The advantages of a liberal arts education

"Actually, this is perfect viewing for the day between Good Friday and Easter," said the Resident Fan Boy, not quite pompously.  

After an exhausting afternoon guiding younger daughter and Demeter (and, truth be told, the RFB himself) through the steps of decorating eggs using shaving cream, I felt like kicking back with a bit of ballet on my Royal Opera streaming subscription, and chose The Dante Project.

As we watched Dante descend and dance through a tour of the circles of Hell, with the poet Virgil as a guide and partner, the RFB continued:  "Because Jesus spent the day after the Crucifixion..."

"Harrowing Hell," I said, not taking my eyes from screen.

"...he went down to..."

"Harrow Hell."

"....save the people born before Christianity..."

"The Harrowing of Hell!"

"What?"

"It's called the Harrowing of Hell. It's like you couldn't even hear what I was saying!"

"Well, I never heard it called that."

The Resident Fan Boy is also a son of the rectory, so I, the lifelong Unitarian, was rather surprised. 

"You've never heard of the Harrowing of Hell?"

"Well, I guess you're the one who studied theology..."

English literature, actually.  It did come up.

Stumbling into ballet

I discover the best things while looking for something else.  Today, I came across a collection of videos from the Royal Opera House, in particular a series of demonstrations using Royal Ballet soloists to demonstrate the history of ballet called Ballet Evolved.

I grew up poring over books about dance, but this series tries to give an idea in sound and motion about what older forms of ballet were like.  Here is one of my favourites, an informal look of the style of Auguste Vestris:

Persephone versus the twenty-first century

We're nearly ten years into the new century (yes, nearly - the century began January 1st, 2001 for those of you who can't count), and somehow, I feel I'm failing to get the hang of it.

Take last weekend. On Saturday, we went to see the Boston Ballet on its very first trip to Ottawa. This was a mixed shorts evening, unusual for Ottawa which, being The Nation's Capital, usually gets full-length ballets. This is a pity, because an evening of shorter pieces usually gives you a much better idea of the range of the company. The range of this company was considerable, featuring the usual Balanchine offering (a stage full of ballerinas with one lone male to carry them about), two modern pieces, a Fokine and a Nijinsky.

The Nijinsky was, of course, L'après-midi d'un faune with the costumes pretty well exactly the same as when Nijinsky and his lot scandalized Paris in 1912. Debussy. Dancers dancing like two dimensional figures on a Greek vase. Win.

We got another taste of post-Victorian eroticism in Le Spectre de la Rose, Michael Fokine's romantic mini-ballet of a girl returning from a ball and having a rather hot dream about the rose she's brought home. Win.

My favourite was ein von viel, actually a Canadian piece choreographed by Toronto's Sabrina Matthews, set to Bach with two male dancers “fugue-ing” along with the magnificent pianist on the stage, echoing each other’s movements, then freezing as the pianist turned the page for the next movement. The audience wanted to clap after each movement, but I sat on my hands and applauded hard at the end. I don't know if that was right, but it was how I felt. Big win.

The other modern piece was Brake the Eyes by Boston Ballet's resident choreographer Jorma Elo, really odd and rather nightmarish with Mozart and soundscapes, plus the mutterings and giggles of the lead ballerina. I couldn’t tell if her voice-track had been pre-recorded or if somehow she was miked, as the light fixtures changed with each movement, highlighting the tension and muscles of the bare legs. I thought it was pretty cool.

Twentieth century: three (even though I'm not that crazy about Balanchine)
Twenty-first century: two.

Then, on Sunday, as if to contrast with what we'd seen Saturday, we were confronted with...The Grammies...

I think I made it through the first four overwrought overproduced extravaganzas before I finally reached for the clicker.
We had Lady Gaga. ('Nuff said.)
We had Green Day with the cast of (wait for it) their Broadway show. (Hunh?)
We had Beyoncé, complete with gladiator garb; trademark cross-over runway strut, belting out one of her songs meshed with, inexplicably, Alanis Morrissette's "You Oughta Know".

Then, most baffling of all, Pink (whose lyrics are usually quite literate) stripped down to a strategically wound bandage, threaded herself in a sling, and while dangling below a circle of three spread-eagled acrobats in gold bikinis and body paint and high above the audience, turned herself into a spinning human sprinkler head in six-inch heels. Oh, for Pete's sake, Pink. Get off my lawn. What I wanna know (aside from "Why???") is how the people below felt about getting their expensive evening wear and leather jackets sploshed with what appeared to be a helluva lot of water. Also, how Pink returned to a no-doubt very wet platform and didn't fall on her butt.

Faced with a prospect of Michael Jackson and Céline Dion in 3D, country singers ripping off the Alex Parsons Project, Taylor Swift, and hip-hop and rappers, I searched for something else to watch, feeling very old.

Twenty-first century: zero.
Persephone: zero.

On the bright side, I'm getting the hang of my new iPod, finally figuring out this week how to download podcasts. It took several more days to learn how to actually get them on to my iPod, but let's just rejoice in the moment, okay? I've been listening to CBC Radio Two on the hour's return bus journey after delivering younger daughter to school. I've been rather startled to discover that I rather like what I've heard of a Somalian-Canadian rapper K'naan. This week, I was listening happily to a song of his called "Fatima" which, during the first verses, sounds like a wry ditty about a lost adolescent love:
Fatima,
What did the Young Man say
Before he stole you away....

As the song continues, a sadder story emerges and my heart sank. Fatima didn't go away willingly:

Persephone: one
Twenty-first century: ?

Spot the annie

Frozen dancers at Luce
Originally uploaded by pearl_ady

I have blogged before on my troubled conscience in being a balletomane. This feeling came back in spades earlier this week when I purchased tickets to see "Ballet Under the Stars", two short ballets performed by local company Canadian Pacific Ballet. Economic times being what they are, this is a tiny company, in fact all of the costumes are designed by one of the danseurs. The technique, however, is good. A lot of the younger dancers had that smile-held-in-place-by-pins expression, but one of the leads had that air of control and calm that allowed me to just relax and watch her.

It wasn't long before my gaze drifted to the bone-white limbs of one of the other dancers. And I do mean bone. As she turned, I saw the sinews in her neck, and where her shoulders met her upper arm in a startling knob. Mentally, I gauged how my fingers could easily encircle her humerus, and I have really short fingers...

At the intermission, I stole over to greet someone from church who is, believe it or not, writing a Unitarian Latin mass with the aid of a composer who used to accompany the music activities at elder daughter's preschool. (Victoria's like that; everyone is separated by three degrees, rather than the more usual six.)

"What did you think?" I asked.
"Well," she sighed. "It doesn't take much to pick out the two "annies" in the company, does it?"

I had noticed the rather skinny limbs of another dancer as well. My acquaintance has apparently attended workshops with members of the company and has learned that two of the artists dance under a doctor's supervision, and that their reward for keeping above a certain weight is permission to perform. In the meantime, it is suggested, they have a community of support.

So, maybe you see my dilemma. In purchasing tickets, am I in fact supporting something that keeps these skeletal young women going, or am I part of the problem?

The second ballet was a truncated version of Midsummer Night's Dream. The hollow young woman I'd first noticed before the interval had the lead role of Titania with a flowing empire-waist shift that concealed the shadows beneath.

Giselle: the mysterious case of the unidentified ballerina

The Resident Fan Boy got into our good books by negotiating loge seats at the matinée of the American Ballet Theatre's production of Giselle. (Dance matinées are a scarce as hens' teeth in Ottawa, and usually only available for The Nutcracker.) As we settled in and perused our programmes, we discovered that the only dancers listed were those performing the principal roles of Giselle, Albrecht, and Myrta (Queen of the Wilis). Three Albrechts were listed, ours was to be David Hallberg, but no Giselle was noted for the February 28th matinée!

Here's what I can tell you about Magical Mystery Giselle: petite, brown hair, very long arms and legs, looked really, really young. I realize that this is hardly a distinctive description of a ballerina. They all look like that. (Some of them are blond.) Okay, she didn't look like the pictures I found on the ABT website of the two Giselles who were listed. The Resident Fan Boy and I figured she must be a first soloist debuting in a principal role, which is not an unusual thing for a matinée performance. (I'm not sure why; are matinée audiences less snarky or something?) Stella Abrera seems the most likely candidate as she is performing in Giselle with David Hallberg in June; but it didn't look like her photo, either. So I spent the afternoon enjoying this mystery performance, then restrained myself from bellowing "Who are you?" during the bows.

There are other distractions that result from sitting in a loge. We were on the right side of the theatre so had a superb view of Giselle's mother's cottage in the first act, and Giselle's grave in the second act. While I could nearly see into the wings on the left, I had a very limited view of the right side. It helped that I'm familiar with the plot, otherwise I might have been seriously creeped out by the closing of the ballet. As the spirit of Giselle, having rescued Albrecht from being danced to death by the vengeful Wilis (trust me, if you don't know the story, you should look it up), prepares to return to her grave, she gives a flower, a token of her love and forgiveness, to Albrecht. I watched in fascination as a hand, clad in a pink sleeve, appeared from low down in the wings and passed the flower to Giselle. This gave the impression of a Carrie-like hand reaching from Giselle's grave, and moments later, reaching out to catch Giselle as she gracefully fell backwards and appeared (to the rest of the audience) to float headfirst off-stage. I knew it was the dancer who portrayed Hilarion assisting in the hocus-pocus, but someone watching this for the first time might have wondered why Giselle was being whisked away in such a sinister manner.

We also had a clear view of the orchestra pit, filled with musicians who appeared to be drinking coffee when not playing their instruments, and who also packed up and left during the curtain calls, leaving the conductor, when he was called onstage for his bow, to gesture magnanimously to an empty pit.

I'm giving the erroneous impression that this was not a top-notch performance. It was actually very beautifully performed, and given the far-fetched nature of the plot (no, seriously, go look it up; it's too convoluted for me to retell here), every motivation was clearly illustrated. It was ably demonstrated from the beginning that Albrecht is a noble, albeit in disguise, and very used to getting his way. There's a lovely moment early on when the jealous Hilarion draws his dagger and Albrecht instinctively reaches for his absent sword, thus betraying himself. Every opportunity was taken to show that Giselle, however she may love to dance, is a fragile creature with a heart problem, so we are not puzzled when she suddenly drops dead during the famous mad scene. The entire performance was filled with this tiny, clarifying details. What could have been Victorian melodrama (which, essentially it is, early 16th century costumes aside) is transformed into a very moving story of a very young naïve girl and the ethereal spirit of transcending love she becomes.

The real challenge of Giselle is that the first act and the second act are like two completely different ballets. Again, these are enormously talented dancers right down to the corps who deftly handle the transition from the earthy pastoral of the beginning to the spooky yet moving ghost story of the second.

Younger daughter seemed to thoroughly enjoy herself, particularly the bonus of having two real live Borzoi hounds enter with the hunting party in the first act. Too bad they sat on the right. Resident Fan Boy had a lot to say about the beige tights of the male soloist in Act One. He was right. Several shades darker would have helped us concentrate on his dancing.

Update: The Resident Fan Boy and I went through the pictures of the soloists at American Ballet Theatre and the mystery is solved! Our Giselle was first soloist Maria Riccetto. And I forgot to wish you all: Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!

Ballet with Balls

When I first saw Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo in Toronto during the first winter of my marriage, the programme notes alone were worth the price of admission (I'm quoting from memory): Giselle Act Two - Synopsis - Hilarian, a gamekeeper (probably a poacher) comes to lay flowers at Giselle's grave, but is frightened away by what appear to be dangerously large pests...."

The performance was memorable too: Albrecht doing laps around the stage, looking wildly about him, then doing a couple more; Giselle emerging from a coffin like Dracula; Hilarion being tossed off (one...two...three!) the stage by ticked-off Wilis. The programme also featured a well-aimed kick (in simply enormous dance slippers) at Agnes de Mille.

When I saw them for the second time, about five years ago, most of the original dancers were gone. AIDS had decimated the original company. (I don't know if it's a requirement that to be in the "Trocks" you have to be gay; but it's evident that most, if not all, of these guys are.) I enjoyed a programme that featured their take on Swan Lake and The Dying Swan, along with a Spanish solo and some mean Balanchine. The next day, the dance critic gave a lukewarm review and described The Dying Swan as the final act of Swan Lake. The awful thing is, I don't think she was joking.

So last night, we went to see "The Trocks" for the third time and brought younger daughter along. The guys really were in top form, offering once again the second act of Swan Lake and The Dying Swan, plus Pas de Quatre (the showcase number for Marie Taglioni and her three most famous rivals back in 1845), the pas de deux from Le Corsaire and another Spanish number called Majisima (from the 1885 opera El Cid). I was very intrigued this time to note that, while Swan Lake, Pas de Quatre, and The Dying Swan were done for laughs in all their campy glory, Le Corsaire and Majisma were almost entirely played straight, if you'll pardon the expression, rather like the singers performing in a drag club. I guess The Trocks have picked up on a sad fact of life: comedy is seen as a lesser expression of the arts. Funny books are perceived as being not as well-written as serious books; people are astonished to discover comedians can actually act; and men with hairy chests and pits, huge toe-shoes, and packages under their tutus are not seen for being the remarkably gifted dancers that they are. I have never understood this. The old adage is so true: comedy is hard.

I had brought along two sets of bird binoculars because we were in the third level of the loges, because although The Trocks body-language is clear as a bell (piqued, imperious and remarkably feminine), a great part of the fun is in the facial expressions. Younger daughter seemed to be having a splendid time, but the second intermission was a bit of a hiccup. She returned to our box and sighed: "Why are we staying here?" This was her first two-intermission evening, you see. While the Resident Fan Boy and I debated whether to make a break for it, the house lights dimmed for Majisima, and we were very glad we stayed, not only for the quality of the dancing (although I had to struggle with keep my mind clear of The New Pornographers), but for the joyous jitterbug encore to "Sing Sing Sing" in response to the rapturous audience ovation, as danseur danced with danseur, and ballerina with ballerina, all decked out in their Spanish garb, grooving to Benny Goodman. They weren't playing it for laughs, then, either.

Enabling Part Two

My second example of enabling in the arts is my fondness for ballet. Sometimes I wonder if it's the moral thing to encourage malnourished women with malformed feet to dance upon their bludgeoned toes for my pleasure. Ballet, it seems to me, is a brief career of self-torture. Mind you, this could be a definition for most careers in the arts, but I still think George Balanchine has a lot to answer for. Furthermore, we're raising another enabler in our household. After the success of the outing to see the HD film of Tales of Beatrix Potter a little over a fortnight ago, we decided to tackle an HD offering of the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty at one of our local cinemas.

I was a bit hesitant about subjecting second daughter to Sleeping Beauty, remembering it as a very long ballet with (how do I put this?) rather a lot of dancing in it. Every time someone finishes their bit, some other character makes a rolling motion above their head which is classic ballet mime for "Please dance!" (or "Were you the last person to use the bathroom?"), to which there should be the classic ballet mime equivalent for: "This is a *&%!# ballet; what do you think we've just been doing here?"

Actually, that's a neat advantage of watching a ballet in a cinema rather than live; you can see the details of the facial expressions, the costumes, and classic ballet mime. (You could see these live as well, but only if you sat close enough to be sprayed by sweat during the pirouettes.) This was a particular pleasure in seeing Genesia Rosato who played Carabosse the wicked fairy.
Oooh, I love a good character dancer. She had fiendish fun parodying the gifts the good fairies had brought, then going into loving detail about the fate awaiting Princess Aurora: "She's going to grow up and be all these lovely things, then she's going to prick her finger and DIE!" For good measure, she arrives in a kind of Harley-Davidson black coach with a bunch of black rats and wears a low cut costume not quite made decent by purple pasties.

Of course, this left stuff for the Lilac Fairy (top picture) to mop up, including a lot of mime explaining that Aurora would not die, made more difficult by the fact that the classic ballet mime gestures for "not" and "die" are rather similar, and furthermore she had to re-explain this in each act: "Okay, remember what Carabosse told you? Now watch carefully: the princess is not going to die. Get it? Not. Die. Not...." All with this rather fixed grin on her face.

Other dancers got to have a little more fun with the mime. The prince got to perform something along the lines of: "Yes, you're the one who has to play Blind Man's Buff with the Countess. That's why I'm the Prince, and you're a nobody." And the Major Domo character (named Cattalabutte, poor fella) demonstrated the difference between "king and queen" (three fingers pointing at forehead) and "princess" (two fingers pointing at forehead) as in: "Gad! Here come the King and Queen!" and "Oh, look! Here comes the jailbait princess..."


Princess Aurora, as I have intimated, is extremely young. And tiny. The dancer who plays her mother looks like a woman of typical height, until Aurora shows up with the other female dancers in tutus (granted, quite a few of them are supposed to be fairies). As a result, when the grieving queen goes to her unconscious daughter, she looks a bit like that Amazonian Madonna in Michaelangelo's Pieta. Alina Cojocaru, the Aurora in this production, is actually 27, but looks about 12. She doesn't dance like a twelve-year-old; she is undeniably a crackerjack dancer, as were all the other principals and soloists, including her dark and brooding prince Federico Bonelli.

And younger daughter? Entranced, even more so than at the Beatrix Potter ballet of two weeks before. We've bought season tickets for one of The National Arts Centre's ballet series. It includes a production of Peter Pan from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Romeo and Juliet from the National Ballet of Canada, and Giselle with lots more adventures in classical ballet mime. I fear we will be enabling throughout the coming winter...

Pirouettes and popcorn

With younger daughter's birthday party in less than a week, I'm battling back the panic with a clever combination of small accomplishments and major procrastination. However, finding a focus for younger daughter's Saturday since her tutor moved away is a weekly must. This week we decided to try one of the artistic offerings at the local cinema. I've noticed them in the paper for the past couple of years. For about twice what you'd pay for a movie ticket, you can go see a sort of one-time-only screening of a recent production of an opera or ballet from New York or London. We decided to take the leap with the Royal Ballet's production of Frederick Ashton's ballet Tales of Beatrix Potter

Younger daughter is thoroughly familiar with almost all the stories, so we set out in the oppressive humidity (which, sadly, isn't nearly as bad as it's going to get) via a thankfully air-conditioned bus to the air-conditioned multiplex at World Exchange in downtown Ottawa (and it better damn well be, at those prices). The higher price gets you greeted at the door of the designated showroom by one of the older ushers, who hands you a programme. We entered to find a sea of white heads. No complaints there; I'm rapidly joining their ranks and they tend to be more considerate to fellow-attendees. To my relief, a number of children, all girls of course, arrived closer to the screening time. This is supposed to be in high definition, but these shows are usually shown in Silver City which has the big bucks equipment, so I didn't notice anything fabulous about the clarity.

Younger daughter was entranced, and I enjoyed the ballet in-jokes: Jemima Puddleduck departs the stage like a combination Dying Swan/Odette; Pigling Bland and his partner use moves from the Sleeping Beauty pas-de-deux. Oh, and the steeper ticket price also gets you an intermission and a bathroom break which is a welcome thing, considering real ballet-goers aren't usually eating popcorn and sipping on pop during the show. It's Sleeping Beauty in a couple of weeks; maybe we'll go.

Now, wouldn't it be lovely if they decided to film David Tennant's Hamlet like this? I understand it's sold out...

Dreams and nightmares

Freezing rain ("freezing bane" is more like it) fell early this morning. The Resident Fan Boy had been worshipping at the altar of Environment Canada throughout Sunday, so I really hadn't bothered to fix younger daughter's school lunch. When word came that the school buses had been cancelled, we knew there was little point tackling the treacherous sidewalks for slightly-less-than-one kilometre uphill to school. I phone the school's absence line and tuned the television to Sesame Street. (Elder daughter and the RFB must brave the elements for the sake of marks and money.)

While I've given up going outside in freezing rain (don't; not if you can help it), I have been making an attempt to do other things I've been nervous about. One of these is taking younger daughter to an evening ballet performance. Elder daughter, despite my best brain-washing attempts, has sworn off ballet, and Ottawa only offers matinées of The Nutcracker. Since younger daughter had made it quite happily through an evening performance of a musical review put on by a local theatre company over the Christmas holidays, I thought I'd finally make a stab at it when Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo showed up in town with their production of Le Songe. Ah, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I thought: slapstick, fairies, Mendelssohn.... perfect for younger daughter.

Well, it wasn't a total disaster. This was very, very French, that is, heavy on whimsy, preciousness, and what the Resident Fan Boy called "A-a-a-a-a-rt!" (as in Gonzo the Great playing Mozart in a vat of oatmeal with bagpipes). Younger daughter, whom we'd carefully prepared, sat between us with Ballerina, the stuffed chocolate-coloured lab and Jeffrey her dog-puppet. She enjoyed training her opera glasses on the members of the audience waiting for the curtain. I was seated next to Mr. Elbows, and the RFB was seated next to Monsieur Appreciator of French Art who was a dead ringer for Mick Fleetwood (down to his build and wardrobe) and chuckled appreciatively throughout the performance. The ballet was a mixture of sort of Commedia dell'Arte (the band of mechanicals), traditional ballet (the lovers, conveniently labelled in large letters), and modern ballet (scary fairies). Of the last, these were probably rather Shakespearean fairies: not fluffy and ethereal, but earthy and erotic, all "holes and poles". Titania's white body stocking was decorated with aqueous circles emphasizing her breasts, belly and pudenda, while Oberon sported a sort of pearl saddle horn on his belt (and yeeowtch! what a physical hazard for his dancing partners!). All of this innuendo would go flying over younger daughter's head, and truth to tell, the choreography of the fairy section was by far the most interesting of the ballet, which spent rather too much time on the story of the four lovers (which, let's face it, is usually the most tedious part of the play). Three quarters of the way through the first act, younger daughter was asleep.  The Resident Fan Boy and I exchanged glances as the lights came up for intermission and gathered up our coats. While waiting for a taxi in the lobby, we saw a family with a four-year-old boy making an exit and, so help me, we heard a baby crying in the orchestra section at the beginning of the ballet...

I don't know if the evening would have been better if I hadn't been battling a persistant headache resulting from a 3+ hour shopping expedition to seek out a "dressy" outfit for elder daughter's European class trip next week. First off, I am not, in any sense of the term, a fashion consultant (that would be eldest daughter's best friend who was sick this weekend). Secondly, my limit for shopping malls is just under 90 minutes. Thirdly, elder daughter had no idea what she wanted, being a jeans-and-tee girl herself. So it was my worst nightmare: 90 minutes in boutiques and waiting outside and inside fitting rooms, followed by 90 minutes of bloody Payless Shoes where I've never been and I never wish to revisit. Then she said she needed a bag. What did I think? I carry everything in cloth book bags, I told her, slumping off to sit on a shoe-fitting bench while she quizzed the salesgirl....

Next attempt: Broadway Across Canada season tickets. I'm praying there are matinées. And no dress code.