Isadora by Amelia Gray

Summary from Goodreads:
Using the scaffolding of Isadora Duncan’s life and the stuff of her spirit, Amelia Gray delivers an incredibly imaginative portrait of the artist

In 1913, the restless world sat on the brink of unimaginable suffering. But for one woman, the darkness of a new era had already made itself at home. Isadora Duncan would come to be known as the mother of modern dance, but in the spring of 1913 she was a grieving mother, after a freak accident in Paris resulted in the drowning death of her two young children.

The accident cracked Isadora’s life in two: on one side, the brilliant young talent who captivated audiences the world over; on the other, a heartbroken mother spinning dangerously on the edge of sanity.

Isadora is a shocking and visceral portrait of an artist and woman drawn to the brink of destruction by the cruelty of life. In her breakout novel, Amelia Gray offers a relentless portrayal of a legendary artist churning through prewar Europe. Isadora seeks to obliterate the mannered portrait of a dancer and to introduce the reader to a woman who lived and loved without limits, even in the darkest days of her life.

I've been very interested in this novel for a while.  Isadora Duncan is an absolutely important figure in the development of modern dance and in breaking away from the classical ballet tradition.  She's also a tragic figure in the discipline, first losing her eldest two children to an accident and then dying of a broken neck when her scarf is caught in a car's axle.  Of course, I would want to read a novel based on her life.

This didn't quite pan out.  There's an interesting biographical novel somewhere in Isadora, one about grief and loss and art, but it's bogged down by the style. The novel begins on the day that Isadora's children drown in a car accident in the Seine and spans the next 18 months or so told by a rotating cast of 4 characters: Paris Singer, Isadora's lover and father of her younger child; Elizabeth, Isadora's sister; Max, Elizabeth's lover (maybe her lover, maybe not?) and a teacher at the Duncan school in Darmstadt; and Isadora Duncan herself.  There are also other characters coloring the narrative, the Duncan matriarch, another Duncan sibling and his wife, students of the Duncan school, and so on. Now, the major snag here is that Isadora narrates in the first person and everyone else in a close third person point-of-view, with some letters mixed in between chapters, and that makes it absolute hell to read. Also, while some of Paris's sections were interesting, absolutely none of Max's sections were worth reading, in my opinion. Isadora's sections are the strongest, and most beautiful, with Elizabeth's a perfect contrast as the sister always in the shadow. If I could take a knife and snip out everything else leaving only these two sister narrators (and magically make Isadora's sections a close third POV) this would be a marvelous novel.

Dear FTC: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today by Simon Morrison

Summary from Goodreads:
On a freezing night in January 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions into scandal. The Bolshoi Theater had been a crown jewel during the reign of the tsars and an emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century. Under Putin in the twenty-first century, it has been called on to preserve a priceless artistic legacy and mirror Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. The attack and its torrid aftermath underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world.

The acid attack resonated far beyond the world of ballet, both into Russia’s political infrastructure and, as renowned musicologist Simon Morrison shows in his tour-de-force account, the very core of the Bolshoi’s unparalleled history. With exclusive access to state archives and private sources, Morrison sweeps us through the history of the storied ballet, describing the careers of those onstage as well as off, tracing the political ties that bind the institution to the varying Russian regimes, and detailing the birth of some of the best-loved ballets in the repertoire.

From its disreputable beginnings in 1776 at the hand of a Faustian charlatan, the Bolshoi became a point of pride for the tsarist empire after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. After the revolution, Moscow was transformed from a merchant town to a global capital, its theater becoming a key site of power. Meetings of the Communist Party were hosted at the Bolshoi, and the Soviet Union was signed into existence on its stage. During the Soviet years, artists struggled with corrosive censorship, while ballet joined chess tournaments and space exploration as points of national pride and Cold War contest. Recently, a $680 million restoration has restored the Bolshoi to its former glory, even as prized talent has departed.

As Morrison reveals in lush and insightful prose, the theater has been bombed, rigged with explosives, and reinforced with cement. Its dancers have suffered unimaginable physical torment to climb the ranks, sometimes for so little money that they kept cows at home whose milk they could sell for food. But the Bolshoi has transcended its own fraught history, surviving 250 years of artistic and political upheaval to define not only Russian culture but also ballet itself. In this sweeping, definitive account, Morrison demonstrates once and for all that, as Russia goes, so goes the Bolshoi Ballet.

Bolshoi Confidential was at the top of my list of galley-gets at BEA.  (I mean, come on - I'm "balletbookworm" pretty much anywhere on the Internet.)  I wasn't able to get it read for the release date so I saved it for my plane ride to Book Riot Live.

Overall, Bolshoi Confidential is a well-researched book detailing the history of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow from its early origins as a motley theatre troupe pre-Napoleonic invasion through the nearly $700 million renovation of the Bolshoi theatre in the 2000s (and the acid attack on artistic director Sergey Filin in 2013). Of particular concentration are the Soviet years, when political ideology forced the artists of the ballet to reject "formalism" (a work's artistic value is determined by its form) for glorification of the realism of the Soviet people.  This was an ever-shifting, uncertain, and hard-to-perfect definition since a) that stricture doesn't particularly lend itself to creativity or good art and b) could land the artist in hot water/unemployment/worse depending on the mood or whim of the censor. It really is this push-pull between the Imperial and Soviet histories that creates a lot of the friction that makes for good reading.

However, it is very obvious that Morrison is not a dance writer, or even a dancer. His descriptions of dance steps or clarifications between the major evolutions of ballet (the introduction of blocked pointe shoes, for instance, or differences between French, Italian, Russian, Bournonville, Cechetti, and Vaganova styles) are muddled or stilted. The section discussing the struggles of Prokofiev, Shostokovitch, and Khatchaturian - all major Russian composers of the 20th century ballet repertoire - is extremely well-written and wonderful to read. Morrison is a professor of music and it shows.  But the focus is on the music and less on the dancers. In a book marketed as an inside look at the Bolshoi BALLET, there needed to be more about the actual dancing and dancers. A good read overall, but I needed more.

Dear FTC: I picked up a galley of this book at BEA.

Dance to the Piper by Agnes de Mille

Summary from Goodreads:
Born into a family of successful playwrights and producers, Agnes de Mille was determined to be an actress. Then one day she witnessed the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and her life was altered forever. Hypnotized by Pavlova’s beauty, in that moment de Mille dedicated herself to dance. Her memoir records with lighthearted humor and wisdom not only the difficulties she faced—the resistance of her parents, the sacrifices of her training—but also the frontier atmosphere of early Hollywood and New York and London during the Depression. “This is the story of an American dancer,” writes de Mille, “a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts.”

Strangely, I think I read Dance to the Piper before, or tried to, because the early sections of the book were crazily familiar. When I was a child, I read any and all dance biographies or memoirs I could lay my hands on, which were pitifully few given my local public library. I read Alicia Markova's constantly, understood most of Margot Fonteyn's, was frightened by Gelsey Kirkland's, but I didn't understand Agnes de Mille's.
1) de Mille wasn't a ballet dancer so was immediately of less interest to me (tutus and toe shoes were my jam)
2) She didn't take ballet lessons until she was an adult but she still wanted to emulate Pavlova (*cue scoffing from one totally stuck-up kid*)
3) She went on and on about her own dances which I had never heard of or seen (I knew she had choreographed Oklahoma! but this was completely prior to that and made no sense).

It didn't take.

Well, I'm so thankful that NYRB Classics printed a new edition and that they contacted me out of the blue and offered a review copy. A re-read almost 30 years later - with a much wider dance education and modern classes under my belt, not to mention a dance minor - really made the difference in my understanding.  de Mille's memoir is not only a chronicle of her experiences as an itinerant, aspiring dancer in an era when America was developing its idea of the art form apart from classical ballet but also the very early silent motion picture era when her father moved the family West to join his brother Cecil (yep, that de Mille) in California. Her story is a testament to how your dreams and goals change over time.  She never gives up her dream of being a dancer, and her determination to keep with her ballet training was a major influence on her later choreographic style, but she slowly turns from classical ballet to an original contemporary or modern style.  We would never have had Rodeo without her.

A few chapters are a bit uneven in places, and clearly shows mid-century psychological theories around the edges, but de Mille captured everything so brilliantly.  Dance history fanatics will goggle at the sheer number of mid-twentieth century dancers de Mille interacted with both in the US and in England. For a memoir supposedly delivered to her editor in a grocery sack, the sentence-level quality of writing is excellent.

(Must also point out an introduction by the dance critic Joan Acocella)

Dear FTC: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Dancers Among Us

Jordan Matter thought up an idea and went with it: why not have dancers interpret everyday emotions and situations?  Dancers of all stripes - ballerinas, modern dancers, tappers, breakdancers, newcomers, old hands.  Happy things, sad things, joyful moments, getting coffee, hailing a cab, taking the baby for a walk, singing in the shower.  A great book of photos and dancers. Props to the dancers for performing in less than ideal/possibly dangerous conditions (cf. the former rythmic gymnast in a deep penchee arabesque on the railing of a lookout point, damn!). The human body is amazing.

Love the passerby in a lot of shots who are pretty amazed at what's going on.  Matter also had some interesting notes about how passersby were also pretty happy about getting in on the action with Dancers Among Us.

Every Little Step/A Chorus Line

All I ever needed was the music and the mirror.

One singular sensation.

Do I luurrrrve A Chorus Line or what?  Like Val, I never saw The Red Shoes...I saw A Chorus Line and The Nutcracker when I was little.  Hooked.  My dance teacher also staged "One" as a finale to our dance recital when I was little.  Hooked.

Every Little Step is a documentary about the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line on Broadway.  The original production closed in 1990 after about a gazillion performances so a fifteen-year gap before a new staging is appropriate.  The bulk of the film follows the casting process - a marathon because soooo many people want the chance to be a part of the magic and an obstacle course because the parts (Connie, Val, Paul, Diana, Kristine, Cassie, Bebe) are very specific as to type.  Interspersed with the casting footage are interviews with the producers and directors as well as Baayork Lee, the original Connie, and Marvin Hamlisch who wrote the score.  You root for all the performers because they have to get this job (song!) and you really feel for those who don't make the cut.  It's all blood, sweat, and tears.  No one becomes a Broadway performer for the money; they all do it because they love it.  A small bonus to Every Little Step is that Charlotte D'Amboise, the daughter of Jacques D'Amboise, happens to audition for Cassie.  Yes, that Jacques D'Amboise is her dad, the one who danced for Mr. B, was Ephraim in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and is interviewed for this documentary.  Love.

So then I had to watch the movie adaptation of A Chorus Line - which is great in some respects because they are able to play with close-ups, etc., that you can't get with a stage production, and a total clunker in others because of the way the script got chopped up (and Michael Douglas is Zach, which doesn't quite fit well in my opinion).  But it has all the great songs and dance sequences so I can "One, singular sensation" my way around the house.

Ballerina and Mad Hot Ballroom

Thanks to the magic of my new Blu-Ray player with wireless Netflix streaming, I was able to watch Ballerina, a documentary that follows five ballerinas with the Kirov Ballet, and Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about a ballroom dancing program offered in New York City public schools, back-to-back.  It was quite nice and the picture and sound quality was very good on both.

First up was Ballerina, directed by Bertrand Normand.  The five ballerinas are all at various stages in their careers from graduating student to prima ballerina to returning to full-steam after an injury.  Alina Somova is the first ballerina introduced and the youngest, at age 17, just graduating from the Vaganova Academy with the starring role in the graduation performance.  She joins a classmate, Evguenya Obratsova, and both show promise as future soloists (Evguenya also acted in Les poupees russes which gives her a career alternative if necessary).  Svetlana Zakharova is a talented, driven young woman, a prima ballerina barely in her twenties; she moved to the Bolshoi during the filming of the documentary.  Diana Vishneva is an established prima with a schedule of international guest appearances.  Uliana Lopatkina is working her way back from a two-year hiatus that included surgery for a major ankle injury and the birth of her daughter; Lopatkina is the ballerina the younger dancers look up to, emulate.  The structure of this documentary is very informal but it is shot very, very well.  The footage includes both performance and rehearsal scenes (I love rehearsal shots as much as performance footage) and I loved watching this film.

I followed up my ballet binge with Mad Hot Ballroom and this was such a joy to watch.  The ballroom dancing program in the New York City schools is sooooo different from the "square dancing unit" I had to endure in grade school PE.  The kids have so much fun and you can see how invested the teachers and kids become in learning the steps and competing against the other schools.  I kept thinking that, for some of the kids, they were on familiar ground with tango, rumba, and swing (which looked more like a Lindy Hop variety), particularly in the Washington Heights school where many of the kids are African-American or Hispanic; you could see the pride just bursting of one of the kids who proudly shouted out "Dominican" when asked where merengue steps originated.  The film didn't offer any follow-up commentary so I do hope all the kids featured in this documentary are doing well; the teachers have such hopes for the kids and I was rooting for all of them.

Chess: In Concert

I got Chess: In Concert from Netflix a while back because:

a) I love Josh Groban (playing Anatoly)
b) I love Idina Menzel, too (playing Florence)
c) The guy playing Freddie (Adam Pascal) was Roger in Rent (awesome)
d) Chess has some fantastic music including "Anthem", "I Know Him so Well", "Someone Else's Story", and "One Night in Bankok"
e) The production was shot at the Royal Albert Hall which is ginormous

I was pretty excited to see this because I have the soundtrack to both the original Broadway Chess recording and this new one, too.  They are quite different in structure because Chess was reworked by Tim Rice a number of times in the early 1980s when it first debuted and then other productions tend to mold the story as needed; the "In Concert" production was re-worked by Rice to most closely resemble the original London storyline with a few bits kept from the updates.

I can't say anything about the singing or orchestrations of this performance.  Great voices all around, good balance between the soloists, choir, and orchestra in this huge, huge performance hall.  Good costuming and use of the black/white motifs of the chessboard.  Josh Groban acted quite well (I think this is an intended step toward musical theatre for him) although he could have tried a little bit of Russian accent particularly as the other actors potraying Russians laid it on thick.  Idina Menzel .... amazing (I still can't figure out why she was cast in a non-singing role in Enchanted; makes no sense).

The only drawback to the production was the choreography and dancers.  I thought the choreography was on the poor side for a big production, very stylized, and, after the third-time through the modern, pseudo-improv-inspired 'Chess match' piece, it was pretty boring.  The big set-piece opening to "One Night in Bangkok" was a lame pastiche of South East Asian dance arm movements and hand patterns; the one thing I know about Thai/Balinese/Cambodian, etc. traditional dance is that all the movements are very precise and are very symbolic (the choreo here also looked really under-rehearsed and sloppy; you might not notice from the back of the arena but you certainly notice on close-up from the camera).  I would rather have seen a group of dancers trained in the actual traditional dance type performing to the "One Night in Bangkok" introduction.  It would have lended a little more atmosphere and looked lovely (there is surely a SE Asian dance company or group in or around London who could have been asked).

I'm debating whether to purchase this concert DVD; I have the CD, so I have the best of the production already, but I do like the overall look (and Josh is pretty cute).

Current book-in-progress: The Complete Stories, Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters, Illness, and Twitterature
Current knitted item: baby sweater
Current movie obsession: must. watch. My Boy Jack and return it before watching The Edge of Love
Current iTunes loop: "Chill Tracks" mix (currently on an Amy Winehouse/Evanescance shuffle....odd)

If I went crazy no one would blame me.

And if you do, I'll kick your butt. I mean it, I'll be crazy.

Insurance adjusters (particularly the one I'm dealing with) are scum. This one also happens to be stupid. And selectively vision-challenged. And rude. And not particularly interested in maintaining good relations with clients. AAA is going to get an earful.

I'm about to be screwed 110 different ways over this car accident (and also, by extension, my parents as well because they are nice people who try to help out thier kids). I love it. I get plowed into at a red light and I'm the one who's going to take it up the rear, if you get my drift.

IRB is officially pissing me off. Usually it's only informal irritation.

I watched some movies this weekend because that's all I could concentrate on. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix released so yay. Watched a 1982 production of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon starring Jennifer Penny and Anthony Dowell (now Sir Anthony). Manon is not generally a ballet that I like, there's far too much exposition between the major points of action, but the redeeming quality of this performance is to watch Anthony Dowell dance; he has the most beautiful ballet line, Royal Ballet trained all the way, and such beautiful control in the adagio. Unfortunately, he's been retired for the last 20 years, so I have to watch on DVD. Sigh. I also slogged through The Squid and the Whale which is a short movie, but absolutely excruciating in the way that the film is so truthful. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are excellent and the actors playing the kids are very good as well. A well-made movie.

Current book-in-progress: Middlemarch
Current knitted item: Christmas sock #2 is mostly done
Current movie obsession: Harry Potter #5

I have a clean office...

...and you do not. Hmmm. Doesn't quite scan as well as "I am a baboon and you are not." In truth, I had accumulated a great deal of paper (memos, print-outs, brochures, etc) and was unable to see the surface of my desk. So I had a cleaning day. Death to dust bunnies!!

This is also called work procrastination because it keeps me from doing something really boring like sending nagging emails. Now that my office is clean I have to send emails. Blah.

Current book-in-progress: Middlemarch, The Western Canon
Current knitted item: Second sock is almost done
Current movie obsession: American Ballet Theatre in Ashton's "The Dream" - Ethan Stiefel is so gorgeous

Secret Knitting

Here I am knitting yet another surprise. Not so terribly secret - the store manager saw a pattern for a knitting "mohawk" hat (yes, it's a hat that looks like a mohawk haircut) and said he'd wear it if someone made him one.

Never tempt a knitter.

It's a complicated design, but simple enough to stitch. And I'm using some really, really ugly yarn that I bought waaaaaaaayyyyyy back when I re-taught myself to knit. TLC Red Heart acrylic. Yuck (he's only got to wear it long enough to get a picture of him in it).

I worked a full shift in kids at the bookstore today. The shoppers are already developing Christmas psychosis. God help us.

Dance Gala was really nice. The department limited the show to six pieces so the length was really just right and all the pieces together showed a very nice range. Alan did a beautiful homage to David Berkey's "White Mountain" and guest choreographer Toni Pimble created a nice ballet piece to a Villa-Lobos string quartet (the Maia quartet played the music live).

Current book-in-progress: Lies My Teacher Told Me, revised edition; The Almost Moon; Classics for Pleasure; it never decreases!!!!!
Current knitted item: Tank, secret hat (heh, heh)
Current movie obsession: Hamlet is still in the player, but I did receive 300 from Netflix, hmmmmm

Down in front...

Went to see the Joffrey Ballet this evening. They've been on tour in Iowa celebrating Hancher Auditorium's 35th Anniversary - totally awesome, FREE (bonus), outdoor performance. Some of my favorite pieces: "Sometimes it Snows in April" from Billboards, the Grand pas from Nutcracker (performed by my two favorite Joffrey dancers, Maia Wilkins and Willy Shive), and Light Rain (if you saw Altman's "The Company", you saw part of the first section). Untitled (a Pilobolus piece I'd only seen pictures of) was very interesting, very athletic, too, for the guys since Pilobolus choreography is amazing in how it uses the human body to make shapes, balancing acts, etc. Slight disappointment in the new piece (of which I can't remember the name) - it was definitely not reminicent of "sultry tropical nights" and looked more like a contest to see who could develope higher disguised as a teenager's version of being sultry - pastiche. Someone needed a tango lesson (since I think that was the vibe) but the music was all rhumba-y. God I miss my ballet class.

For being Iowa in July, the weather was perfect. Once the sun went behind the trees we had shade and there was a nice breeze off the river.

Current book-in-progress: The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter
Current knitted item: knitting....yeah, I should do some of that