Haglund's Heel

NYC Arts on Whipped Cream

Well, this is fantastic – one of the best TV short pieces that we've ever seen about ABT. Mark our word, there is going to be pandemonium at the matinees when the parade of the final act begins. The actual ABT part of this episode begins at about 2'30".

 

Here are Haglund's reviews of the world premiere and the second performance last March at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa. You don't want to miss this; take every kid who you know to it.

 

observations 5/11

The irresistible Whipped Cream T-shirts with Mark Ryden designs are ready and waiting for you in the Met Opera Shop – pink version, black version. At $30 each, they are no more expensive than those offered at the premiere performances of ABT's new ballet in Costa Mesa. There is also a very cool collection of postcards with Ryden's artwork and a couple of different books. We did not observe any child sizes of the T-shirts or any of the nifty W.C. sticker sets that were available at the Segerstrom Center. Lost opportunity seems to be an ABT specialty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Speaking of pink – She's back!! Our little pink renegade azalea made it safely through the winter to bloom among the Rubies again!

Here she is in Damrosch Park kicking up her heels today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The truth is hard to find. © The New York Times

Oh, yes it is, especially when The New York Times critic has a personal financial interest in the subject of her article.

The truth is hard/the truth is hard to know/the truth is more important than ever. © The New York Times

Independent journalism. More essential than ever. © The New York Times

Pardon our incredulous smile and slight snicker, but what about the latest factless piece of garbage by NYT critic, Gia Kourlas, who is writing a book about Misty Copeland (the pillar example of whining your way to success and paying to play) among several other more respected and more professional ballerinas of color who Kourlas intends to include in her book? She was granted a multi-thousand dollar fellowship by Jennifer Homan's Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU to perform the research for the book entitled Finding the Black Swan. It is being promoted as historically grounded, and will also be a promotional effort for her own solutions on how ballet can be re-invented and invigorated through diversity. We're all dying for it to be released. It should be an entertaining read given how she obscures truth when it will help move her writing along.

The point is that Kourlas' latest article in the NYT has no point other than to promote Misty Copeland, to keep the Misty breezes blowing as hard as possible, to delay that inevitable Misty-fatigue that is upon the world. If the Misty breezes stop blowing, then who will want to buy Kourlas' new book?

So, in the NYT, Kourlas has begun the careful manipulative transformation of Misty from the (fake) victim of white ballet to Misty the martyr for ballet. “Even just approaching the fouettés,” she says caused her to sustain a pop in her neck and a warm feeling run down her back, which in turn required her to cancel her second performance in Washington DC during the Swan Lake run in January.  Misty cannot even "think" about them without incurring injury. She might not be real ballerina material, but she certainly is real diva material - no one will argue about that.

But where was the question about whether the pressure on Misty in Washington increased exponentially because soloist Devon Teuscher knocked out ALL of the tricks flawlessly (per the Washington Post) in her debut the night before Copeland's own performance which the critic characterized as weak and struggling and went on to clarify that her problems were ongoing from years earlier?

Devon was the long-legged, cool blond in 2011 who Copeland publicly trashed on stage at bows during a Nutcracker performance at BAM following Copeland's fall on her ass during an exit. The two were among the Nutcracker Sisters. Big mouth flapping wide open, fat tongue wagging, in front of thousands of people, she trashed Devon to whom she apparently ascribed some responsibility for her fall -- all of this while Daniil Simkin and Maria Riccetto were trying to take their principal bows after an absolutely magical performance. If anyone wants to go to the videotape, the exact date was December 23, 2011. The only thought that came to mind at the time, other than astonishment at Copeland's unprofessionalism and arrogance, was that someday this would all come back to bite her in the ass because she would never be even half the dancer that Devon would become. Perhaps in Washington on the night of her pop in the neck and warm feeling down her back, Copeland was physically suffering from humiliation and embarrassment that she deserved. Gia wouldn't touch that, though. Nope, she's not going to poke at Misty and risk sales of her new book. Nor apparently, is she going to write anything about Misty that won't serve eventually to promote her new book.

"Misty Copeland, a ballerina with real acting chops" Really?! Has any critic ever lauded her for her acting? True, her acting might be better than her actual dancing technique, but that isn't saying a lot.

Kevin McKenzie is quoted, “[S]he’s taking the mantle of the classics on.” Uh, not exactly Kevvie. The classics are being handed to her on a silver platter even though she cannot dance them at a high professional level while there are many, many others in the company who can and could dance them very well. So instead of seeing Veronika Part, Skylar Brandt, Cassandra Trenary, or Devon Teuscher actually bang out Kitri with pop, pizzazz AND ALL THE STEPS, McKenzie is wasting not one, but TWO Don Q performances on Misty because of her race. Ditto with Swan Lake and Giselle. Race is Misty's ace, and she's got an endless supply of them tucked up her sleeve.

How interesting that Copeland didn't mention her upcoming scheduled performances in Whipped Cream, the choreography for which is also far beyond her capabilities. She withdrew from the first performances of it in March in Costa Mesa, again citing an injury, but continued rehearsing Giselle while in California and shortly thereafter performed it in Oman. Injury? Maybe to the ego, again.

But Gia has the solution for brushing away all these lapses in technique and form. She'll make Misty a martyr for ballet. All those near career-ending injuries, the plates and screws in her leg -- it just hurts so badly to even try to do those fouettes that Misty has never been able to do in her life but should be able to do to the left as well as to the right. What about a reporter's basic question about why she's never been able to do them? That question was nowhere in sight for this article and never will be by any reporter who has a personal financial interest in keeping the Misty breezes blowing.

Says the most over-ballyhooed ballerina ever: “You feel the age and the injuries, and you realize the importance of character,” she said in a recent interview. “I used to muscle through these things. I can’t do that anymore. There needs to be something more, something else.” Help us understand this. She used to muscle through what things? The fouettes, the hops on pointe, the gazillion revolution pirouettes (two revolutions represents Misty's gazillion), all that fast batterie? Our little ballerina should up her dosage of psychopharmaceuticals if she is remembering herself as a technical tour de force back in the day.

Perhaps most laughable is Kourlas' attempt to show how hard Copeland is working on her "acting" with her coach – the same acting coach used by Kevin McKenzie, Susan Jaffe, and Isabella Boylston. Now there are three stellar examples on which to rest a career as an acting coach. It is doubtful that Gia Kourlas ever saw performances by either McKenzie or Jaffe where their acting was particularly worthwhile – unless she wants to credit McKenzie's nonchalance about his drooping sweatpants incident as "acting" or Jaffe dramatically throwing her face to the ceiling every time she ran across the stage during the last several years of her declining technique as "acting".

The truth is hard to find – in The New York Times – when the critic has a financial incentive to obscure it.

 

NYCB Spring Gala 5/4Random sketches to nowhere

Alexei Ratmansky’s newest work for New York City Ballet, Odessa, which premiered at the company’s spring gala last night, is set to Leonid Desyatnikov’s Sketches to Sunset. The music was composed 25 years ago but never released as a recording until last month when Quartz Music put it on an album with Russian Seasons. It is nine separate segments not particularly connected except perhaps by a haunting quality. A Jewish Lambada, Absolom’s Death, and Lot’s Daughters are the composer’s titles for segments along with Take Five and Seven which will drive you crazy if you actually try to count out the fives and sevens. But if the composer’s titles and Biblical references were meant to have anything to do with the choreography, it was lost. 

 

Of course, we all remember those good ole days in Odessa, Ukraine when we would sneak out in the middle of the darkest nights to test our tango and lambada that were prohibited under strict Halacha. We'd encounter gangs and criminals who would exploit us and we'd barely escape. The next day we would return to the mundane life of center barre work of classical ballet class (that was sooo stifling and sooo terribly cruel to our young Soviet-controlled imaginations) to obediently observe the Halacha-like rules. Oh, excuse me, you don’t remember? Well then, there is nothing in this ballet for you except random phrases of choreography that will test your patience. Here again, here now, the choreographer has tried to be “relevant” to someone somewhere at the expense of craft and art. Here is a mix of music with some steps and a hint of story, he says. The audience is supposed to make up a text and then applaud the choreography. The gala audience last night which was clearly unaware was also clearly unimpressed. Probably every dancer that was not on stage last night was collected in the orchestra section of the audience to hoot and cheer. If they were made to open up their own wallets to buy tickets, it is doubtful that there would be much cheering.

 

Keso Dekker’s dark costumes against Mark Stanley’s minimal lighting insured that we understood that these people were out in the dead of night doing things that they should not have been doing. (Has anyone seen Ratmansky’s Symphony No. 9 - also costumed by Dekker?) If the idea was that the audience was NOT supposed to see the dancers very well, then ✔️. 

 

The sections of the music were each around two to three minutes long, along the lines of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, but the choreography was more like brief attention spans strung together with weak thread. We saw three minutes of vibrant tango-inspired movement from the corps; we saw a couple of minutes of dramatic interpretative dance from Sara Mearns; there were spurts of action from Joaquin De Luz, Taylor Stanley, and Amar Ramasar that recalled both Pictures at an Exhibition, Concerto DSCH, and other ballets that Ratmansky has created. Sterling Hyltin slapped someone for being too fresh and perhaps more. Tiler Peck did what every choreographer now has her do. And it all ended with the company standing around doing tendues, degages, and ronde jambe en l’air while promenading on the supporting leg. And hating it, because, you know, we all hate what classical ballet has done to ballet. What better way is there to represent unhappiness in a stifled life than daily ballet exercises?

 

Also on the evening’s program was Peter Martins’ Jeu de Cartes, one of his worst ballets, which was created in 1992 during a period when he was determined to become jazzy. The program notes claim that Balanchine suggested to Martins that he choreograph an abstract ballet to Stravinsky's music. Balanchine, himself, had once used the music, but his ballet did not survive. So Martins waited until Balanchine was dead to create his homage to jazzy ballet. Left arm/left shoulder up, right arm/right shoulder down, left arm/left shoulder down, right arm/right shoulder up, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat ad nauseam. Add cutesy ad nauseam. It went on and on and on and on. Not even a sparkling Megan Fairchild nor intense Harrison Ball & Joseph Gordon nor bubbly Aaron Sanz could save this ballet. Martins must have taken this opportunity to “help” Sanz with his pirouettes. Last night they looked as frightful and on the verge of disaster as Ask la Cour’s generally do. 

 

After the Rain has had its day. It is now an honorary piece for a ballerina and not much more. Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour performed Wheeldon’s signature piece for Wendy Whelan as well as anyone has. Here now is the best example of Wheeldon’s choreographic philosophy If less is more, then nothing must be the best something of all. Puddles to that.

 

Not even a performance of Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux could save the evening, although the audience gulped it down like water found on a desert. Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette have danced this much better in the past. Last night it looked unfresh and rumply, like they had just pulled it out of a pile of clothes to wear without bothering to iron it. Is that the treatment that Balanchine is getting these days while the company chases after the next new fad in choreography?

 

We don’t intend to waste our money on this program again. 

 

Culture Shed update

The Culture Shed (aka The Shed) that is being constructed as part of the mammoth Hudson Yards development on the West Side of Manhattan is progressing impressively.

Yesterday Haglund was down at Caffè Via Trenta having cappuccino and fluffy cornetti when he struck up a conversation with a couple of steelworkers who wandered in on their coffee break. These know-no-fear Flying Wallenda-like ballerinos in steel-toed boots, who casually waltz along steel beams hundreds of feet up in the air like they're meandering through The High Line park below them, were pretty excited that their project would make its deadline.

According to the steelworkers, our new Culture Shed is going to roll out her conestoga frame onto the pavilion for the first time on May 24th. This maiden voyage, which might be all of a couple of hundred feet, will represent a magnificent example of the city's commitment to making the arts a vibrant part of every neighborhood.  The Shed, in addition to providing a unique performance space, will also house thousands of square feet of gallery space over several floors.

No doubt about it, The Shed will be the place to be when it opens in 2018 as originally announced. Wait a minute! Now The Shed's website says it won't open until 2019. But the steelworkers beamed with pride about their project meeting its deadline! Oh well ....  😞

Haglund will try to be Johnny-on-the-spot on the 24th so that he can get video of The Shed's maiden voyage. Until then, here are some photos:

 

Here is one set of wheels on which The Shed will slowly roll out onto the pavilion: