In which our Diva is kind of a wee bit all over the place tonight, and rolling with it
Watch:Mao's Last Dancer, which I had never heard of until it happened to be one of the movies on my flight back from London. A bit heavy-handed at times, as these things tend to be, but generally an interesting biopic and the dancing is superb and (a clincher for me) mostly even filmed well. The funny thing is, I got about ten minutes into it and went "Wait, everyone is calling this guy Li, and he's arriving in Houston in 1981... OMG, is this about Li Cunxin?"
See, I actually saw him dance Swan Lake on Houston Ballet's tour in 1982, in the midst of my hardcore ballet-baby phase, an occasion memorable for being the first time I saw ballet of that caliber in person. If I'd thought about it when I was older, I would have realized it was almost a given that his life story would be a dramatic one, but I hadn't, and I had no idea. And (unsurprisingly, given that ballet has its politics and mercenary side just like everything else) not all the drama was the fault of the Chinese government.
Bruce Greenwood with a British accent (as artistic director Ben Stevenson) is a little blink-inducing, but once you get used to it he works well. Of the three actors playing Cunxin, it's actually the middle one, Chengwu Guo -- covering his teenage years in Beijing -- who impressed me most, as both actor and dancer. It gets a little on the soapy side, but nobody (except maybe Madame Mao, who was kind of a living caricature anyway) comes off as either a saint or a villain. It's a collection of flawed people with their own goals and agendas, some of whom happen to dance gloriously.
Eat: Ancho Chili BBQ Burrito at Qdoba. Ridiculously good. And reheats well, which is important, since it's one of those burrito-as-big-as-your-head places, so the thing is easily two meals.
Read: The "Walker Papers" series by C.E. Murphy.I've been doing pretty much all research reading lately, and it's great stuff, but I picked up the fifth book, Demon Hunts, just in time to have some lighter travel reading for the trip to England. Joanne Walker has all the most fun "standard" urban-fantasy-heroine traits -- notably a very hard head, in both the literal and figurative senses -- and a few that are very much her own. Plus an interesting cosmology, a great support structure of interesting characters, a personal life that's engagingly complicated without crossing the blurry line into paranormal romance, and (at least so far) nary a vampire in sight. Which, as you know if you read much urban fantasy, is worth noting. Not that I'm not demonstrably quite fond of the fangy types in a variety of flavors, of course, but it's nice to have a universe that does things a little differently.
Do?: Spring fever has hit me early this year, partly because -- due directly to the wicked cool stunt work you can catch a glimpse of in the Resonance trailer -- I'm having an attack of see-something-cool-and-want-to-try-it with respect to parkour. Which may or may not be practical (given my schedule, dodgy knees, and questionable upper-body strength), but I've been watching Jump City on G4, reading articles and watching videos on GirlParkour.com, and eyeing the mentions of beginner jams on the Chicago Parkour site. For all that it looks pretty outside most days, of course, it's still too chilly for me to want to actually be out there if I can help it, but I can smell spring, darnit!
All this is proving once again that part of me is still the slightly reckless eight-year-old who was prone to things like taking a friend's big brother's go-cart (the old-school home-built kind you may have heard about from Bill Cosby) down a rather steeper incline than it was, strictly speaking, intended for. Suffice it to say the cart and I parted company well before the bottom, and I arrived there with noticeably less skin than I'd started with. (And yes, this coincided with the hardcore ballet-baby phase. I'm a complex creature. *g*)
Listen: I'm always behind the curve with pop music -- I have no patience for commercial radio, and most often find music I like because it appears in movies or TV shows I like, or because it's used for fannish music videos -- so I only recently downloaded Paramore's Brand New Eyes. The first track, "Careful," is getting a lot of repetition on my MP3 player because I've mentally adopted it as the theme song of a Chicago-based Resonance character. (I'll tell you who when she goes public, and you can decide for yourself how well it fits.) But it's "Brick By Boring Brick" that has the video I keep rewatching.
I saw Black Swanthe other day. Like pretty much everyone else, I was blown away. Like Roger Ebert, I almost immediately wanted to rewatch The Red Shoes, something I haven't done in several years. That's partly because, though it's one of my all-time favorite films, it is -- for some of the same reasons as Black Swan, albeit not as intensely -- not always easy to watch.
(Here's where things get a bit spoilery, despite my best efforts to avoid it. If you haven't seen Black Swan and want to avoid preconceptions, stop reading and come back later. The post will still be here.)
As Ebert's review notes, Black Swan harks back to The Red Shoes in ways large and small, almost certainly deliberate, and not least among them the ending. There's a critical difference, though: The Red Shoes' Vicky Page has a life -- romance, interests, independence -- and the film follows the domino effect of choices she makes to sacrifice all of that on the altar of her art. Black Swan's Nina Sayers, as the film makes painfully clear within the first few minutes, has never had such a life. She seems barely conscious that such a thing is even possible; her entire world is the theatre, the apartment she shares with her mother, and the subway ride in between.
In a way, Vicky has been fragmented into two characters: Nina and rival (?) newcomer Lily. I put that question mark there for a reason, one that I'm not seeing discussed very much. There's rumination aplenty on Natalie Portman's performance, complete with deconstruction of the sociopolitical ramifications of what she put her mind and body through to achieve it. There's commentary on the creepily controlling mother and domineering artistic director. And all that is undeniably interesting, and I could get into it, but I'd mostly be saying stuff that's been said elsewhere.
What I haven't run across, what I'm finding myself thinking about more and more in the day and a half since I sat staring, slightly stunned, at the closing credits, is this: Lily is the "black swan," the glamorous, insidious threat, because the drama playing out in Nina's mind -- and everything we see is through Nina's eyes -- requires it. And the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me that not only is Lily ill-cast in the role, but that she is in fact the one and only person in Nina's world who is not trying to co-opt her life.
To the extent that we can separate the actions of the real Lily from the hallucinatory construct who sometimes wears Lily's face and sometimes Nina's own (and there's a point or two where that remains ambiguous), the worst we can say is that maybe she wouldn't be making such an effort to befriend Nina if Nina weren't the freshly-anointed star. But it's also perfectly possible that she really just sees a colleague who's lonely, terrified, and in desperate need of a friend.
Lily's no angel, and we may well disapprove of her casual attitude toward drugs and sex. But while the "girls' night out" seems wild and utterly out of control from Nina's (and therefore the audience's) perspective, it doesn't take much thought to realize that she can't be doing that every night. She shows up reliably to work, dances well, seems to get along with pretty much everyone.
There are repeated assertions in the dialogue that Lily is charismatic and sexy because she's slightly "dangerous." This serves the point Thomas is trying to make about what Nina needs to bring to her Black Swan (and I find it curious that Odette and Odile are never referred to by name, but that's a ponder for another day), but I'm not convinced it's accurate. Lily is confident, healthy, secure. In a circus of extreme personalities, she's the unlikely poster girl for "everything in moderation." A concept so utterly beyond Nina's grasp that, through her increasingly fractured lens, it makes sense for Lily to be out to take away everything she has... which, at the end of the day, is pathetically little.
Nor does Lily have any need to do so, and it's this that Nina is particularly unequipped to understand. The shape of the drama requires that Lily be named the alternate. But it says something else, too, something that gets overlooked but which is critically important in my world: She has achieved a level of professional success very nearly on a par with Nina's without sacrificing the rest of her life. (Whether she did it without resorting to the casting couch is an open question, answerable only by knowing the sequence of events outside of Nina's perception and whether a particular event within her perception actually took place.)
The myth sold to Nina all her life, the one that's been romanticized in fiction as long as we've had fiction, is that true art is possible only through sacrifice to the point of abject misery.
It's a lie. You can be an artist and be happy. Lily is living proof, embedded directly in this latest iteration (and, to a great extent, subversion) of the classic storyline.
As for the other principal figure required by this play of archetypes, the tyrannical, abusive genius pulling the strings? He's a lie too, not because he doesn't exist but because he isn't necessary or excusable. And there are clues in the characterization of Thomas that we're meant to take some subversion away from that too. It's not as clear, maybe, but I don't think it's an accident that it's Lily -- that same voice of moderation -- who states matter-of-factly that he's a prick, and voices directly to him her concerns about how he runs his rehearsals. (Worth noting here are the stories Natalie Portman has been telling in interviews, about how Darren Aronofsky attempted to play her and Mila Kunis -- who've been close friends for years -- off as rivals, keeping them separate in ballet training and telling each that the other was "looking really good." But there's something in the amusement with which Portman relates this that makes me think Aronofsky knew perfectly well they would get together and compare notes, and that the whole thing was an oddly ironic game for all parties.)
Both of these myths -- told over and over again, and widely taken as truth by audiences -- are incredibly dangerous and damaging if an artist takes them at face value. Yes, we absolutely have to take risks. We have to sacrifice personal defenses and let strangers in where we fear to admit even those we love most. But there's a contract on both sides of that transaction, that the place we're taking that risk -- the studio, the stage -- will form the boundary of the storm, and that it need not rage beyond that boundary to wreck the rest of our lives. We have to trust those riding out the storm with us.
No genius, no results can excuse betrayal of that trust. There is no result that cannot be equally effectively achieved without such a betrayal.
All of which has tangentially reminded me of one of the reasons I adore Slings and Arrows, the acclaimed Canadian TV series about a beleaguered fictional Shakespeare festival. At the center of the series is artistic director Geoffrey Tennant, who knows a little bit about risk and loss in the name of art. That'll happen when you fall off the metaphorical tightrope and have a psychotic break in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, precipitated by failure of the two most critical strands of his net, his director and his girlfriend.
Seven years (the first several of them institutionalized) later, he winds up back at the same festival, inheriting in midstream the direction of another Hamlet. His Ophelia is a curious character named Claire, whose presence in the company despite her glaring lack of ability is never explained beyond "I think she's someone's evil niece." No one likes this woman, nor is there any particular reason they should. She's pretentious, gossipy, and smarmily duplicitous. If there were ever a situation where the audience would forgive a fictional director for launching a tyrannical tirade at a fictional actress, this is probably it.
Geoffrey does eventually reach his breaking point with her, and this is what he does:
Keep your spoiled-brat Lermontovs and Thomas LeRoys. I'm not impressed. This, my friends, is how the grownups do it.
In which our Diva borrows another's perspective for a moment
I talk a lot here about the physical aspects of acting, of developing and being aware of my body and what it can do in the course of telling a story. I was a dancer first, so that thinking is second nature to me, which makes it difficult to articulate what's so important and valuable about those aspects of our craft.
Enter Ben Hopkin, of the consistently thoughtful and useful Acting Without the Drama blog, to spell it out from the more cerebral vantage point. It was an eye-opening read from my very movement-oriented perspective too, illuminating the thought process behind some actors' dismissal of or resistance to what I've always considered to be a key portion of the toolbox.
In which our Diva is at least half kidding about that subject line
I wore my green today, in the form of a nice comfy soft wrap sweater that I barely needed. It's over 60, sunny, and amazing, and I will soon be taking a walk to take advantage of it!
For those at my primary day job, it's also Free Lunch Day. (Benefit of the company being owned by a first-generation Irish-American. We won't talk about the Dublin expat in the office next to mine, and how I sometimes have to check that my mental switch hasn't flipped to the accent that got drilled so successfully into my head for my very first professional play 20 years ago.) In the spirit of the day, and with Solàs on the BigBossLady's laptop, I attempted to teach a coworker sevens & threes and the Gay Gordon (yes, I know it's Scottish, sshhhh!), with hilarious results.
Continuing in that spirit (and speaking of Solàs, to which I once literally danced until I couldn't walk -- barefoot, dirt baseball diamond, live folk festival, blisters over the entire soles of my feet, we shall discuss it no further), I'm going to cheat and turn today's blog over to the incomparable Jean Butler and Colin Dunne in their take on the Graìnne and Diarmuid legend, Dancing on Dangerous Ground. I wish the show had been more successful so I could have seen it live, and I still think that kind of evening-length story ballet is the next logical step in the stepdance-fusion trend that started with Riverdance.
Also, if you'd told teenage me that hardshoe would someday be rendered screen-meltingly sexy, I would have laughed in your face. But, well, guh.
In which our Diva ruminates on a form that is more than the sum of its feathers, rhinestones and g-strings
I love Netflix recommendations. Sometimes they disappoint, but more often they bring my attention to a gem I would never have heard of otherwise.
Such was the case with A Wink and a Smile: The Art of Burlesque. Which, from the synopsis, I expected to focus on the rise of neo-burlesque, the revival and evolution of old-school burlesque that has enjoyed a mini-explosion the last few years. Not only in straight-up burlesque shows, but in influence on other arts. (Some more successfully than others. I don't have anything against groups like the Pussycat Dolls, but I'm not a big fan of their rather surfacey quasi-burlesque. OTOH, Emilie Autumn's show -- in part because one of her "Bloody Crumpets" backing group, Veronica Varlow, is a burlesque artist in her own right -- has a lot of burlesque in its mix, in a way that recognizes not just the raunch but the humor and irony.)
I first became aware of the movement in 2004, when I was costume designer for a play set in the 1950s that featured a classic striptease. In fact, that's pretty much how I ended up designing the show -- the actress doing the strip number was in another show with me, and was talking backstage one night about researching classic burlesque. I gave her a couple website leads (I don't even remember now why I knew about them, though I suspect it branched off from my love of Moulin Rouge), touched on a couple of the primary engineering issues, then interrupted myself in midsentence to ask, "Do you guys have a costume designer?" Turns out that, as often happens with newer small theatre companies, they didn't.
I had a blast working on that show, and the thrift store gods smiled on me with some fabulous vintage finds. I also learned that I still had a lot to learn about burlesque costume engineering, the most important thing being NOT to line the strapless gown with shiny lining fabric. Next time, a nice cotton broadcloth that won't threaten to slide right off the poor dancer! (I also should have gone ahead with a zipper instead of snaps down the side seam, but that was less of an issue.)
The choreographer for Jenn's number was Michelle L'Amour, one of the leading lights of the burlesque scene I didn't even know Chicago had. She's a founder of The Lavender Cabaret, which has been producing shows and teaching burlesque since 2003. I've thought about taking one of her classes a hundred times, but there always seems to be too much going on. (Same goes for the circus aerial training I'd dearly love to do at the Actors Gymnasium, or even just going to ballet class regularly again. Or a dozen other things. A lot of the reason I'm an actor in the first place is that I tend to look at people doing something cool and go "Oooh, I want to try that!" But I can still really only do one of them at a time. *wry g*)
So it was a surprise and delight to find that this little documentary I'd rented was less about the burlesque scene as a whole, and more focused on Miss Indigo Blue's "Burlesque 101" class in the fall of 2007. The ten "ordinary" women are as varied as they can be in age, background, personality, and of course what they're looking to get out of the class. The interviews with the students and with Blue and her co-teacher are unflinchingly honest and insightful, illuminating the complexities and power (and yes, empowerment) of an easily-dismissed form. There are tears, laughter, and life-changing explorations from the students, and exceptionally intelligent and educated nuggets of history from Blue, who clearly knows her stuff and then some. If you never thought much about burlesque before, or even if you're somewhat familiar with it like me, you'll come away from this film knowing a whole lot more.
There are a bunch of cynical comments on the YouTube page about its being an advertising stunt, as if that ruins it somehow. Let me get this straight: Some phone company decided to spend money on something really fun to witness. And the problem with this would be...?
(For comparison, check out this archival film of Anna Pavlova, for whom the piece was originally choreographed, and present-day star Uliana Lopatkina. Also, to clarify, it's a standalone number, to a piece by Saint-Saens. It's a separate entity from the Tchaikovsky story ballet Swan Lake, with which it gets confused about 98% of the time.)
Stop before you get to the part with the judges, because they're crazy. I love this so much. It's such an amazing fusion, and her physical perfection and emotional power just blow me away. As a friend pointed out, it's a great big challenge to the traditional "pretty" portrayals of death and suffering, especially women's. And I lovelovelove that it's a black artist doing a little cultural appropriation of her own.
I almost didn't watch the show, what with Simon Cowell's tacky "reality" competition fingerprints all over it, but I couldn't resist the lure of getting to see this awesome smorgasbord of dancers even in that context. And I'm not sorry (though it was really hard to stick with ignoring the lame competition aspect), because I wouldn't have heard of most of them any other way, and they were all worth watching. I really need to get back into dance class; I feel like such a slug since the end of Dracula with all its cool movement work.
And posting all these videos lately makes it look like I'm not doing anything but surfing the Internet! Which is only partly true -- I'm in research mode, working on the storytelling bits for The Magic Flute. Where, as well as being the storyteller, I'm once again playing an imaginary creature, one of the "Spirits" that lead Papageno and Papagena together at the end. In the last year, I've been a fairy, a vampire, and now a forest spirit. Oh, and several zombies in this oddball voiceover gig last fall. (I should nag them about getting a copy of that -- it looked like it was going to be really fun when the animation was done!)
So, back to the fairy tales. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
In which our Diva has a scattering of Sunday morning thoughts
Busy week on tap -- a couple new auditions, and table read for Hell the King, the dark comedy short I'll be shooting in a couple weeks. I put a news item on my website, but hadn't gotten around to saying anything about it here. Every actress (especially if she's an old comics geek!) should get to play an Intrepid Reporter, and now I get mine. Her name is Tara Kyles, and she's on the scene with the latest as the minions of Satan go on strike. Can't wait to see how this one comes together!
Backstage at the Elgin Opera gala last weekend, one of the other choristers mentioned how impressed his wife was with my performance at a recent Festival of Singers night at Villa Verone. He quoted her as saying "There's something about the way she sings that just compels you to listen." Wow!! How often do we get a compliment like that? I wanted to throw my arms around her and hug her, if she'd been there in person. More importantly, though, how often do we remember the compliments? Something that gobsmacking, sure -- it instantly went into my arsenal of Amazing Things People Have Said To Me that I use as talismans when the negative mental soundtrack cranks up. But the most trivial stuff goes onto the negative soundtrack, while I have probably half a dozen talismans. They're powerful ones, crystal-clear memories of these amazing things people have said to me at various times, and their faces and the environment when they said them. But so many other wonderful little gifts are heard and accepted and don't go into the arsenal, except for a vague notion that "people said nice things." Maybe that's its own talisman, I don't know.
Still going great guns on That Other Stuff, still having fun. Even when software does not entirely cooperate. My reel is now edited, and I'm experimenting with the best ways to get it up online for all the world to see! And yeah, there's a little bit of quaking in the boots about that. In theatre, there's a finite number of people in a finite time frame who see your work and have an opinion about it. Put your acting not only on film/digital but on the Internet, and anyone could stumble by. There's not nearly as much quaking as excitement, though, because, hey, look! We live in a world where we can put our work in pixel form on the Internet for anyone who stumbles by, and how cool is that?
I had a small epiphany over in the comments on Sandra Joseph's blog this morning -- something that's been happening in my head for a while, but it crystallized in the process of putting it into words, which so often happens: I'm working on training myself out of saying "I should have done this years ago." I've been saying it a lot -- about moving to Chicago, about getting more seriously into film -- but the truth is I should be doing this now. That's the lesson of so many exciting things starting to bear fruit. (Incidentally, if you're not reading her, you have a hole in your positivity-generating blogosphere. She doesn't update terribly often, but it's always worth the wait. I was about to say I wish I'd gotten to know her better in college, but pursuant to the rest of this paragraph, the truth is we're meant to be reading and learning from one another now!)
In closing, I leave you with the single most awesome thing I have seen in weeks:
In which our Diva sits still for a couple hours, watching people who never seem to
Having worked my way through the "costume dramas I missed" portion of my Netflix queue, I've hit the "dance movies I missed" portion, which means that this morning I watched Rize. By which I mean that I -- contrary to my intent of watching the dance and paying half-attention to the interview segments while doing some work on my laptop -- couldn't take my eyes off it.
I expected that of the dance, of course. I know krumping is old news, and I'm sure there's some current street dance movement I know nothing about, but it's not going to get less impressive any time soon. I was aware of the basics: the dancers' conscious use of it as catharsis, channeling the frustrations of inner-city life into creation; the jaw-dropping isolations of popping that have been with us since the 80s, but now performed at anatomically improbable velocity (there's a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that none of the footage has been sped up, and it's a good thing to make clear, because holy CRAP); the confrontational style of two or more dancers interacting that looks eerily like rioters' violence. But I knew nothing at all about the hip-hop "clowning" movement that grew out of one man's grass-roots youth program, or its relationship to the krumping phenomenon.
I don't know if the former students of Tommy the Clown who implied krumping was their creation, evolved out of the clowning style, were stretching a point, but it's at least a primary ingredient. It's hard to tell how much of the trash-talking between the "clowns" and the "krumpers" is competitive ritual and how much is genuine antagonism, but the angry words about cheating (from both dancers and family members) after the BattleZone competition make it clear that there's at least some element of the latter. It's definitely not all warm fuzzies. But there's nothing but positive in the kids' passion for what they're doing -- one young man asserts that "this is like our ballet," and I came away with the impression that they may very well spend more time honing their skills than a pro-track ballet student -- and awareness of and gratitude for it as a shield against the destructive lifestyles around them.
Things that really struck me: the intercutting of dance sequences with footage of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and later with archival footage of traditional African dancers. The latter was particularly riveting for a couple reasons. One, because it so brilliantly matched shots of both preparation (application of face paint, warmups and camaraderie) and movement vocabulary. And two, because it came just a few minutes after some of the dancers had been explaining the evolution of one of the key movement elements of both clowning and krumping from what they called "the stripper dance." They couldn't say where the move had originated, only that it had suddenly been "the dance everybody was doing" at parties and such.
My jaw was on the floor that they were calling it that, but not because of any kind of general shock that a dance trend would be borrowed from strippers or anything like that. On the contrary, it was because I recognized it as anything but. They're talking about what's now a staple of hip-hop dance: wide stance, knees bent, balance back of center, rapid pelvic contract-and-release from lower abdominals. Which, until this morning, I had assumed to have been borrowed by hip-hop dancers from West African traditional dance, via the same heritage codified by Katherine Dunham. Because that was where I've known it from for years. And I know only the broadest strokes of Afro-Caribbean. But a move that, to my eye, says power and pride and warrior's prowess? These kids are calling "the stripper dance"! And yet, in the way they're performing it -- boys and girls alike -- it speaks exactly the same way I expect it to, and has nothing of the stripper in it at all. It just seems to me there's something very wrong when the middle-class white chick recognizes a piece of African heritage that the African-American kids apparently don't.
Other threads in the interviews include family relationships (conventional and otherwise), church ties (several of the kids are also involved in liturgical dance, and one boy's mother has some eloquent commentary linking the way her son's dancing "comes out of the spirit" to her own connection with her church, and asserts that she "gets krump for Jesus," and if you know anything at all about my opinions about art and spirituality, you can guess how happy that made me!), and the kids' very matter-of-fact knowledge and firm rejection of the violence in their lives. There's not a boring second.
Definitely worth the watching, especially if you have any interest in dance, physical prowess in general (my knees and hips were aching just watching these kids!), and/or people living real day-to-day lives in neighborhoods usually presented to us only as places to escape from.
