The Bang Group

The Bang Group Blog

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

There are 3 comments for this entry.

My Favorite Dancer

"This slavery to the moment is far more tyrannous than any other constructions I can think of. The artist ceases to ask the personal question 'what is right for me to do?' and asks instead, 'what is right for 1971?'." W.H. Auden interviewed in the New York Times in 1971 I now have a blog. I've sweated over my opening blog entry and cast about for something I thought would be worthy. I decided to write about my favorite dancer. There isn't really anything more important than that, ultimately. This is a dancer who has devloped over time and made his mark for a number of years. In a fast-food culture which erases as fast as it rewards, a dancer that can deepen and ripen over decades is a rare thing. I have a lot of favorite dancers. I began loving Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly (in that order)and Debbie Reynolds (of course), Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, The Nicholas Brothers, John Bubbles, Gregory Hines, Paul Draper, Donald O'Connor and Ann Miller (in no particular order). I love the great English dramatic classicists from the sixties and seventies--Lynn Seymour, Antony Dowell, David Wall, Antoinette Sibley, Monica Mason, Christopher Gable and their predecessors Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Michael Somes, Moira Shearer and Svetlana Beriosova. I loved the modern dancers I saw onstage when I first came to New York in eighties--Rob Besserer, Tere O'Connor (yes, as a dancer with Rosalind Newman and in his own work of the time), Ruth Davidson, Penny Hutchinson, Kate Johnson, Ken Tosti, Robert Kovich, Erin Thompson, Shelley Washington, Tom Rawe, Jennifer Way, Richard Colton, Amy Spencer, Alan Good, Christopher Batenhorst, Sara Rudner and on and on. But my absolute favorite dancer is Jeffrey Kazin. This works out especially well for me since he dances in my company and has been my muse for over 16 years. Like other great dancers he melds paradoxes: luxuriant and urgent, innocent and erotic, formal and intimate, commanding and vulnerable, raw and impeccable, freewheeling and scrupulous. He provokes a similarly inexplicable cocktail of emotions in audiences. His formidable technique is never held close or precious but can be shorn of all polish in a blink's time. He has a tail-wagging enthusiasm for performance but can be as imperturbable as a prey-stalking lynx. He is funny but never with apparent concern for a laugh or a joke. He is an artist. The Greenwich-mean could be set by his sense of rhythm. He will be performing tomorrow night, September 6, at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City (www.dtw.org)in one of his best roles, a piece called Hind Legs which premiered in 1995. There's nothing like it. Be there if you can.
September 5, 2006

There are 4 comments for this entry.