Sweet civility in the new ballet season (if nowhere else)
Art Scatter’s chief dance and decorum correspondent, Martha Ullman West, takes a look at Oregon Ballet Theatre’s upcoming season and discovers hope for artistic manners in the midst of a meltdown of civil rudeness.
The ballet just might be the last bastion of civility in what used to be a civil society.
Consider the evidence:
- A certain Supreme Court Justice, in attendance at Wednesday night’s State of the Union address, mouthing a contradiction of the President on camera.
- So-called Tea Party activists shouting loudly enough to shatter a bone china cup.
- Drivers, discourteously at best, cutting in ahead of other drivers in traffic.
- Bicyclists — righteously, oh, how righteously — taunting drivers in the same way.
All of this occurred to me last night as I was watching Yuka Iino, a principal dancer at Oregon Ballet Theatre, balancing her way through the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty. The scene of this very tasty preview of the company’s first full-length production of the Tchaikovsky classic was OBT’s studio on the east side of the Willamette River in Portland. The occasion, complete with nibbles and name tags, was the ballet company’s announcement for press and supporters of its 2010-11 season. The Sleeping Beauty will open the season on October 9, accompanied by — oh, joy! — the live orchestra that has been mostly missing since the company’s financial disaster last spring.
The Rose Adagio, for those who have never seen Beauty, takes place at Princess Aurora’s birthday ball in the ballet’s first act, when she dances, briefly, with four suitors, portrayed Thursday night by Lucas Threefoot, Brian Simcoe, Christian Squires and Brennan Boyer, who were dressed in ordinary practice clothes, as was Iino.
She, however, was so thoroughly steeped in the character of the young girl going through this aristocratic rite of passage — infusing her performance with the same shy charm and radiant smile that Margot Fonteyn had in 1949 — that she transported me to a place where decorum counted and manners mattered.
And of course the plot of this ballet is driven by an act of discourtesy by Aurora’s father’s Major Domo, who fails to invite one of the fairies, Carabosse, to the celebration. Carabosse then crashes the party and gives Aurora a spindle to play with, which punctures her finger so that she dies. Only it’s a fairy tale, and the Lilac Fairy mitigates this rudeness by having everyone fall asleep for 100 years instead. Y’all know the rest, I’m sure.
The rest of OBT’s 2010-11 season is more reflective of today’s society, with Trey McIntyre’s Speak, to rap music, on one program. Stowell’s and Anne Mueller’s Rite of Spring will be reprised on an all-Stravinsky program that also includes collaborative works by Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton of BodyVox, Mueller, and Rumpus Room’s Rachel Tess. There’s decorum on that program too, with a revival of Yuri Possokhov’s staging of Firebird.
Stowell’s programming also includes an alternative to The Nutcracker in the form of a holiday revue that will run concurrently with it at the Keller Auditorium. And the season closer reprises Nicolo Fonte’s terrific Left Unsaid and Stowell’s own Eyes on You (like the Rose Adagio, it’s all about balance) — works that are fun, or thoughtful, or serious, that take us out of the present or into the future, or remind us of our better selves.
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Photos, both by Blaine Truitt Covert:
Top: Yuka Iino and Ronnie Underwood, center, in OBT’s 2007 performance of Act 3 from “The Sleeping Beauty.”
Inset: Artur Sultanov and Daniela DeLoe in a 2009 OBT performance of Nicolo Fonte’s “Left Unsaid.”
January 29th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Can no one leave politics out of anything?! This is ballet for Christs sake! You completely ruined what could have been a great article. Clearly a hardcore Liberal!
January 29th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Great suggestion, Bryan. Thanks! Mr. Scatter likes the idea of a ballet for Christ’s sake. He is thinking of the parable of the loaves and fishes, feeding all of those hungry masses. It could give a ballet company a terrific opportunity to use dozens of students from their schools and thus sell large numbers of tickets to the kids’ families. What about it, choreographers? Any takers?
January 29th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Well, Bryan, I’m not a hardcore anything as it happens, though I do lean left, and the Justice, I respectfully submit, violated good manners in if I may say so an unprecedented manner. Meanwhile I hasten to add that there will be live orchestra accompanying A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening on February 27th, and Bob, Auguste Bournonville’s Napoli contains elements of the scenario you propose, including hordes of children from the Royal Danish Ballet School and a friar who gives our hero a medal that enables him to save our heroine from wicked evil undersea something or others.
January 30th, 2010 at 7:10 am
Brian, she was making a point about civility in the world and clearly politics has become a great example in the world of the LACK of civility. This is called good writing.
January 30th, 2010 at 9:08 am
You honor me Mr. Deemer, thank you.
January 31st, 2010 at 10:51 am
Bob, that’s hysterical!
“a ballet for Christ’s sake”…I’m thinking Jesus Christ, Superstar without all that singing.
January 31st, 2010 at 11:01 am
P.S. Invoking the spirits of Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Mae West, P.T. Barnum, George M. Cohan, Will Rogers, and W.C. Fields, I ask that you change your spelling of Mr. Sultanov’s first name to Artur.
Thanks!
January 31st, 2010 at 11:03 am
P.P.S. Tthe blog software turned the link into a simple underline. Nice!
It was coded to point here: http://www.nku.edu/~turney/prclass/readings/3eras1x.html
January 31st, 2010 at 11:21 am
P.P.P.S. As an added incentive (not that you needed one), once you change the caption to that photo, you can delete posts 7, 8, and 9!
January 31st, 2010 at 11:31 am
David, I’ve typed the name “Artur Sultanov” many times, and never before, if I remember right, as “Arturo.” It’s fixed. May I blame the keyboard? I’d kill out comments 7, 8, and 9, except I do like that reference to Mark Twain and the gang. (And, yes, “Jesus Christ Superstar” without the singing might be a good idea!)
February 1st, 2010 at 10:29 am
Except David, we already had a Jesus Christ Superstar ballet without the singing–James Canfield made one, starring himself as JC (their initials match after all) and Patricia Miller I think as Mary Magdalene. They danced on high platforms as I recall. And thanks too for the Arturo/Artur correction, I kept meaning to tell Bob and then I didn’t. I’m sure the keyboard did it incidentally. Mine has the same gremlin.
February 1st, 2010 at 10:29 am
correction: we had the singing too in JC’s ballet. Which incidentally had some good stuff in it.