Ballet Dancers take to the Stage -- "Doing it Their Way"

The New York Times, and Pointe magazine have recently run articles on ballerinas in their thirties, forties or fifties who are crafting and shaping their own careers, taking on a variety of projects and working with artists outside their specific discipline. It’s exciting to watch these fascinating performers who are not retiring from dance to teach (although they are doing that too) but are delving into new and diverse ventures and recreating themselves as artists.

ID thought it was time to put the spotlight on three of these artists who are exploring the postmodern dance scene and dance-theater work in this next phase of their performing careers.

Wendy Whelan

Alessandra Ferri

and Diana Vishneva

 

Read on for this tiny tribute to the changing, ever sparkling, face of Dance.

Wendy Whelan says ballet feels like her child. “This is the one thing I’ve cared for, cultivated, and thought about for my whole life. It’s not something I can imagine throwing away. I can only imagine cultivating it more in a different way." That “different way” is an evening of duets created by four postmodern choreographers for Whelan this summer at Jacob’s Pillow.

Whelan calls the four pieces “Restless Creature” which premiered at the Pillow in August and will continue to cities across the county into 2014.

Aleksandra Ferri a "prima ballerina assoluta" had actually retired from the stage but was lured back by several new projects. Most notably Cheri by Martha Clarke.



“I felt like a fish out of water for most of it,” she said. “When I saw the way everybody else moved around me, I thought, ‘I will never do that.’ But I was open. Who knows?”

Ms. Ferri said in an interview at the Signature Theater, where “Cheri” is playing through Dec 29, "We often think of dance as being the ballerina,..You think, ‘Oh, I cannot do that anymore,’ or ‘I do not want to do that anymore, so stop.’ But no: There’s a huge world out there that is dance that we don’t look at when we are in our tutu world. I freed myself of that tradition and of that costume, and I am ready to look around.”

In “Cheri”  Ms Ferri combines her flawless balletic technique with an innate and equally riveting dramatic ability. One NYT reviewer glowingly commented that in Ms Ferri's perfomance "fleeting emotion is captured in precise, illuminating movement."

Cheri, Offical trailer

Diana Vishneva is pushing dance's boundaries while still performing classical repertory internationally.



“I am always aiming at a discovery in terms of my personal history, my personal career," she said. "For me, the process of my development is very important — what I experience, what I feel, what I achieve with each new endeavor, especially when I undertake something completely or especially new."

In her Performance, Vishneva on the Edge at the Segerstom Center for the Arts in LA

"Given my new experiences, I can now come back to breathe some new life into [classical] productions. But I will never allow myself some free interpretation of a classical role. I should be very cautious not to retreat from 'Giselle's' romantic style, its beauty and aesthetics. It is a challenge for me to preserve my old school and at the same time to enrich it with something new."

Here's to the New Year and everything New and Interesting!

Cheers

ID

 

Isadora and jooking

I went to Duncan class excited, I

couldn’t wait to learn how to dance like floating fairies or hell bent furies.

It looked simple.

Still how can you make that open legged gallop light as Botticelli’s “Primavera” and strong enough to travel across the stage?  I found myself inside a position and let it go from me. I looked in the mirror and wondered was that me? maybe not, maybe so. I chose not to know. Dancing the Narcissus for me was about feeling and not feeling: knowing your body hard and fast, and then yielding to a moment of flight.

It surprised me how it felt remembered and fresh, alive but ancient. The movement Isadora found and brought to us wasn’t just hers alone. It came from her body, but its source was beyond her. In her book, The Art of the Dance she said she wanted “..to bring to life again the ancient ideal, not to copy it, but to breathe its’ life, to recreate it in one’s self with personal inspiration, to start from its beauty, and then go toward the future dance.”

Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance p. 96

That’s what makes it beautiful in a way that is so simple it takes you by surprise as you think about again later. When you dance it seems simple and then something happens, a trigger goes off and you feel that you are inside a much larger place. Lois would say Isadora opened up a window. It’s still open, we continue to dance in and out of it.

Alistair Maculay, the dance critic of the NYT, wrote an article a few weeks ago describing how when he saw Lil Buck jooking he remembered a line of Isadora “I have seen America dancing."  He felt his notions of beauty art and society were extended when he saw these young LA dancers in rehearsal.

I thought it would be interesting to place clips of these two artists side by side. Examine their innovations, the dance they embody.

The clip of Isadora is the only extant verifiable moving film. It is very short so you have to watch it many times. But look at the utter abandon, the pure lift of the solar plexus and the heart. She yields her body to a great force that runs easy and free through her body. Her dancing body was like a tuning instrument channeling a clear and powerful grace.

In the Lil Buck video I see his desire to embody a form to his own method. Look at the turns with the leg crooked but extended, his feet on a forced point that sides over the side of ankle. His dying swan takes power form the ground and lifts from there and gets almost airborne,  especially toward the end where he see saws and spins into the horizontal mid-plane.

As YoYo Ma plays the music’s sorrow and desire for freedom, watch how it ripples though Lil Buck’s body, elegant and fluid like breath coursing into all the necessary places. Like Isadora I see a body making a dance that is natural to itself and yet in giving over completely to the melding of style and emotion becomes more than that.