strange, dear, but true, dear
Sunday, 25 October 2009 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtBeing a fundamentally uncoordinated and knobbly-kneed child, I was sent off to ballet lessons when I was about six. I was never much good at it, but kept up classes more or less erratically until my first couple of years of high school, stopping just before I went en pointe. Then I took up ballroom dancing, which I did off and on, again without notable success but with enormous enjoyment, until the end of my undergraduate years; I stopped because my regular dancing partner, who was very good, gave up and I really didn't enjoy dancing with a random selection of more or less wet fish thereafter. (A weak hold is a horrible feeling, all loose and floppy, no support or direction, and makes me think irresistibly of dead fish. And tempts me to try and lead, which is fatal. The dance floor is absolutely the only space in which a solid imitation of male chauvenism is not only permissible, but actually essential.)
All this means that, quite apart from the Fred Astaire fixation, I watch dance productions with a sort of semi-educated eye, employed most recently when we went to see Swing Time at the Baxter last week. This is a celebration of swing and Big Band rhythms and styles by a small company, no more than twenty dancers, and its not-quite-professional status shows in occasional unevenness and slightly out-of-sync movements. But it generally makes up for the odd ragged line in its energy, and in the sense I kept having that most of the dancers are having a hell of a lot of fun. The music was lovely, coherent in style if a bit all over the place in time period, ("Mack the Knife", "Mr. Bojangles", "Putting on the Ritz", "So in Love", "Fever", just to give you a sense of the range) with some of the numbers sung live, with proficiency and charm. The dancers, however, are classically trained and it was extremely odd to see the Charleston done en pointe, the jazzy rhythms and movements somehow only working from the waist up, while the legs take the classical lines.
I love swing, and in fact almost any kind of non-classical ballroom-style dance; over the years I've become less and less tolerant of what to me feels like the extremely unnatural and stilted purity of classical ballet. The dance company made me happy because it was equal male and female, without that ridicuous girl-heavy weighting of the classical ballet, and because the classical steps were leavened by the 1930s dance styles. On the whole, though, the production made me realise how little time I actually have for ballet: I was niggled throughout by a sneaking desire for the dancers to get off their bloody pointes, stop with the classical posing already and actually dance for a bit. It made me realise how comparatively static classical ballet is, particularly in a pas de deux: steps are only intermediate to the whole series of flowing, graceful poses, mostly with the female in the air. It was a bit jolting, to watch vivacious jazz-style steps suddenly flow into an attitude and stop for a moment - felt all wrong. There's also none of the lovely mutuality of mirrored movement you see in a Fred and Ginger number, it's all momentary solos showing off the individual dancer, with the partner support and backdrop. I thought the production was most successful when it was doing justice to the music with snappy, lively chorus-line numbers; the second half, which stepped up the classical pas de deux quotient to the detriment of pseudo-Charleston, seemed much weaker.
All in all, I think I may avoid future balletic excursions in favour of my Fred Astaire collection at home. Swing Time wins serious style points, though, on several counts. It offered a nicely subversive little male-on-male pas de deux number, which faithfully reproduces the artificiality of the convention while giving it rather a lot more playful punch, and which I can only assume was a nod to the gay club scene of the 1930s. The women's costumes were seriously drool-worthy and beautifully made, with a clever adaptation of 30s styles to movement demands of ballet. And the programme was an imitation vinyl record in a sleeve, complete with period artwork and the injunction "MUST BE PLAYED WITH A PICK-UP DESIGNED FOR LONG PLAYING RECORDS." Nostalgia, after all, is in the details.
All this means that, quite apart from the Fred Astaire fixation, I watch dance productions with a sort of semi-educated eye, employed most recently when we went to see Swing Time at the Baxter last week. This is a celebration of swing and Big Band rhythms and styles by a small company, no more than twenty dancers, and its not-quite-professional status shows in occasional unevenness and slightly out-of-sync movements. But it generally makes up for the odd ragged line in its energy, and in the sense I kept having that most of the dancers are having a hell of a lot of fun. The music was lovely, coherent in style if a bit all over the place in time period, ("Mack the Knife", "Mr. Bojangles", "Putting on the Ritz", "So in Love", "Fever", just to give you a sense of the range) with some of the numbers sung live, with proficiency and charm. The dancers, however, are classically trained and it was extremely odd to see the Charleston done en pointe, the jazzy rhythms and movements somehow only working from the waist up, while the legs take the classical lines.
I love swing, and in fact almost any kind of non-classical ballroom-style dance; over the years I've become less and less tolerant of what to me feels like the extremely unnatural and stilted purity of classical ballet. The dance company made me happy because it was equal male and female, without that ridicuous girl-heavy weighting of the classical ballet, and because the classical steps were leavened by the 1930s dance styles. On the whole, though, the production made me realise how little time I actually have for ballet: I was niggled throughout by a sneaking desire for the dancers to get off their bloody pointes, stop with the classical posing already and actually dance for a bit. It made me realise how comparatively static classical ballet is, particularly in a pas de deux: steps are only intermediate to the whole series of flowing, graceful poses, mostly with the female in the air. It was a bit jolting, to watch vivacious jazz-style steps suddenly flow into an attitude and stop for a moment - felt all wrong. There's also none of the lovely mutuality of mirrored movement you see in a Fred and Ginger number, it's all momentary solos showing off the individual dancer, with the partner support and backdrop. I thought the production was most successful when it was doing justice to the music with snappy, lively chorus-line numbers; the second half, which stepped up the classical pas de deux quotient to the detriment of pseudo-Charleston, seemed much weaker.
All in all, I think I may avoid future balletic excursions in favour of my Fred Astaire collection at home. Swing Time wins serious style points, though, on several counts. It offered a nicely subversive little male-on-male pas de deux number, which faithfully reproduces the artificiality of the convention while giving it rather a lot more playful punch, and which I can only assume was a nod to the gay club scene of the 1930s. The women's costumes were seriously drool-worthy and beautifully made, with a clever adaptation of 30s styles to movement demands of ballet. And the programme was an imitation vinyl record in a sleeve, complete with period artwork and the injunction "MUST BE PLAYED WITH A PICK-UP DESIGNED FOR LONG PLAYING RECORDS." Nostalgia, after all, is in the details.
