Very interesting news... the Orange County Performing Arts Center will host its own version of Fall for Dance, the festival started at New York's City Center and featuring an array of great dance companies with all tickets priced at $10. Here's the story in the OC Register, a press-release type story on Playbill Arts, and the full schedule at OCPAC's web site. The program looks fantastic, something not to miss.
Other random thoughts from inside my head:
-I need to see Spring Awakening on Broadway! The performance on the Tony Awards broadcast Sunday was vibrant, energetic and spectacularly raw - which made me want to see the show a ton. I also love the CD; the voices, the young energy, the content of the material... it just seems so fresh as a theatrical experience. The rest of the Tony's on Sunday were also fun to watch, mostly because I was familiar with many nominees. Of the best musical nominees, I saw Curtains here in LA last July (apathetic towards it), Mary Poppins in London two years ago (mostly bored during the show). I also saw Legally Blonde, which I thought was a hoot, but which the Tonys evidently did not. David Hyde Pierce's acceptance speech was so sweet!
-American Ballet Theatre's Sleeping Beauty is not getting a good reception at its premiere in New York City. Which makes the upcoming performances in Orange County this July fascinating in a stare-at-a-train-wreck kind of way, but also very disappointing. I love The Sleeping Beauty; it's such a perfect classical ballet in the purest sense. If the choreography is performed straight out, the drama and the beauty comes out naturally - it's inherent in the steps and staging. So I'm terribly disappointed to hear that they've overloaded the production with extra layers "interpretation" and dramaturgy, and an overly complicated libretto. ABT's Nutcracker and Swan Lake are similarly overthought. Sigh. At least there will be performances from great dancers to see. Gillian Murphy and Paloma Herrera have been particularly well reviewed as Aurora.
-I'm not sure if I'm ever going to get around to writing reviews of all the stuff I saw during the last few weeks. Tech on my friggin' show consumed all my time and energy. Now that we've finally opened, I'm breathing a sigh of relief and hoping to get my life back. Sure, the experience was a lot of fun. But really: working a day job all day (in a theater no less), and then running to another theater to work all night just isn't feasible. Exhaustion wins out, and even a huge amount of passion for the theat-ah will only get me so far.
4 comments:
That is so cool that Orange County is having a Fall For Dance Festival! Here it's amazing beyond words -- something I look forward to every year!
I saw Spring Awakening and thought it was good but nothing really great. I feel like the excerpt you saw on TV was basically the entire show -- it's the same throughout -- same music, same choreography ... no real movement. But of course if I saw it again, it may well grow on me...
Apollinaire liked Sleeping Beauty, or at least she sees potential in it once ABT fleshes it out some, she says. I thought it was fine, just didn't take my breath away. I'll be interested to hear what you think of it, and Othello.
First the Merce Cunningham event at OCPAC, then Shen Wei at WDCH this weekend, and now Fall for Dance. Is dance actually becoming hip in Southern California?
It's been a while since we've had so many exciting events that are reaching out to the community and bringing in people who aren't in the traditional dance audience.
Sorry, I have to say one more (long-winded) thing. I've been following the ABT-revised Sleeping Beauty drama since its premiere, and it does bring up an interesting point that hits pretty close to home. That is, how should one balance popular appeal vs. purity of the art? Certainly for things like technique, there's really no choice but purity, but what about choreography and dramaturgy?
One of our recent shows leaned towards the popular appeal side, and the board meetings following those shows were pretty lively. It started out with a board member making relatively negative remarks about the show to a reviewer and being quoted (anonymously) in the review!
Then it moved to the board room where there was a long debate over this issue. One side argued that the show didn't befit a classical dance company, while the other argued that it was by far our most popular and cheapest-to-produce show yet. It also brought in lots of people who may never have seen the company.
I think there will always be an uneasy balance between the two sides, especially in the current non-profit funding conditions of the market. We don't know the right answer, but certainly reactions like this have heightened our sensitivity to these issues.
Re: Popular appeal vs. purity of the art - I don't think the issue over Sleeping Beauty is as much about purity of the art as it is about what sounds like a misguided overinterpretation. What is the point of adding complicated story elements to the libretto, like having Aurora's parents getting banished from the kingdom and her mother weeping a river of tears for the prince to come discover? Wasn't it enough the way it was? This seems to indicate that he doesn't trust the original classic in the first place. I don't mind a revision or update - I actually rather like what Peter Wright did to amp up the drama of his "Giselle" for the Royal Ballet - but this seems to have gone way overboard. Of course, I say that without having yet seen the new ABT production, so perhaps having prepared for the worse I will end up actually liking the thing. Who knows?
And re: dance being hip in Southern California - I was watching "So You Think You Can Dance?" on television last night and realized that it's actually filmed in Los Angeles (and noticing that ABTer Danny Tidwell is on it too!). So it's not that dance isn't hip out here, it's just not in the places that we'd expect it to be from a New York perspective. I loved the energy of those dancers, and missed that entirely with our too-hip-for-music Merce event in the OC!
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