What threatened to be “a year-long Festival of the Feet” when it was announced in March turned out better than we’d feared. For the most part.
With some exceptions.
This version of our comprehensive season wrap is verifiably our last word on ADF Season 2008. With 1,100 more words than the story in our print edition (including our views on Meredith Monk, Maguy Marin, the Japanese Festival and Acts to Follow), this report has all the juicy stuff we couldn’t cram onto the pages of this week’s copy of the Independent Weekly.
Buy the ticket — click on “more” — and read the verdicts (in this and the next two posts). Then leave your reactions in Comments, below. As always, your replies won’t appear immediately, since we have to screen for spam. But all legitimate responses will be posted.
It is an easy — and a thoroughly useless — thing to be intimidated into silence or critical complicity by a “masterpiece.”
New audiences and critics may be mindful of the meanings an artwork has been given in the past. But if they’re encouraged, by anyone, to stop there — if someone convinces them that they have nothing new of value to say to a masterpiece, or no right to say it (without the appropriate advanced academic degrees) — they are swindled of their birthright, which is this: to determine, for themselves, what meanings an artwork has to them, now.
Why is this a birthright? Meanings — and aesthetics — change in a culture, over time.
Let’s consider the theater for a moment. In a space far less than the 72 years since the premiere of Martha Graham’s Chronicle, a bombastic, declamatory aesthetic once considered the apex of live theater was replaced by something very different. What’s now viewed as the artifice of the elocutionary movement was once valued as something else.
At some tipping point, a gesture on stage that once conveyed the height of drama is read by new audiences as communicating melodrama instead.
Where does the tipping point occur? The dance and theater historians don’t decide. The audiences do, at every single performance. They did it last evening in Page Auditorium. They’re doing it again, tonight.
Martha Graham’s work has said much to many people over the years. But the all too avoidable question under the circumstances also happens to be the primary critical question:
” What does this work say to us, now ? “
Could we have identified Steps in the Streets‘ “clear political message” without Janet Eilber’s pre-show explication ? ( Come to think of it, can we identify it even with it? ) Would we have known anything of what the work was “about” without those words?
What, if anything, does this suggest about the artwork’s current ability to communicate on its own terms — without someone having to speak for it?
Were there actually three couples – or just three female leads — in Diversions of Angels ? What characterizations differentiated the three women from one another, and just how deep did those characterizations go?
Now, apply the same questions to their male partners — if, that is, we can actually remember them. Weren’t they merely universal donors — interchangeable ciphers? What, if anything, is suggested by the fact that none of the men’s costumes were different — and that the one non-couple male was dressed the same as the others?
What do the qualities of movement in these works communicate to us — not 60 or 70 years ago, but now?
The floor is yours. Take the stand, and respond in comments. We have to moderate responses, due to spam, but all non-spam comments will be posted.
Dancer Anjuli Bhattacharyya is from Kentucky. So is video documentarian Jessye McDowell. The two went to Mark Haim’s technique class last week, where the topic was momentum…
Amy Beasley’s been coming to the ADF for three years. Documentary videographer Jessye McDowell followed her to contact improv and advanced technique classes one day this week. (Cameo appearance by Ming Yang!)
Local documentary filmmaker Jessye McDowell is following this summer’s ADF with her camera. Each week, she will post a short featurette on a student participant. Episode 1: opening weekend auditions with an old hand — returning ADF student Thomas Newkirk from Greensboro, North Carolina.
As I was sitting in the Duke gardens, trying to conjure up something blog-worthy, I could not help but glance at my beautiful surroundings. Squirrels running to and fro, beautiful green grass, the sun peaking through the clouds, Duke students walking from class, dancers walking from class…whoa, wait a minute, you might ask how I can tell the difference between Dukies and Dancers. Well, I learned how to make this distinction easily by simply observing my environment at the Duke gardens. Continue reading »
The first rite of passage for students at the ADF School got underway last night.
Several hundred of this generation’s most promising dancers. Paper numbers pinned to sweaty clothes, like marathon runners. Hurried descriptions and demonstrations—followed by demands for immediate (and perfect) playback. For the chance to dance for the world on the ADF mainstage in the last week of the festival.
Video documentarian Jessye McDowell’s coverage will be with us in a bit. But before that, in 2002 the Indy published my essay on what’s really going on in dance auditions. The same article explored what was really different about auditioning for Shen Wei, during the summer he first presented The Rite of Spring.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
For the most part.
