Notes on Watching Dance on Video

Galina Ulanova in Swan Lake

Some critics have described dance as the most ephemeral of the arts. It exists only at the moment of performance, and unlike even another performing art such as music, which can be recorded and give one a good idea of the performance, if not the performer-audience pact, recordings of dance can be, at best, decent and at worst, wholly misleading. But recordings are the primary (sometimes the only) way that most people are exposed to great dance, especially for those that don’t love in a city large or diverse enough to maintain a dance troupe, be it Western classical or Indian or Irish step. So we are stuck with video.

First note about video: dance, a three-dimensional art, is flattened into two dimensions. Thus, movements toward upstage and downstage are not really seen with the same impact as side to side and up and down (in both Western and Indian classical dance, the stance of the hips and feet are designed for maximal movement in the major eight 8 directions from the body). In addition to the lack of correct spatial orientation and correct viewing of the angles, it deprives us of one of the most important aspects of all dance – breath. All forms of dance that have a school of steps have an attitude, for lack of a better word, about breathing – how to deal with the necessity of it, how it should be done, how it should determine the other movements of the body and be coordinated…. But on video, dancers usually don’t look like they’re concealing inhalation and exhalation - they simply look like they don’t breathe at all. Whether we recognize it or not, this changes the meaning of the dance for the viewer of what is being seen. Instead of seeing the human body, we feel that we are seeing some robotic form that appears human. We relate to the image and what that image is doing differently. As one critic put it, all dancers look disembodied on video.

In video, there is up and there is down. But there is not ground or air. A Western classical dancer rising up onto a single pointe does not look like she is defying gravity, using strength and balance to hold a pose – she just looks like she’s doing something that would be painful – all her weight on that one spot! An Indian classical dancer sliding a flat foot along the ground and then bending the working leg behind her high into the air just looks like she’s showing off her flexibility. Since we are not experiencing the effect of gravity alongside the dancer overcoming its effect, movements that utilize ground and air (and all dance does) look merely like technical feats.

And then there’s the problem of camera work. I don’t need to point out that the camera views images in a different way than the eye sees, and differences on the technical side of recording can really impact one’s enjoyment of performances from, say, nearly a century ago. At another level, individual shots/dances look better than group shots, and if there are a lot of dancers about, when they move around on stage for a long time during a wide shot they just look like ants. (It always amazes me how powerfully meaningful the dance for a large corps de ballet can look on stage, and how awful it typically looks on video.

In summary, dance that favors straight lines, crisp movement, and lots of quantitatively measurable elements looks great on video when compared to dance that doesn’t feature these elements. (It is also favors thin-bodied dancers – they make for clearer lines.) The classical ballet roles look fantastic on video compared to some works of contemporary choreographers. (A William Forsythe piece stands out as being particularly bad – with two dancers low to the floor/ground, involving lots of unorthodox turns and spins with the torso bent, it was nearly unwatchable. It may be unwatchable on stage too, but it’s really impossible to judge.)

Am I suggesting that all video of dance should just be burned because it is a substitute so inferior it shouldn’t be used, or as Suzanne Farrell once commented, viewing dance on video is like watching ghosts? Considering that Farrell is my favorite dancer and she retired from performance a full decade before I even became interested in dance, of course not. For me, the great dancers still look like the great dancers even without being able to see their spontaneity, although those with less than ideal bodies can’t be fairly judged – ballerina Lynn Seymour is a great example. Dances are recognizable, if deprived of some of their impact and meaning. I have seen recorded performances that were better than live performances. The recorded performance below, of Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev in 1940, is the greatest performance of the Act II Swan Lake adagio I’ve yet seen - one can watch it on youtube, even though it is danced as a recital piece in front of a curtain, and thus robbed of its context.

So what I would suggest to people watching recorded dance performances is to be open-minded about what they are seeking. Recognize and remind yourself of the limitations and insufficiency of the medium for capturing dance, and try to re-create in your mind a proper stage space and orient to the movement. Even breathe in and out with the rhythm of the music, to have some feel of the motions that the dancers are doing. This should never replace attending live performances, but at times, it is the best we can do.

Alien Music

Spacescaping: (according to Terry Riley) combining the sounds of plasma waves in space with a string quartet and chorus

On stage are small metal rods of varying heights; these rods have lights along their axes and at each tip that illuminate to a blue-white glow. The backdrop is a screen that fades from dark blue at the top to light blue at the bottom. A man carrying a violin walks on stage, sits down, and waves his bow over his music stand. A point of bright green light appears, and we hear a large bellowing sound, like a deep voice in a huge underground cavern, that fades away gently to a whisper. A few seconds pass, and the man repeats the sweep of his arm. This time the sound is an electronic twitter that ends abruptly. A man holding a cello walks onto the stage, settles down, and waves his hand behind him over a rod. Again, a point of green light. The sound is an unearthly mid-range chirping. Eventually, as these two men continue their arm sweeps, a violist and another violinist join them on stage, and all four men take part in these motions and each time they do sounds are heard. Eventually, the first man on stage brings bow to string, and the familiar sounds of a violin began, as the screen shifts from blue to a display of different geometric shapes. For those who don’t know, they are close-up pictures of the “how to play” instructions on the gold record sent on the Voyager space craft in 1977 that contains sounds from Earth – to those out there, this is how we sound.

Thus begins Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, a ten-part work performed by the Kronos Quartet and the Stanford Chamber Chorale at Stanford on January 18. The work was commissioned in 2002 for the Kronos Quartet by the NASA Art Program, among others. The work is a multimedia presentation – visual design by Willie Williams, lighting design by Laurence Neff, and sound design by mark Grey – that utilizes sounds of plasma waves from outer space, string instruments, human voices, and pictures of stars, swirling orbs, mathematical equations, the solar prominences, and life here on Earth.

The sounds from space are from the collection of physicist Don Gurnett, a builder of plasma-wave receivers sent on interplanetary spacecraft. Plasma, ionized gas, can propagate waves caused by the movement of a series of electrically charged particles and the response of those particles to electromagnetic fields. The waves that a plasma can support can reveal a great deal of the characteristics of that plasma. The waves themselves are detectable with an electrical antenna and a radio receiver. Thus, we know that lightening and the Northern lights make whistling sounds, electrons trapped in magnetic fields (such as those surrounding most of the planets) make bird-like sounds called chorus, and the place near Jupiter where the solar wind (high velocity plasma) meets Jupiter’s magnetic field sounds like a sonic boom.

The work uses those sounds, looped rhythmically or played in response to a hand movement from the musicians. The musicians sometimes duplicate those sounds, at other times the sounds are the background for rapid-fire arpeggios. At all times, the sounds from the stage are accompanied by visuals on the screen behind the musicians and by the lights of the rods. At one point, as the musicians begin playing music so lush it could be a Brahms string quartet, the rods light up at their tips and the screen reflects the blackness with twinkling light from the stars - the night sky. This drifting into space dissolves as the violist plays increasingly dissonant sounds, and the screen becomes fiery red, and then fades into orange and yellow as the violins repeatedly play a 6-note lullaby.

At another point in the piece, human voices join in and duplicate the space sounds: in a choral feat, while holding long notes, they manage to sound like chirps and eerie whistles. They sing words that cannot be identified, but as the musicians stop playing and the screen goes black, they begin to flatly speak sentences – a cacophony of the various phrases that we, through radio waves, constantly send out into space.

This work reminded me of the necessity of the experience of live performances – the immediacy of it, the thrill of being part of an audience participating in the event. I don’t think I would have enjoyed this work (indeed, I’m not a big Terry Riley fan) listening to it on cd or watching a clip on youtube. Some things need to be able to pierce you or engulf you (visually and aurally). And it’s partly because of the features of live performance that I cannot recall the last time art left me so optimistic. There’s a certain sunny innocence in our explorations of the other planets and further out into deep space, in our desire to send out little feelers and try to see and hear what’s out there, and wanting whatever it is out there to know what’s back here – the desire to communicate as a basic human yearning.

The final part of the work begins with the well-known image of man and woman on the Pioneer plaque, his hand waved in a friendly gesture. The work ends with the words “One earth…one people” spoken over and over again, as various images from earth show up on the screen. And the final sound is a human voice saying, “one love.”

This record represents our hope and our determination
and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

- Jimmy Carter on the Voyager record

Why I love Jesus

Response to a very old meme from Crimson Catholic, so it gets a very long post

1. Because my mom taught me to. When I was a very young child and my older sister was off at school, my days were spent entirely with my mom, just the two of us. Our schedule began with her coming into my room, singing “Good morning to you!” Then after the usual morning activities (getting dressed, eating breakfast), she’d dab some Holy Water on my fingers so I could make the sign of the Cross and off we were off…to church. My mom attended (she still does) daily Mass, and I’d play with her crystal and blue rosary, or look at the statues, or read my picture books on the Virgin Mary or the saints – my parents allowed us to bring books to Mass, but only if they were about religious figures – and she would do the responses, the kneeling, and so on that I couldn’t follow. I’d have to move from my odd positions sitting on the kneeler, arms across the pew (as young children often get into strange positions when kneelers and pews are available) when she came back from Communion, and then I’d watch her and she’d kneel down, place the first and second fingers of both hands on her temples, cover her face with the rest of her hands, and bow her head. She would go on praying like this for three minutes or so, and I’d wonder what she was thinking or saying. Then her head would lift and she’d gaze at the tabernacle.

After Mass, we’d pray the Stations of the Cross; rather, she would pray them while I would walk back and forth, up and down, from the Resurrection to the Fourth or Seventh Station, repeatedly, because it was taking her so long to crawl on her knees up those stairs, and I liked the blinding effect of the sudden sunlight at the end of the Stations (on the roof) compared to the darkness on the stairs inside the building. After the roof, we went back into the building that looked like a blue cave for a statue of the Virgin.

Then we would go and run the daily errands. In addition, often we would visit a nursing home, where the elderly would pinch my cheeks or tug on my pigtails, and come March, bring me lots of fig and sesame cookies from the St. Joseph’s Altars that were set up in many Catholic nursing homes. I hated the smell of the old people and would ask not to go there, but my mom would say, “You don’t know how happy it makes the people there to see you. Do it for Jesus.” And oh, my mother’s constant refrain to any report of discomfort (after a quick lookover): “Offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory.” As I got older, I realized that we already prayed, every night, for the poor souls in Purgatory, so I asked my mom would I should continue offering up my small sufferings for them – wasn’t praying for them enough? With a look of subdued horror and infinite patience that I think only mothers can perfect, she said to me, “AG, many of the poor souls don’t have anyone to pray for them.” I thought it was so awful, all these people wandering around in Purgatory with no one to shine a little prayer light on them, and I’d nearly start crying and pray for them even more.

As I got older, my mom began spending much of her time with other people’s young children, teaching them their colors and shapes, how to read and how to count. She taught these children in their homes, wrecked by a combination of teenage pregnancy, poverty, substance abuse, and incarceration. She’d also clean the houses, wash laundry, and prepare dinner for older people who were homebound – people she had learned of through Church who didn’t have family nearby, and who everyone else seemed to have no time for – and she would do these things for free, of course. I would sometimes get annoyed when she was away for 5 hours cleaning someone’s house – “How long does it take you to do that?” And she’d reply, in her way, “I can’t just do those things; it’s very important that I stay and chat with them and sit and have a cup of coffee. That’s what matters the most to them.”

My mom taught me other things too – she read the children’s Bible to me, she taught me all my prayers, she pointed to the Virgin and told me that she was my mother too – but it was her example that made its imprint. What does it mean to receive God? It means to bury one’s face in one’s hands and pray intensely, and then extend one’s gaze in contemplation at His earthly dwelling. Why in the world would my mom, who in my estimation has always been as far from a great sinner as night is from day, get in her knees and crawl up stairs while meditating on the Passion? How in the world could my mom clean the house of an ornery elderly woman who was given to making nasty statements about blacks (unware of my mom’s race), and then even come home and make cookies for this woman because she thought the woman would appreciate a homemade treat? What could move her to do that?

2. Because of the examples of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. The twin pillars of light of my early childhood. The images of Mother Teresa holding sickly children and comforting the dying. Why would anyone choose such a life? And oh, John Paul II. I wasn’t moved by him just because I wanted to be pope one day, and he was keeping the chair warm for me. When this Polish guy with a round face and charismatic smile stood amongst a million people, holding a Crucifix and said “I love you! Christ loves YOU!” I could feel it to the tips of my toes. He didn’t even know me, but through Christ, he loved me? How amazing is that! “How much do I love you?” “This much!” with an arm span that can wrap around the whole world. I have no real patience for those who harp on the pastoral decisions of John Paul II during his pontificate, when the man yelled to the world over and over again that life is love, the Cross is love, suffering is love. His cry is the response to our cynical age, so it’s no surprise that cynics can’t hear it. If Mother Teresa was what love looked like in the small spaces of suffering and death – My arms can tenderly hold the least of you - John Paul II was what love looked on the big scale where love is never-ending and keeps giving of itself– My arms can hold all of you.

3. Because of Mother Mary and the saints. Enough said.

4. Because in the above three points, I began to understand what Jesus was all about, to use modern slang. What could lead these people to do the things they did? They showed me that it’s not about them, but about Jesus in them. And they are examples of the most mind-blowing fact of our existence – that Jesus works on the individual level, in each of us; He’s the one who makes it possible for us to give of ourselves, He loves us perfectly and unceasingly, and He gives us everything and can move us to every good thing. And not just me, but everyone.

Nureyev on PBS' Great Performances

This week, PBS stations will be showing a new documentary on legendary ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, including that elusive "never before seen footage." Be sure to check it out!

Morris' "Mozart Dances"

Mark Morris' recent dance to three of Mozart's works for piano can be seen on PBS in the Live from Lincoln Center program, starting tonight (check local listings by scrolling to the bottom).

From Joan Acocella's review in The New Yorker:

Why is he so popular? One reason, I think, is that he gives people the modern pleasure of seeing abstract work without leaving them scratching their heads over what it was about. Though he may not have a story on the surface, he always has one underneath, in the form of movement motifs. For every dance, he devises a certain number of key gestures, which he then weaves through the choreography. Some of these gestures are naturalistic. In “Mozart Dances,” for example, there is one that could be called the “danger” motif: the dancer suddenly turns and looks behind him, as if he had heard a strange sound, and then looks back at us as if to say, “Did you hear that?” But others of Morris’s motifs have no obvious meaning when he first shows them to us. Only in the course of the dance do they come to tell a story.

A Brief Tharp Diversion

Following up on this post: when discussing Tharp’s work with A.V. and why I don’t regard her as highly as Paul Taylor or even Mark Morris, I realized that part of the problem for me is the lack of dance images in her work. She has a mastery of movement - an ability to break movement apart and put it back together so that simple steps are seen in new and clever ways – but lacks that gift for creating/assembling a movement or placing a configuration of bodies in a way, that, no matter how theatrically artificial, feels like something that happens in one’s own (interior) life, as critic Robert Garis liked to describe great dance images. It’s the difference between finding yourself participating in the dance with one’s own body (Tharp’s works do make you feel this), and feeling emotionally and spiritually involved in the work when the emotion isn’t adrenaline-evoked elation but communal experience. She lacks the intuition of an image-maker.

Tied to this is the lack of stillness in her work – not actual motionlessness, but the feeling of breathing, which is in itself real stillness (not-breathing is a void). Sometimes it seems that no matter the dance (and what steps the dancers are actually performing), everyone in a mature Tharp work is jitterbugging like mad in the California sixties - this is where the energy level of her dances often resides. And it’s for that reason that I suspect she is sometimes criticized as being too commercial: not because she does commercial ventures (almost every great choreographer has done “s/lighter” works to sell tickets), but because her works, while sometimes brilliant, are not transcendent. As a result, her ingenuity in movement comes across as a clever gag – slickness. And I can think of no other choreographer who would have written a book titled, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. The polar opposite of Balanchine’s “one can’t talk about such things.”

Now back to Balanchine, NYCB, and my favorite dancer, Suzanne Farrell…

NYCB Style - Part II: The Farrell Influence, by Croce

Suzanne Farrell in the sixties

“Balanchine's Girls: The Making of Style” April 1971, Croce.

[Farrell] was big and strong and handsome, but without much personal force. In her tiny leotard, she looked very like a big bee, but more like a woman-sized baby. With that almost perverse precocity that was then characteristic of the younger generation, she could do anything Balanchine asked of her, and do it on a grander scale, at greater speed, and with a silkier recovery and sense of control than anyone else. And then we began to see that Farrell had a line that was positively voluptuous. Farrell, her stage personality as yet undeveloped, moved at once into a lead position. Our style was thin no more.

In any decently written history of the NYCB, the years 1963-9 would consume several chapters. The Farrell Years saw the company remade in a new, younger, and more romantic image. For Farrell personally they began in glory and ended in confusion and estrangement. Because of her importance to Balanchine – she was probably the most important dancer who ever entered his life – her rise to prima status was spectacular and sudden, perhaps too sudden. When her break with Balanchine came in the middle of the 1969 season, her repertory totaled 32 roles. She was everywhere and nowhere. Her beauty fascinated more people than were repelled by her flamboyance. She transformed the company, freed Balanchine from the excessive braininess of “modernism” and departed, like Dulcinea, who in the ballet is apotheosized, the Queen of Heaven. Her place in the history of the company is sacrosanct.

Peter Martins and Farrell in Diamonds, photo by Paul Kolnik

“Farrell and Farrellism” February 1975, Croce.

It isn’t that Farrell is so terribly big; it’s that she dances big in relation to her base of support. The lightness of the instep, the speed of her dégagé are still thrilling. You’d think a dancer moving that fast couldn’t possibly consume so much space – that she’d have to be more squarely planted. Farrell defies the logic of mechanics, and in that defiance is the essence of the new heroism she brought to Balanchine’s stage a little over a decade ago.

Farrell and Balanchine 'shopping' for jewelry, mid-70s

“Free and More Than Equal” February 1975, Croce.

Farrell’s independent drive no longer seems unacceptable burdensome to her, and her mastery implies no rebuke. And what mastery it is – of continual off-center balances maintained with light support or no support at all, of divergently shaped steps unthinkable combined in the same phrase, of invisible transitions between steps and delicate shifts of weight in poses that reveal new and sweet harmonies or proportion no matter how wide or subtle the contrast. Your eye gorges on her variety, your heart stops at the brink of very precipice. She, however, sails calmly out into space and returns as if the dancer did not exist. Farrell’s style in Diamonds (and the third act of Don Quixote) is based on risk; she is almost always off balance and always secure. Her confidence in moments of great risk gives her the leeway to suggest what no ballerina has suggested before her – that she can sustain herself, that she can go it alone. Farrell perfects the act of balance/imbalance as a constant feature of dancing. It is not equilibrium as stasis, it is equilibrium as continuity that she excels in. Although she can take a piqué arabesque and stand unaided, she’s capable of much more; her conquests are really up there where the richer hazards are. In the finale, her partner is only there to stop her. She slips like a fish through his hands. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t wait, doesn’t depend, and she can’t fall. She’s like someone who has learned to breathe thin air. Of course, the autonomy of the ballerina is an illusion, but Farrell’s is the extremest form of this illusion we have yet seen, and it makes Diamonds a riveting spectacle about the freest woman alive.