Tag: movement

Noise And Motion

Trying to write about a litany of amazing experiences is like trying to file spaghetti bolognese by ingredient -after it’s cooked and on your plate.

Friday night I attended Monodramas at the New York City Opera. Then I had a great meal, met some great people, and walked through a curiously-quiet Times Square. Saturday I went to the legendary Strand Books, and later explored the Lower East Side with a local friend. Today I heard another friend sing at a favorite spot on the Upper West Side, and on the way there, chatted about the wonders of Bukowski with a fellow commuter.

Together these things seem unremarkable, but… trying to put them into some kind of order, and sense, parsing out their colors, textures, sounds, meanings, the small spaces of light between the blocks of firm monolithical EVENTS… is hard. Such efforts demand a certain commitment of time and energy and availability of mind and spirit and fingers, to sit, think, contemplate, and type. Time isn’t always on my side.

New York is swallowing me up, and I’m enjoying being in the throes of its guts, thrown this way and that, against hardship, wellship, friendship and relationship. I want to sit down and try to make sense of all this, slowly, carefully, and against the grain of everything New York demands. I love the fast rhythm, but I like the slow numbers too, and I have to mind the splinters and dirt while I’m at it. Never mind the glam, here’s bare feet, dry hands, red eyes and low voice. Add a glass of red, Sinatra on the stereo, and a room with a view -or at least access to a great, busy street – and I’ll truly feel I have arrived. Until then, I’m on input mode.

Tiptoe Through The West Side

 

Joyful, quiet, exuberant, contemplative.

Who knew ballet could be so many things at once?

The National Ballet of Canada‘s summer mixed program, playing as part of this year’s Luminato Festival in Toronto, is a heady mix of contradictions. The first third, “Pur ti Miro”, features the music of Beethoven and Monteverdi; the choreography in the piece, by hot dance figure Jorma Elo, is regal and joyous. The second piece, “Opus 19/The Dreamer” features the choreography of Jerome Robbins and the music of Sergei Prokofiev. The last third is “West Side Story Suite”, based on the legendary musical by Leonard Bernstein, features Robbins’ choreography once more, along with colourful, lively dancing, snaps, and vocals.

With short sections, hummable music, and gorgeous visuals, the mixed program has a little something for everyone. It was with great delight that I noted the incredible number of enthralled children in attendance at Sunday’s matinee performance, as well as numerous twenty-something hipsters. Kids get the liberating quality of dance that is, for the most part, sadly lost in adulthood. It was fascinating to observe their reactions to the music and the moves, and to observe their deep, immediate connection with the dancers.

I was equally struck by the various emotional chords that were hit within the show: funny, sad, whimsical, sad, sassy, melancholy, meditative… innumerable shades of the human experience were expressed with a turn, a hand, an arm wave, and even vocally. It’s become something of a recent phenomenon to have dancers vocalize during a performance; as with Wen Wei Wang’s Cock-Pit (presented in Toronto earlier this year), vocals are a pure enhancement of the inherent drama and silent magic of movement. We take talking -and moving -so much for granted, but to have both, within a kind of vacuum, be used for sheer expression, feels like a revolution. I could only help but wonder what Nureyev would think.

Still within the revolutionary vein, I was bowled over by seeing choreography to one of the most famous pieces of music in the classical canon. I grew up hearing Beethoven’s sole violin concerto in a concert hall; it felt new, strange, and surreal to see dancers leaping around to the concerto’s exuberant third movement. It was interesting to note how the program itself was structured as a kind of journey from traditional to pseudo-modern too; moving from the old-school world of Beethoven and Monteverdi, onto Prokofiev, and Bernstein, was like a nod to a variety of dance styles and expressions.

While I enjoyed the meditative nature of “Opus 19/The Dreamer” (the silent drama between Patrick Lavoie and Sonia Rodriguez was scintillating) and adored the vintage-thug moves and hip-swinging snaps of “West Side Story Suite”, it was “Pur Ti Miro” (roughly translated as “I simply aim for you“) that affected me most deeply. Call it sentiment, call it old-fashioned, but there was something in that old-meets-new ethos in that piece (a world premiere, no less) that felt completely provocative and, weirdly, new. Its juxtaposition with the more modern Robbins works felt like just the kind of balanced contradiction that shapes a festival like Luminato, and, I suspect, will come to define, in many ways, ballet of the twenty-first century.

Top photo: Jenna Savella with Sonia Rodriguez and Elena Lobsanova in Pur ti Miro.
Middle photo: Artists of the Ballet in West Side Story Suite.
Bottom photo: Sonia Rodriguez and Patrick Lavoie in Pur ti Miro.

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