La Danse, madame, c'est une question morale.
Or not. Frederick Wiseman's transportive documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, didn't tell me anything new about French ballet qua ballet. To sum up: superb, brilliant, beautifully schooled dancers; adagios vaster than the Russians' and more slow; style so correct and dry as to make the Mariinsky look like circus clowns; Nureyev choreography that makes my calves ache just to watch it; and, finally, terminally, really, really dreadful contemporary ballet. There are few phrases that can turn my bowels to water as quickly as "an evening of contemporary ballet." The mere thought of attending such an evening at the POB makes me wish instead that I might sleep with

Sometimes I feel like slapping Wheeldon and saying, "You can do better than this!" but the
Wendy Whelan and Andrew Crawford in Rhapsody Fantasie, photo by Erin BaianoHere's my considerably belated look, on ballet.co.uk, at Program B of Morphoses/The Whe

What NOT to say to a dancer
So this woman posted on Twitter something like "After the performance I saw dancers X and Y and they kind of agreed when commiserated with them about Terrible Ballet." I slapped Chatty Twitter Lady's wrist (via tweets); she may have thought she was being chummy, but all she accomplished was to put X and Y in a difficult position while stroking her own ego.Let's suppose that Chatty Twitter Lady was right, and Terrible Ballet is a piece of crap. Let's also suppose that Dancers X and Y were painfully aware of its crappiness. It was still inappropriate for her to disparage Terrible Ballet to X and Y, or even insinuate (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) that it's a piece of cra

I'm going to hell for this, but...
So a friend asked emailed me, wanting to know if it was worth missing his poetry class to see V*r*n*k* P*rt dance The Dying Swan tonight. I observed my fingers typing out this reply: "Not even if Anna Pavlova herself returned from the grave to dance it on my lap."Suddenly I know what I'll be for Halloween....

New Chamber Ballet, September 11, 2009
Romantic Pieces, Dreams, All the Rage, Moments, Echoes City Center Studio 4With dancing designed to be seen practically in your lap, Miro Magloire's New Chamber Ballet lives up to its name, with a s