Don't You Just Hate It When...

I don’t like dances which are the same all the way through. It’s a widespread phenomenon and I don’t know why it’s not more often discussed. Some dances start off fierce and flinging and stay that way for their duration. Even a brownie with nuts has various textures throughout and takes a lot less time to eat. I saw one not long ago (a dance, not a brownie) in which a rather large number of people hurled themselves upon each other and the floor in fairly athletic ways for around 20 minutes. That was it. They did this at more or less the same pitch and speed throughout. The basic variables in the work stayed in the same proportion to one another the entire way through. The tenth minute was virtually identical to the 17th and to the intervening 6. While it may be hard to organize such activity for 20 minutes running I don’t know that one should try. Another thing I don’t like is the tendency of some critics to make final, forceful declarations about quality. “Not a major ballet by any standard”, “froth but nothing more”, “masterpiece”, “drivel”, “classic”, “dud”---“this wine is bad”, “these Doritos are stale”, “off with their heads!”. It’s the kind of thing business folk on expense accounts say to impress their companions with their connoisseurship (well, maybe not the Doritos thing). But does this impress? It’s as if dances are being inserted into some imaginary canon and catalogued for the library of congress. On the other hand, I liked Claudia LaRocco’s statement at the end of a review of Katie Workum, Will Rawls and the Labor Union at Dance Theater Workshop where she said something like “art is better off being interesting than sensible”. Katie’s and Will’s work as very lively, very detailed, very tasty, not very sensible and…not a major ballet by any standard. I enjoyed it very much. Give me liberty or give me death. A stitch in time saves nine. You get more bees with honey than with…
February 14, 2007