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The Tutu’s Tale: A Cultural History Of Ballet’s ‘Angels’
Ms. HOMANS: One of the great ballerinas once told me: When you start to have a dialogue in your head when you’re performing, that’s when you know it’s going wrong. In a way, you want to get rid of those words and sort of enter a kind of different way of existing for the time that you’re on stage. So instead of thinking about…
GROSS: A way of thinking about your music and movement?
Ms. HOMANS: That’s right. You know, so instead of thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner that night, which you could do because dancers know their steps so well, and they are so second nature that your mind can wander. But, you know, to sort of shift into another dimension, as it were, so that you’re not thinking about that, but you’re in a kind of close synchrony with music.
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GROSS: If there was an authoritarian side to Balanchine’s company it sounds like there was also a very spiritual side. He was Russian Orthodox and you say that partly because of his faith, he believed that music and dance were sacred arts and that one finds God through the senses. Did you experience that when you were dancing?
Ms. HOMANS: Oh, very much so. I mean that was the - that was the reason to dance, and that’s the main thing that one experienced on a sort of daily basis. You know, there is something almost religious about ballet and about being a dancer. It’s a commitment, the ritual of going to class everyday, of being with people and performing these great works. And when you work very hard and you achieve a kind of coordination and skill in the body, there is a way in which it sets you free. And, you know, if you’re doing these beautiful movements to music and you manage to get it all right, which doesn’t happen all the time, but when you do, it is an extraordinary and transcendent experience.
GROSS: And you say that Balanchine had this uncompromising emphasis on now, not holding back, doing it all, giving your all now. What did that mean for you as a dancer?
Ms. HOMANS: You know, as a dancer it was really a kind of concentration. It’s much harder than it sounds to focus your energy now and not be thinking about what I’m going to do in five minutes or in five hours or what happened before and was it OK or, you know, so-and-so made me angry or wasn’t that a nice thing for them to say, to just put everything aside, focus on this movement here, now and really sort of throw your full self into it, in a way that’s not just throwing but intelligent, is quite a discipline. So, you know, there was that side of it.
Jennifer Homans on Fresh Air interviewed by Terry Gross
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I praise the dance, for it frees people
from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person,
one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life,
who is not obsessed by lust for people and things
and the demon of isolation in his own ego.
Dancing demands a freed person,
one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.
I praise the dance.
O man, learn to dance,
or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.
- Saint Augustine
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Super Christ Me. Every Sunday, TV congregations numbering tens of millions tune in to salvation sermons broadcast from mega-churches filled with thousands upon thousands of followers. Sure, televangelism is shallow, manipulative, money-driven. But isn’t everything in pop culture (think Top 40 music, fast food, reality TV) just vacuous drivel designed for material gain? Maybe McJesus televangelism is just as valid a religion as any. But the real question is, can millions of couch-bound American souls survive on it alone? Who are we to point the finger at someone’s spiritual diet and say it’s time for some ecclesiastic exercise? Is televangelism an acceptable method of ministry to the masses?
Todd Steinberg for SoulPancake
His vernacular made me laugh.
Link
Morphoses at Vineyard Arts Project →
Produced by Julie Bloom
“I’m Andrew Crawford. I’m from Sydney Australia. I was picked up by Morphoses..uh.. when they went to Sydney earlier this year for the Sydney Festival…I was drawn to it. I mean I was born into it anyway because um, my mother used it as cheap child minding. Of course my oldest sister naturally wanted to be a ballerina but um I grew up moving. The freedom of it…it’s um.. it is such a kind of personal thing, it is, in a sense, a meditation, you know, which I think a lot of people strive for these days. They want to have that personal time. They want to find this meditation; they want to find this stillness or this, this intimacy with themselves and their own life experience and it’s something that you get immediately when you, when you dance—-especially when you can and there’s beautiful music and you’re involved with the music. There’s such a focus about that..um..the challenge of classical ballet is so extreme and never ending. I think with a lot of disciplines it’s very much like that. It can never be turned out enough, it can never be long enough, it can never be on or off balance enough. Nothing can ever be quite there so you’ve always got further to go.” Andrew Crawford
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MB: What’s going through your mind when you’re dancing?
MJ: I’m not thinking.
Thinking is the biggest mistake a dancer could make.
You have to feel.
You become the base, you become the fanfare, you become the clarinet, the flute, and the strings and the drums…
MB: So you’re almost the physical embodiment of the music.
MJ: Yeah…absolutely.
