francisco Ballet’s opening night gala. It was a fun evening. I always love going over to the opera house. It has these beautiful high ceilings and it’s absolutely full of gilding and marble. It was a bit of a lonely adventure though because my usual performance seeing cohort (the lovely Melanie Freeman) was out of town. Nobody to share the gasps of amazement at the extravagant couture and precarious hairstyles with! My favorite sight was a group of young people dressed up in costumes, complete with bright wigs and holographic glasses, as if they were headed to a Mardi Gras party. Fantastic!
The program was fun, not too heavy or one-sided, a little party mix of tutu ballets and more contemporary work. L’Air D’Esprit (Gerald Arpino/Adolphe Adam) was one of those ballets that look so difficult that I was thinking “that looks terrifying” the whole time, but Tina LeBlanc breezed right through it. She has the most beautiful jump and sparkly feet. The second act pas from Giselle made me laugh—not because of the dancing, the dancing was lovely—but because they had this “freshly dug grave with cross” sprouting out of the bare stage. It reminded me of those Styrofoam decorations you can plop on your lawn at Halloween. I was giggling when Albrecht draped himself across the grave and I think my neighbors thought I was a horrible person, but it looked like it came in a box labeled Insta-Grave Complete With Mournful Bouquet or something. I wish I could supply a photo!
My favorite piece was a pas from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain danced by Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith. It’s a gentle, thoughtful pas to this beautiful Arvo Part music. He seems like the most incredible and sympathetic partner… Through all the unusual lifts he made her look like an extension of his own body. Terribly impressive and the audience was so hushed once it was underway, but really enthusiastic with the applause at the end. I loved the opening when they stand side by side and sway from one foot to the other, very simple and affecting.
(these make me think of UFOs)
I’m really looking forward to seeing some of SFB’s programs this season, especially Artifact Suite and Eden/Eden. Forsythe’s company is coming to Berkeley next month and I’m curious about them as I’ve never had the chance to see any of his new work. Lots of performances to get to.
Oh and my latest thrill is GOOD Magazine . GOOD is a company that is encouraging media with “the sensibility of giving a damn.” On top of very cool design and great articles like “Sleeping With Strangers,” the magazine donates 100% of subscription fees to twelve organizations (including Unicef and WWF). I love it.
late
Happy Year of the Boar to everyone! Best wishes for a year of good fortune and no colds or lost keys or anything like that. I hope everyone had great holidays. I got to celebrate a late Christmas with my family and received a most amazing present from my wonderful sister:
Lloyd Alexander is an author who wrote some of the books that I read over and over when I was younger. It’s also the same edition as the copy that I checked out from a library once, loved, and never managed to find again. My sister is a genius.
This is very late, but I finally got some more photos from Montreal developed…
Here I am with my personal fireworks display/headpiece:
Tutu innards. These were surprisingly comfortable because the side panels were made out of stretchy material. No constricting corsets, I mean bodices, here.
Act II scenery coming in:
Sweeping snow:
My favourite Nutcracker moment: In the battle scene there’s a cannon that goes off and shoots a burst of multi-colored streamers. One night, about ten feet of orange crepe paper got stuck to something high above the front of the stage, and hung from ceiling nearly to the floor throughout the whole snow scene. Our snowflake jumping around exertions made enough of a breeze to send it swaying. I couldn’t stop thinking of pinatas… I think my dancing might have been a bit bouncier than normal and I definitely had that weird smirk that comes from trying to not fall on the floor laughing.
So now I’m back in CA, enjoying some of the most absurdly nice January weather ever. No peeling off numerous puffy layers here. I actually made it though the day without even a jacket. How’s that for the middle of winter? According to the weather people though, we’re due for a chilly weekend so I can’t get too smug (while looking up the forecast I found this—Animated SF Bay Area Fog Forecast–which is weirdly entertaining).
On the day that I got off the plane (after a quick stop in New York to visit some friends and see NY landmarks recreated in twigs, leaves, and berries at the New York Botanical Garden) we started rehearsals for Alex Ketley’s Careless, which we’re performing next week. We’re dancing in the dramatically named “Destination: Dance SF,” which is starting off the American College Dance Festival at SF State University. We’re sharing the program with several other SF groups including ODC, Smuin Ballet, and Robert Moses’s Kin… I can’t wait to see what everyone else is doing. This will be the third time that we’ve done this piece, so everything is familiar, but there’s so much partnering and “collisions” that rehearsals are still challenging. We’re working in a slightly smaller space so the spacing has to be adjusted and while we’re getting used to it, there are still some foot in face moments and near misses. What I love about this group of dancers is the fearless lack of hesitation: “you want me to do a one-handed handstand, knock my arm out from under me, roll on the floor, all in the midst of nine other people moving like crazy? No problem!” I definitely have times when I feel like the biggest wimp in the room. I’m the one saying, “well, but isn’t that a bit dangerous?” Goodbye tutus!
And I know that all you Wingers are terrifically busy dancing up a storm, saving the world, and being generally amazing, but if you do have some extra time on your hands I highly recommend some Doctor Who, specifically the new BBC series. I got the season one dvds over the holidays and have been tearing through them. It’s like Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with some Star Trek and Star Wars thrown in for good measure. It’s very British and very entertaining. Ridiculously addictive. So now you know how I’ve been spending the past few evenings: on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and a big grin on my face!
P.S. I wrote this post a few days ago and had a bit of a delay in posting it… I now have to eat my words and say that we’re having abnormally chilly weather in CA, record low temperatures, apparently. Not only did I have to wear a jacket today, I was even sporting a scarf!
Cold, but nice
Hello hello! We just got back from Ottawa. Did I tell you that we were going to Ottawa? Anyway, we started our Nutcracker run there for six performances at the National Arts Center. Being shamefully ignorant of Canadian geography, I didn’t even know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. I had no idea of what to expect in the city and was very pleasantly surprised by all the beautiful buildings around the theatre. An example:
I walked around on my day off (which was blessed with actual SUNLIGHT! but so freezing cold that I had trouble pressing the buttons on my camera) and admired as much as I could before I had to go back inside to defrost. The performances were fun, but a bit of a shock. We have three casts of corps, so even though we all had a chance to run it at least once onstage before opening night, spacing was a bit nerveracking. Everything felt a bit closer and narrower, especially in waltz of the flowers, which has us in massive, long tutus. There’s so much tulle and bright colors in that dance that I feel like I’m dancing inside a kaleidoscope. At one point we have two concentric circles of girls doing turns around the stage. I’m on the inner circle, and while it looks very pretty and swirly from the audience, I always feel a little precarious! The corps does get to dance quite a bit though, so I enjoy it.
I’ve always wanted to be a parent in the party scene of Nutcracker, mostly so I could wear a fantastic Victorian get up with lots of silk and ruffles. Unfortunately, being extremely short, I’ve never had the chance, but I love watching the other girls get into their costumes and hair:
Now we’re back in Montreal and go into the Place des Arts theatre on Friday for a day of tech rehearsals before we open on the 16th.
I am having a great time in Montreal. It’s an interesting city… lots of odd little nooks and delicious food and shops full of tempting things.
I love this sign:
And I woke up to my first white morning ever last week. Having lived in California all my life, it was a huge novelty to wake up and see real snow drifting down and making everything white and beautiful! I even enjoyed the one icy, slushy day we had because I had never seen trees freeze over before. There were even icicles hanging on the bicycles that were still parked outside!
That’s our backyard. We have a flock of sparrows and several very obese squirrels who visit us for bread crumb handouts now and then.
I hope all of you are having good Decembers so far and are getting your holiday shopping done early (wishful thinking!). Stay warm! Eat some roasted chestnuts and candy canes!
Exciting news for summer
Hello, all! I’m happy to report that I survived my first week of work in Montreal. We’ve learned all our choroegraphy and are now starting to run things straight through. Les Grands is a fantastic company– all the dancers are beautiful and everyone’s quite nice and helpful. It’s so interesting to be working on corps de ballet pieces… I’ve spent the last year or so immersed in contemporary choreography, so it’s a bit alien to be on the lookout for your “mark” on the floor and to remember the rules of the ballet stage (left downstage of right, standing in immaculate B+, etc.), but it’s fun to have a bit of a change and challenge. And it’s not even cold! At least, not inside. The heating system is amazing!
I just wanted to write a quick post to let anybody who’s interested know that the Conservatory has just announced its upcoming William Forsythe program. During the summer, we’ll be working with Thomas McManus on improvisation and then we’ll set and perform a Forsythe ballet. Fun! The link is here. We’ll also be working with the very lovely Glenn Edgerton on repertory by Jiri Kylian. Take a look!
Hope everyone in the States had a nice Thanksgiving… I’m afraid that here in Canada I just had a Thursday
