And Elsewhere in the Dance World...

...You know that star burst thick glass makes when it's struck? I'm pretty sure that's what the Western dance world would look like as a cultural window. Here we have this clear, pristine thing that teaches royalty and wannabes how to do Pavans and Galliards and get the man or get the woman and make the right marriage and keep the act going. Here we have it on show for the kings' pals. Frontal presentation has obvious appeal (look at me! look at me!) so here we have ballet. Here we have Ballanchine bringing ballet to its effervescent extreme (goodbye, cheeseburgers) after his buddies at the Ballet Russes found new ways to jazz up (what an awful metaphor for this context!) the old material, and here--watch closely--we have Vaudeville- and theater- and academically-trained Moderns making that unhappy sound a Mac computer makes when you click somewhere you shouldn't as they run, repeatedly, into this thick glass window that's been built up around an old and now considerably dated form of courtship boogie.

Listen to the satisfying crunch of the window as, after fifty plus years of Moderns' pushing it, Merce Cunningham finally punches it.

That being said, ol' Merce didn't shatter all of dance entirely. The heteronormative frontal performative virtuosic music-obeying smiling presenting dances of dance are alive and well and

(big development)

I like it. I mean, apparently all kinds of viewership like it, since I can't imagine anyone watches So You Think You Can Dance for the inter-dancer drama. But after a BA in the history of that star burst, I think I'd forgotten the virtues of what an old prof might call Miss Trixie's School of Ballet and Tap. This week I saw Carnival: The Choreographers' Ball and Up On The Roof, where--yep, on a roof--the high-kicking kids with huge smiles and often breathtaking dance technique inaugurated the Debbie Allen Dance Academy move to Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza between those two neighborhoods. Miss Trixie must have done something right. These kids are confident, disciplined, happy as very agile clams, and on their way to being the confident, disciplined, happy adults I saw at Carnival. I'm not knockin' the moderns who put more into stage composition and the intellectual question of why dance. I can't. They're brilliant. But brilliant, too, is a program with over 80% of the students on scholarship and 100% of the managerial staff doubtlessly worked to the bone and everyone pleased as punch to be showing or shown a double axle in a number set to seven of the most recent top forty in whatever genre it is that includes the Black Eyed Peas and "If You Seek Amy".

I'd bring back the window metaphor if I could, but it's early and I'm tired and it's off to another day of adventures in sunny CA. Time to test out these pesky lower abdominals and see if I can at least start jamming out in the kitchen again without pain...


LADB