The Studio

2006-09-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Diana Vishneva and Vladimir Malakov in Giselle

Diana Vishneva and Vladimir Malakov in Giselle

2006-09-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

RP sends 1st bet to prestigious ballet competition

2006-08-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

As the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) celebrates its 50th anniversary in East Asia, an outstanding Filipino ballerina is set to take part for the first time in the Genée International Ballet Competition—one of the world’s most prestigious competitions for young ballet dancers and the RAD’s flagship event. It will be held at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts from August 26 to September 3.

In a special announcement released by the British Council, Mary Beatrice Saludares of Steps Dance Studio was named the official Philippine candidate to this year’s Genée International Ballet Competition.

At 17 years old, Saludares is enrolled as a sophomore dance major at the University of the Philippines. She was also one of the first three RAD Solo Seal Candidates from the Philippines this year. Accompanying her will be Filipino RAD teachers Malen Claravall and Sofia Zobel-Elizalde, along with lone Filipino RAD examiner Raul Sauz.

The 2006 Genée International Ballet Competition in Hong Kong will again acknowledge the great international appeal of ballet. The Genée is a demanding competition and attracts the finest young ballet dancers aged 14 to 19 from all over the world. It offers a unique opportunity to work with and learn from world-renowned teachers and choreographers and also the chance to dance on the best international stages.

**Taken from ABS CBN Interactive
**Click here for more info from the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Questioning Ballet: My Response to Mr Segal's Article

2006-08-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

This could otherwise be entitled, "An Attempt to to Pull My Thoughts Together and Write a Thorough Response" as I have just waded out of a swamp of statistical concepts in which I have been soaking in since this morning in preparation for an exam on Monday. Whew!

I'm not in total disagreement with some of the points raised by Mr Segal. I am, however, extremely turned off by the writing style. Maybe he was trying to be hip and funny but he comes across as insulting instead of exuding wisdom as an art critic and knowledge of the art form he so easily dismisses as "decaying, danced by the disenfranchised".

Ballet companies, from the New York City Ballet to our own Ballet Manila and PBT, are suffering from a slump in ticket sales. And they are no loners in this struggles as museums and orchestras are on tight budget as well, the world over. This is not fresh news. But Mr Segal writes that this is simply proof of the "intimidation factor" of ballet, of the "tutu as icon --- and armor".

Ballet and an intimidation factor? I'll admit that it does have that effect sometimes and that sometimes it's our (choreographers, dancers, balletomanes) fault. We have a tendency to let the rigorous and difficult training to get into our heads and we look down on other dance forms. Sorry for that. Still, some of us simply can't react on other dance forms because ballet training takes up all our time and energy. Little is left in us to be exposed to other dance forms.

Most of us have a healthy respect for other dances. At the ballet school I attend, our teacher mixes in some jazz and hip hop dancing from time to time. She encourages us to try out ballroom and folk dances. Ballet academies the world over have classes in tap and ballroom for their students to participate in. The great etoiles themselves immerse themselves in different dance forms as part of their training.

Ballet is also very expensive, both for those who dance and those who watch. A simple comparison of the expenses of a Jazz Dance class to a Ballet class could possibly discourage a student. Audiences in the US can pay around $300 for front seats NYCB tickets to the Nutcracker this season. Back row tickets cost $22. [Personally, that's not too high considering the standard that NYCB has.] But Mr Segal fails to see how companies and dancers try to cultivate a closer relationship with audiences and students. Major companies have outreaches and dance classes for those who want to immerse themselves more in the art.

Here in the Philippines, one can watch Giselle and Swan Lake performed by the Philippine Ballet Theater for P300. You can see La Bayedere, the Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet danced by Ballet Manila [directed by Principal Dancer Lisa Macuja-Elizalde] for as low as P150. How's that compared to what you'll pay for a Backstreet Boys concert?

Many artists and directors work towards the dream of bringing ballet into every person's life. Lisa Macuja-Elizalde came back to the Philippines from the Kirov Ballet (one of the world's premier ballet companies) with the dream of bringing the art into every region of the Philippines. Our ballet companies back home create masterpieces that incorporate Filipino culture and art with ballet technique.

As for its place in contemporary times, ballet is trying to move along with the times without sacrificing its form. It does not uphold its history as an excuse to replay what Mr Segal calls a "decaying repertory". Every year, artistic directors, choreographers and managers spend much time and money on finding the next new thing. Every ballet you watch offers the chance to see that ballet in a new interpretation because the dancers are seldom the same and each choreographer and ballerina will have her own interpretation of the dance. This is not an art form written down word for word or painted in a specific way. It is like folk tales handed down from generation to generation. That over the years, choreogrpahers and dancers alike will change how a dance is performed cannot be basis for calling today's repertories forgeries. The sturcture and form remain the same even if the interpretation varies thus the credit to the original choreographer.

Segal's comment as to how ballet turns out "obedient classical atheletes" who are "forever young" is a diatribe of gymnastics, figure skating, beauty pageants and Hollywood careers (in general) as well. This is a social(?) cultural(?) thing that cannot be dumped on ballet. Besides, dancing six hours a day takes it's toll on the body. It is not for aesthetics but practical reasons that dancers and atheletes alike retire at earlier ages than most of us. It is a sad truth of ballet like it is the sad fact that many sports experts expect Michelle Kwan to give up on her Olympic dream because she will be 29 years old.

I am no professional ballerina so I can't say anything on it. But my teacher once is, and she admits that there are problems of drug abuse and anorexia in the professional world. Dancers are under constant pressure to maintain the weight and body required for lifts and the clean lines ballet is known for. However, this problem is again a problem that runs in other sports and art forms.

I disagree entirely with Mr Segal's point that while "Classical music still shakes us to the core" and "...classical theater speaks of the eternal issues that define our lives" ballet fails to move audiences. I watch DVDs and I am moved to tears by particular performances. Of course, not every performance will do so. Even those who are not fanatics and those with no previous exposure to ballet appreciate the art. My mother watched the DVDs I brought home and she loved them! Even my guy cousins were astounded by the clip I showed them of Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella dancing the grand pas de deux in Don Quixote. Little kids still love The Nutcracker and a new generation of balletomanes comes alive whenever parents bring their children to the ballet.

The art form has persisted through difficulties and the changing times while maintaining the technique and form that makes it unique. I bet it will last longer than the chatter generated by Mr Lewis Segal's tabloid style article.

Long live the tutu!

Questioning Ballet

2006-08-10T02:41:00.000-07:00

I received a comment that directed my attention to an article about ballet recently published in America: "Five Things I Hate About Ballet" by LA Times critic Lewis Segal.

"Ballet has given us visions of limitless human potential and a sense of grace as profound as anything we have ever thought, felt or believed. But all too often, it now commandeers a disproportionate amount of money and attention in the dance world and returns only an increasingly self-satisfied triviality."

"When other forms of concert dance — not to mention movies, TV or the theater — are this empty and useless, it's easy to openly dislike or even despise them. But ballet has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall. If people hate ballet, they frequently feel guilty and assume that it's got to be their own fault, that they're not educated or sensitive enough. If only they went more often, read more essays and program notes, joined a company support group …"

"For beginners, the easiest thing to hate about ballet may be the way so many 19th century story ballets depict non-Christian, non-European, nonwhite people. Happy slaves, lustful Muslims, murderous Hindus: They sure don't make 'em like that anymore. But why are we watching this stuff — surely not out of nostalgia for the racism and xenophobia on view?...Classical music still shakes us to the core. Classical theater speaks of the eternal issues that define our lives. But too much antique Western classical dance... simply buttresses a sense of white Euro-privilege by dramatizing how colorfully nasty things are elsewhere."

"Thinking of dancers as beautiful children might seem harmless enough, but in ballet it's part of a system that denies young people any real choices in their lives... Ours, however, too often turn out obedient classical athletes by imposing rules about where to be, what to do, how much to eat, whom to believe in and when self-esteem is deserved or not. It's even worse for the ballet women who starve themselves to match a skeletal ideal and then stop menstruating for the length of their careers. Talk about arrested development."

"Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, "I just don't want to be seen in that 'Swan Lake' "? Does responsibility to the art and audience extend beyond dancing well?"

and Segal ends his piece with:

"Non-Christians and those moved to anger rather than despair by wretched ballet choreography or dancing should try staring at the top of the proscenium arch and repeating words written by George Bernard Shaw: Fall. Fall and crush."

Balletomane that I am, I am probably expected to be outraged at the article and the writer. But as I read it, I found myself only faintly annoyed and mostly amused at the diatribe. I was actually chuckling! Granted, Segal does come up with some some sad truths of the art in question but the delivery is of shock-and-awe irrationality and not thoughtful insight and concern. As Kristin Sloan of The Winger, "It's too bad that the shock value of these statements is more likely to get the article attention than a concerned, caring, fully realized criticism of the art and it's current place in the world."

John Rockwell of the New York Times delivers a calm and rational defense to Segal's piece in "Ballet as a Dance Form Some Just Love to Hate"

"Mr. Segal is the first to point out that his view of ballet is colored by its absence on any significant scale in the Los Angeles area... Had he written 20 years ago, Lewis Segal, a noted music critic for The Los Angeles Times, might have made a similar diatribe about the irrelevance of opera, since Los Angeles did not have a major opera company then, either."
"Mr. Segal’s low regard for ballet is not new... one explanation for his recent rant — that he was egged into it by a journalistic culture that prizes provocation over reasoned discussion — may not be entirely off the mark. He believes this stuff, but not necessarily always with the mocking, strident tone of the Los Angeles Times article."

Rockwell admits to the uncomfortable truths of the art:

"...there is something salutary about his (Segal's) position. There are so many ballet magazines and ballet Web sites out there now that simply assume the superiority of ballet to all other forms of dance that it is nice to have a corrective... To take just one example, there was Jennifer Homans’s denunciation in The New Republic a few months ago of Downtown Manhattan dance as amateurish and childish, largely, it seemed, because it was not ballet... her disdain for those who profess to be dancers without having submitted themselves to ballet training was palpable."
"Mr. Segal’s rant also has historical resonance. When George Balanchine was establishing himself in the United States in the 1930’s, he encountered resistance from those who felt that truly American dance was modern dance in the Fuller-Duncan-Denishawn-Graham tradition, and that ballet was an outmoded European import. Effete too, though the politically correct Mr. Segal does not go there. John Martins, chief dance critic of The New York Times in those years, was one who advanced that argument. Although he later modified his position to embrace Balanchine’s modernism, some balletomanes still disparage him for not immediately recognizing Balanchine’s genius."

and then addresses some of the reasons why ballet is to be hated:

--- “Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in that ‘Swan Lake’ ”? Well, yes. Carlos Acosta, the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theater star, is only the latest to call for modernization and for a de-emphasis on 19th century story ballets. Sylvie Guillem has done the same. Dancers in Europe and the United States yearn for exciting new choreography, and artistic directors do their best to provide it. Mikhail Baryshnikov stands as a one-man symbol of ballet’s (and dance’s) quest for renewal. When it comes to new work (as opposed to fancily modernized new productions of old work), ballet is far more contemporary than opera. Ballet masters and administrators spend half their time searching for the new. Which is not to say that all new ballet is good ballet, but they try.

--- "Fanatic balletomanes resist such change on the very grounds Mr. Segal uses to chide all of ballet. For them anything but classroom ballet technique degrades the form, and a search for relevance is a descent into gimmickry and perversion."

--- "...ballet at its not infrequent best can still be beautiful and can still move the receptive soul as deeply as any other art. Even its hoariest traditions give pleasure, as in the delighted faces of audiences young and old at a good account of “The Nutcracker.” Ballet technique can speak to us today, and not just in Balanchine’s stripped-down modernist exercises, now themselves a half-century old."

Rockwell actually writes a very short response, and I can't help but feel good that he did not allow Segal's article anymore limelight (or space) in the NY Times. Haha.

My thoughts on the matter? Coming up shortly. For now, I just want to point out that Segal does not point my beloved art in any concrete direction for improvement. He just rants. Helpful.

The Defense

2006-08-10T02:19:00.000-07:00

Critic's Notebook
Ballet as a Dance Form Some Just Love to Hate

by John Rockwell

Lewis Segal, a longtime sportswriter for The Los Angeles Times, has written a diatribe against professional football titled “Five Things I Hate About Football.” It deplores a “sport” in which steroid-driven behemoths bash one another about, with no apparent purpose, social relevance, aesthetic pleasure or moral uplift.

Just kidding. Actually, Lewis Segal, a longtime dance critic for The Los Angeles Times, published an article on Sunday titled “Five Things I Hate About Ballet.” Among its sins, he asserted, are that it commandeers a disproportionate amount of dance resources and respect, that it relies on mindless athleticism, that it has lost touch with “the realities of the moment” and wallows in “flatulent nostalgia,” and that it survives because it “has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall.”

Ballet “ignores the present, but it also falsifies its past,” he went on, since it claims a venerable heritage, but opera is far older, and most ballet classics have been altered beyond recognition. Nineteenth-century story ballets are politically incorrect, he writes. Ballet infantilizes its dancers. Mere prettiness has replaced beauty as an ideal for ballerinas. Dance lovers should focus their psychic energies on the proscenium arch during ballet performances and pray, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, for it to “Fall. Fall and crush.”

Mr. Segal is the first to point out that his view of ballet is colored by its absence on any significant scale in the Los Angeles area. Hence my linkage of ballet with football, since Los Angeles is also without a National Football League team. Had he written 20 years ago, Lewis Segal, a noted music critic for The Los Angeles Times, might have made a similar diatribe about the irrelevance of opera, since Los Angeles did not have a major opera company then, either.
(For the record Mr. Segal succeeded me as Martin Bernheimer’s dance-oriented assistant at The Los Angeles Times when I decamped for New York in 1972, and I have barely seen him in the intervening years.)

Mr. Segal’s low regard for ballet is not new. He made many of the same points in a more closely argued, plausibly toned response to an invitation in 2002 from Ballet Magazine to discuss ballet in the 21st century. (He unleashed a few zingers there too, however, as in his crack about ballet’s being the purview of “dancing snowflakes and jumpers with padded crotches.”) So one explanation for his recent rant — that he was egged into it by a journalistic culture that prizes provocation over reasoned discussion — may not be entirely off the mark. He believes this stuff, but not necessarily always with the mocking, strident tone of the Los Angeles Times article.

Although I disagree with him on almost every count, there is something salutary about his position. There are so many ballet magazines and ballet Web sites out there now that simply assume the superiority of ballet to all other forms of dance that it is nice to have a corrective.
To take just one example, there was Jennifer Homans’s denunciation in The New Republic a few months ago of Downtown Manhattan dance as amateurish and childish, largely, it seemed, because it was not ballet. Ms. Homans might paraphrase her argument somewhat more subtly, and her own extremism could have been encouraged by the journalistic culture of The New Republic. But her disdain for those who profess to be dancers without having submitted themselves to ballet training was palpable.

Mr. Segal’s rant also has historical resonance. When George Balanchine was establishing himself in the United States in the 1930’s, he encountered resistance from those who felt that truly American dance was modern dance in the Fuller-Duncan-Denishawn-Graham tradition, and that ballet was an outmoded European import. Effete too, though the politically correct Mr. Segal does not go there. John Martins, chief dance critic of The New York Times in those years, was one who advanced that argument. Although he later modified his position to embrace Balanchine’s modernism, some balletomanes still disparage him for not immediately recognizing Balanchine’s genius.

Despite the absence of major ballet company in the Los Angeles basin, Mr. Segal has seen a lot of ballet over the decades. He surely knows that ballet is indeed trying to adjust to the modern world, to find new thematic and choreographic relevance without abandoning its technique and traditions, however shallow and distorted in Mr. Segal’s view. He could have made the same arguments about traditional ballet’s failings in a context supportive of contemporary ballet. Perhaps he has been soured by the hackneyed touring programs the big ballet companies take into Los Angeles.

“Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in that ‘Swan Lake’ ”? Well, yes. Carlos Acosta, the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theater star, is only the latest to call for modernization and for a de-emphasis on 19th century story ballets. Sylvie Guillem has done the same.

Dancers in Europe (as with the Kirov Ballet’s William Forsythe program) and the United States yearn for exciting new choreography, and artistic directors do their best to provide it. Mikhail Baryshnikov stands as a one-man symbol of ballet’s (and dance’s) quest for renewal. When it comes to new work (as opposed to fancily modernized new productions of old work), ballet is far more contemporary than opera. Ballet masters and administrators spend half their time searching for the new. Which is not to say that all new ballet is good ballet, but they try.
Fanatic balletomanes resist such change on the very grounds Mr. Segal uses to chide all of ballet. For them anything but classroom ballet technique degrades the form, and a search for relevance is a descent into gimmickry and perversion.

One last thing Mr. Segal overlooks or denies is that ballet at its not infrequent best can still be beautiful and can still move the receptive soul as deeply as any other art. Even its hoariest traditions give pleasure, as in the delighted faces of audiences young and old at a good account of “The Nutcracker.” Ballet technique can speak to us today, and not just in Balanchine’s stripped-down modernist exercises, now themselves a half-century old.

Maybe if Mr. Segal weren’t the “sun-kissed Hollywood barbarian” that he self-mockingly called himself in 2002, if he had a homegrown ballet company he cared about with dancers whose progress he could trace, he might feel more sanguine about ballet as an art. With the N.F.L.’s blessings, he might even come to love professional football.

The Offense

2006-08-10T02:11:00.000-07:00

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Five things I hate about ballet
A repertoire that's decaying, danced by the disenfranchised. No wonder audiences are dwindling. It's not our fault.

By Lewis Segal, Times Staff Writer

Right now, there's no major ballet event on the Southland horizon, and instead of a disappointment, that's a blessed relief.

Ballet has given us visions of limitless human potential and a sense of grace as profound as anything we have ever thought, felt or believed. But all too often, it now commandeers a disproportionate amount of money and attention in the dance world and returns only an increasingly self-satisfied triviality.

Yes, Miami City Ballet looked mighty fine in two Music Center programs a month ago. But significantly, the only work created since the dancers' infancy was borrowed from the world of modern dance. In this country, ballet simply will not address the realities of the moment, and its reliance on flatulent nostalgia makes it hard to defend as a living art.

When other forms of concert dance — not to mention movies, TV or the theater — are this empty and useless, it's easy to openly dislike or even despise them. But ballet has cultivated an intimidation factor that acts like a computer firewall. If people hate ballet, they frequently feel guilty and assume that it's got to be their own fault, that they're not educated or sensitive enough. If only they went more often, read more essays and program notes, joined a company support group …

Forget it. Most ballet is every bit as bad as audiences secretly suspect — and it's not going to improve until companies stop conning or shaming us into accepting damaged goods. In the meantime, guilt-free hatred of ballet is reasonable, maybe even necessary.

The first step (as always) is understanding that you're not alone — that audiences are dwindling everywhere, that ballet is largely invisible in the mass media and that nearly a century after impresario Sergei Diaghilev reinvigorated the art in Europe and America with a transfusion of new, high-quality choreography and passionate dancing, companies are desperate to try just about anything else.

So perhaps now is as good a time as any to consider the state of the art as a whole: all the skill in the world and so little else worth celebrating.

A history lesson: The tutu as icon — and armor

Ballet intimidation largely depends on making you believe that Moses carried a tutu, tiara and toe shoes with him from Mt. Sinai along with the Ten Commandments — that classical ballet as we know it has been a pillar of Western culture as long as classical music or the classics of world lit.

Wrong: Next season, Los Angeles Opera will perform a work that dates to 1642, and Shakespeare's heyday was even earlier. But the oldest ballets you're ever going to see originated in the 1830s and '40s — and most of them have been revised so often that the original choreographers would scarcely recognize them.

Bad enough that ballet largely ignores the present, but it also falsifies its past. The problematic "Sleeping Beauty" that the Kirov Ballet danced at the Music Center last season credited 19th century master choreographer Marius Petipa, but it dates from 1952. And the so-called traditional versions of "Swan Lake" danced by New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre were premiered more recently than the radical Matthew Bourne modern-dance adaptation — the one with the male swans.

So don't let the myth of ballet's ancient primacy and long hold on Western culture keep you from openly dissing all that's dreadful in the contemporary perversions of 19th century classics that companies keep merchandising. Forgeries, fake antiques, compromises between the look of then and the technique of now: Whatever you call them, they're the products of ballet's eternal bait and switch, intimidating only for how much millennial moola is spent mounting them again, season after season.

Poisonous exoticism: The serpent among the flowers

For beginners, the easiest thing to hate about ballet may be the way so many 19th century story ballets depict non-Christian, non-European, nonwhite people. Happy slaves, lustful Muslims, murderous Hindus: They sure don't make 'em like that anymore. But why are we watching this stuff — surely not out of nostalgia for the racism and xenophobia on view? It's not the same thing as viewing a movie from a less enlightened age, it's more like remaking one: enlisting the finest dance stars and stage artists of our time to reanimate a corrupt vision.

Classical music still shakes us to the core. Classical theater speaks of the eternal issues that define our lives. But too much antique Western classical dance doesn't even function as metaphor — it simply buttresses a sense of white Euro-privilege by dramatizing how colorfully nasty things are elsewhere. And as the audience for this kind of ballet continues to die out, so should the works dramatizing this offensive world view. When they're gone from the repertory of major companies — available for study on film or video or reduced to their formal pure-dance sequences, they'll no longer be the living embarrassment they are now. In their place, a new, powerful, inclusive classicism or neoclassicism just might emerge. Worth trying.

Perpetual adolescence: Ballet of the living dead

It used to be that only slaves and children were known by just their first names, but with slavery long abolished, dancers seem to be the sole adults on the list. You can find this practice throughout the dance world: on the current TV series "So You Think You Can Dance," for instance, where judges and choreographers always get full identification but the dancers remain just "Donyelle," "Travis," "Heidi," "Benji," "Allison" and the like.

Thinking of dancers as beautiful children might seem harmless enough, but in ballet it's part of a system that denies young people any real choices in their lives. The best foreign training processes and company structures develop distinctive artists through career-long mentoring relationships. Ours, however, too often turn out obedient classical athletes by imposing rules about where to be, what to do, how much to eat, whom to believe in and when self-esteem is deserved or not. It's even worse for the ballet women who starve themselves to match a skeletal ideal and then stop menstruating for the length of their careers. Talk about arrested development.

For the audience, this system produces something well worth hating: dancers forever young (because there's always someone new to replace them when they age) who don't really know themselves but have learned how to move skillfully and energetically while thinking critically about how they're doing — not what. It may be a minority opinion, but a life lived by someone else's counts is the ultimate unexamined existence, and it gives an audience nothing when set to music.

Because this system works like an assembly line, automatic and unyielding, it also breeds choreographers skating over the contours of major scores as if only half-listening, along with ridiculously expensive high-culture events that speak more about the burnout of an art than anything else.

Those pretty maids all in a row may well satisfy an appetite for order, but that satisfaction comes at a high cost. We've given up conventional circuses because we don't want to subsidize the abuse of animals. Isn't it time we extended the policy to the dedicated young men and women at the barre?

Stardom and conscience: The great divide

When we talk about the finest young actors of the moment, we see how they balance commercial and artistic priorities in their careers — doing a studio action film followed by a risky independent drama, for instance, or maybe a stage project. But what recent star dancer has thought the same way other than Argentine firebrand Julio Bocca, who performed conservative rep for ABT in the U.S. throughout his career, then subsidized very different contemporary projects back home in Buenos Aires. Does any star these days lobby artistic directors for better choreography or dare to say, "I just don't want to be seen in that 'Swan Lake' "? Does responsibility to the art and audience extend beyond dancing well?

There's a moment in ABT's pop pastiche "Within You, Without You," when one of the company's most popular male virtuosi has an opportunity to ask himself some of these questions and reconsider why he dances. He performs a shameless audience-courting solo at the beginning of this multi-choreographer showpiece and later, as he waits in the wings for his final entrance, the loudspeakers throb with the George Harrison title ballad — the one about people who gain the world and lose their souls. "Are you one of them?" the song asks, and what would this hotsy-totsy ABT star answer? Is he even listening? Are we?

Beauty vs. prettiness: To have and have not

"Beauty" is a term devalued by overuse in our culture — and in ballet it shouldn't be thrown away on every ballerina with high cheekbones or every women's corps identically dressed in white tulle. Beauty in ballet should be something unique, luminous, even mysterious: dancing that embodies a physical and spiritual ideal, a profound, expressive act rather than just a refined technical feat. But prettiness is relatively easy, a matter of symmetry, smoothness, good taste and a sense of dancing as a form of decoration — of a score, a story, a metaphorical image. And it can be cloying as beauty never is.

The distinction is like the one that choreographer William Forsythe drew at a Dance Critics Assn. conference years ago between dancers and people who've learned to dance. Beware of people who've learned to dance — especially when they spread prettiness like a virus.

In 1992, the Kirov Ballet performed "Romeo and Juliet" in Orange County, the same 66-year-old ballet that the same company will be dancing in the same place in October. In the final scene, one of the dancers cast as Juliet obviously wasn't worried about killing herself for love or reaching out for one last embrace before her death. No, you could see her focused on the process of adjusting her limbs on the bier to make the prettiest stage picture. Star-cross'd body design. If that isn't worth hating, what is?

When all else fails …

The late John Daugherty was a locally based dance critic of remarkable generosity and good humor in the face of bad ballet. But even he understood that there are moments in the theater when a hapless audience has no alternative but the power of prayer.

To those he mentored, he left behind this mantra for such occasions: "Gentle Jesus, descend and save us now," with the last word murmured or whispered with the greatest of urgency.

Non-Christians and those moved to anger rather than despair by wretched ballet choreography or dancing should try staring at the top of the proscenium arch and repeating words written by George Bernard Shaw: "Fall. Fall and crush."

Dance Team Sessions

2006-07-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

will hopefully look like this:

10 prayer and devotion

5 minutes warm-up and pilates

30 lessons/dancing

10 minutes stretching

5 minutes cool down

I feel like the it's all crammed into an hour but since we're all out of shape, this should be a good starting point. Here's to our second season of praising God in dance!

Long Break

2006-05-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

Sorry that I haven't been updating. I went on a leave from ballet class last March to free up time and energy for my finals month and now, it's summer vacation. So I won't be doing any ballet until June or July.

But I'm working on routines for the Dance Team at church. The NYCB Workout and Winsor Pilates is giving me lots of help in making a program that will help us tune our bodies for this year's Cantata. I'm trying to tone down the routines I originally pegged because I think they're a bit much for beginnners...not to mention that most of my dancers will be out of shape because of the summer break. But it's coming around and I expect to have a complete set by June.

I recommend that you visit Kristin's site. It's a wonderful peek into the ballet world. =)

That Delicate Balance

2006-03-04T21:21:00.000-08:00

Last night's class was good, a nice even score between things I did terribly and things I managed to do well or things Ms. Mylene says I'm improving in.

I couldn't coordinate my arms with the legwork in our tombe pas de bourree combi, I still can't get down in splits, I keep sickling, my head is looking the wrong way during some of the barre work (I'm mostly looking at the others because I forget what's next)...Ugh, and all that jazz. Teacher spent the entire of the developpes (three whole exercises) sitting at my feet telling me to turn out and straighten my working leg. Ugh.

But even when you feel like your legs are morphing into lead, even when you want to cry at what seems to be a hopeless case, you keep going on. Between mistakes or just simply looking terrible, it gets really depressing and one can find herself sitting on the floor, cradling her head in her hands (like Diana Vishneva is doing in the pic). But, as Ms. Mylene says, you can get up on your shaky knees and give it a dozen more tries or you can sit there and wonder what your potential is.

And every now and then, you do something right or you improve on something. And in my case, Ms. Mylene makes sure that she points out the good as well as the bad. She congratulated me on being more stable, on keeping my focus even when she's by my side correcting me or when she praises me, on remembering the steps even when she got her verbal reminders wrong, on remembering the previous center exercises, for pushing myself in the training exercises for fouettes and chainnes, for remembering to spot and for not watching myself in the mirror all the time.

And when you get good news, you get a renewed sense of hope. I CAN be better. I WILL be better.

And the night ended with arather novel experience. In class, we all look like we're poised and graceful. Then you start the commute home. I rode on the back of a tricycle last night, clumsily hanging on for dear life, all the exhaust in the traffic-choked Capitol Hills Drive calling on an asthma attack in me. I didn't look so beautiful, graceful, or poised when just moments ago I did. I had to laugh.

Sissonnes

2006-03-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

Svetlana Zakharov: I like her top... =)

I like sissonnes (sp?). We had a new combination for center: sissonne, sissonne, sissonne, arabesque with allonge (I really liked the arms on this one). I could easily imagine us dancing La Sylphide.

And we tried double pirouettes. Tried being the operative word in my case. Rio and Marion nailed it though. Well, another thing to look forward to in the near future. Wohoo for clean singles. But then, those were in soft shoes.

Ms. Mylene was merciful to us today. We didn't have pointes on throughout the entire class. Tomorrow night is sure to be hell though. It's back into toe shoes. I'll probably kill off another toe. I'm becoming a serial killer.

We did two new barre exercises, one of them was petit battement. It's too fast for me. I skip the beating entirely. I look terrible. Then we worked on penches. I'm still somewhere between the 6:10 and 6:15 range. Ms. Mylene had us do it facing the mirror so we could see how far we could go and so we could have something to anticipate. Just keep telling yourself that that leg will get to the six o'clock position someday... That and doing stretches and strengthening exercises.

Stupid splits. Can't get down into them unless I'm so warmed up I'm sweating like a pig. And even then, I feel like I'm ripping my hips out.

But at least I can control my stomach more in the grand battement. I'm not leaning back or front. I'm much more stable even after just a week of pilates. I got a copy of Mari Winsor's Pilates program. I've been doing it every night since. It's a great workout that leaves me feeling the burn in my core. But it makes me feel taller and more supple at the end. And it's just a 20 minute routine so it's perfect for study breaks. Thanks to Jacks for recommending pilates. It would be fun to have someone personally help me with it but my budget can't hold that right now.

I wonder how my two month break from ballet class is going to affect my dancing (or attempts at dancing). I'm looking for ballet schools in the US and Singapore that are near to where I'll be staying with my Aunties. But I doubt the family will be thrilled about me taking classes while I'm there. I could sneak off for the classes... Hmmm...

All in all, I had a great class tonight. I didn't hate the mirror so much. And Ms. Mylene gave me Angela's place on the barre. Now me and Marion lead the ladies through the barre exercises, both of us on oppossite ends of the barre. This might explain why the newbies behind me were lost in the middle of battement fondue. I was a mess. I had temporary, selective amnesia. I couldn't remember what to do for the darn exercise. So sorry ladies.

Gee!

2006-02-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

Before I enrolled at the Turning Point School of Ballet, I naturally researched about the school and its staff. I found minimal information through the internet: Ms. Mylene Saldana used to dance with Ballet Philippines.

After enrolling and about two classes, I asked my classmates. They gave me a little more information about our instructor: She's been a professional dancer since the age of 14 and has trained extensively under various teachers and in various schools locally and abroad. Her mother was a ballerina also. Our school had a campus in Makati and in Cebu. She is also a staff member of other schools in Metro Manila and in Davao.

I was pretty impressed and awed by then. I had no specifics but, shucks, look at her! She's incredible!

Then I got this weird idea to google her again tonight, a sort of break from keeping up with the news about our national crisis. And I found an article published in March 2005. And I got a whole lot of specific information:

"MYLENE S. SALDANA

Mylene started dancing at the age of 6 under the guidance of her mother, Solita Sta. Maria Saldana. In 1987, she was offered a scholarship by the Cultural Center of the Philippines dance school in their summer workshop. Thereafter, she began to take up dancing in earnest. She enrolled at the Radaic School of Dancing (St. Theresa’s College, Q.C.) where she received rigorous training in classical ballet technique using the Royal Academy of Dancing (London) syllabus. There she received outstanding results from an international network of trained examiners. A year later, she was accepted as an apprentice by the Dance Theater Philippines (UP Diliman) and a company member the following year, dancing major roles in the company’s repertoire.

Mylene joined the Philippine Ballet Theater (Meralco Building, Ortigas Avenue, Pasig City) in 1990 and became soloist from 1991-1992. While with the company, she was personally coached by Lisa Macuja-Elizalde and became a finalist in the 1991 3rd Asia Pacific Ballet Competition in Tokyo, Japan where she competed with 300 contestants all over Asia-Pacific.

In 1993, Mylene was a recipient of a scholarship from the Atlanta Ballet School (Georgia, USA). Due to her superb and spectacular performance, she was asked by the director of the Atlanta Ballet Company to be a part of their Educational Outreach Program. In the summer of the same year, she was once again awarded a scholarship from the Joffrey Ballet School (New York, USA) and had the privilege of working with the best teachers and choreographers around the world. She was also invited as guest artist with the Atlanta South Dance Company, Clayton Ballet Festival Company, Georgia Ballet and Agnes Scott University.

Mylene is a bonafide institutional member of the Association of Ballet Academies, Philippines (ABAP), a registered teacher of the Australian Conservatoire of Ballet (ACB), and attendee to the Philippine Ballet Syllabus Years I-VIII teacher’s seminar and an independent dance artist for Dance Forum, a contemporary dance company.

Mylene has a wide teaching and choreographing experience in renowned schools in Manila namely: Turning Point School of Ballet at Celebrity Club (Director), Makati Sports Club, Pink Toes Center for the Performing and Musical Arts Antipolo (Ballet Head) and Fairview, O.B. Montessori Center, St. Stephen College, Radaic School of Classical Ballet, Miriam College, Assumption College-San Lorenzo, Child’s Place, Multiple Intelligence International School and Brent International School. She is also a visiting teacher and choreographer at the Royeca Ballet School in General Santos City and Davao City."

Oh wow! That's my teacher?!

The Distant Threat =)

2006-02-25T22:06:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to think of an excuse to wearing socks 24/7 inside our house when I go home. Mom is going to kill me when she sees my feet. Two nails are no longer attached to the nail bed by three-fourths of their area. I have three nails going black too. And the blisters. And the wounds. This was one of the reasons Mom didn’t want to pay for my ballet tuition. She said I’ll just ruin my feet. Well, I have. But I still think it’s worth it. I'm hoping that the weeks I don't attend ballet class (because of final exams and thesis papers) will give my feet time to heal. If two weeks isn't enough, I'll have to face Mom's wrath. She really likes my feet. She thinks they're very pretty. Is this a Mom thing or is it just my Mom?

Last night when classes were canceled, Fiona and me satisfied our deprivation by holding our own class here in the dorm. I taught her the barre exercises since I’ve memorized them and then some of the center exercises. She’s still not familiar with all the terms so it’s hard for her to catch up in class. She was satisfied at understanding and memorizing three barre exercises: Plié, Battement Tendu and Rond de Jambe. And she was looking forward to joining me when I practiced them over the week.

Imagine her dismay when Ms. Mylene announces that next weekend, she’s teaching us a whole new set of exercises. Flabbergasted is hardly the word.

Class was good. I’m getting really chummy with pirouettes on my right leg from fifth and fourth. My “lefties” still need cleaning up and I still can’t find my center when I do releve passes on my left leg. But just as I was beginning to love them instead of loath them, Ms Mylene challenges Marion, Dione, and me to work towards double pirouettes. Ballet class resembles a song in round robin. Except in this case, you begin one thing while you’re still in the middle of something else.

We also did training exercises for fouettés and chainés. Chainés turns to the left are hell. I’m not a left turner. I get lost in the middle of the floor. That or I start doing it to the right again. But that didn’t suck so much because no one’s a left turner in our class so we were all uniformly messy to look at. Ms. Mylene stopped the music and asked us, “What is happening? You’re all all over the place.” She made us do it twice before she gave up and told us to practice that for next class.

I still can’t go over on my left. So the pique arabesques on my left were another waterloo tonight. What am I going to do with this leg and foot?! Doing it on my right leg is fine. I could go on and on. Sigh. Splitting with my left leg in front is a piece of cake. Doing splits any other way seems impossible but, fine, patience Krissy and you'll get there.

You know that ugly feeling where you feel like you’re the worst student in the class? It’s nice to not feel that all the time now. There are lots of newbies in class. I’m evil, I know.

Class Cancelled

2006-02-24T22:18:00.000-08:00

Ugh! Our President declared a state of emergency, classes were suspended on all level of education, Mom wants me to get out of the capital, and ballet classes were canceled.

I spent the entire day, draped on my bed, doing stretches every now and then. And then I'd attend to fleeting academic modes that got me through just four pages of Nanparametric Stat.

I want ballet! =(

What gives?

2006-02-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

My Achilles tendon hurts whenever I do exercises for my arches. Is it supposed to do that?

So far:

March: Concentrate on strengthening arches and calves for releves and improving core strength for turns and balance.

April: Concentrate on flexibility in hips and in lower back.

May: Work on frappes and nonexistent extensions.

June: Work on jumps. Should be able to do decent grand jete.

New Look for New Challenges Ahead

2006-02-20T01:40:00.000-08:00

The other template, as lovely as it was, was getting rather tedious. So I hope you (my fictional reader) enjoy the new look. It needs tweaking I know but I'll have to do that later on.

Ms. Mylene has taken us from two days a week of center work in pointes to having all our classes in pointes from start to finish. Of course, we do warm-ups before slipping our toes shoes in so my arches aren't complaining all that much.

Barre work tunred out to be more difficult in pointe shoes. We have to releve to pointe instead of demipointe and all the battement frappe and degages are killing us all. WE're sweating and grunting like pigs. But we're all having great fun. The new reality of how weak your body is creates another challenge of trying to strengthen it until you can do even if just the barre exercises right.

Ms. Mylene spared us the horror of battement degage devant. We almost fell to her feet.

I never seem to strike the balance between my sides. My left leg and foot were stronger than my right side at the beginning. But now, my right leg is the one who can really sustain that pointe work and I have a wonderful arch that helps me during the center work with those pesky arabesques. It looks like I overshot the strengthening exercises on my right side so now it's stronger.

Meanwhile, the left side has compensated by being more flexible and supple. My left side used to be so stubborn during stretches. Looks like I overshot the stretching on this side.

Blisters were scraped open during the class. I forgot to bring my tape along and I was too shy to use my classmate's tape liberally. So now, I have three bandaged digits which give me hell in the shower. Never. Ever. Forget your toe tape!

Haha. I did a single, CLEAN! pirouette! With my right leg as the working leg of course. The sad thing was I couldn't repeat it. Durg! I have a nasty habit of whipping my foot back then front during the turn. It's like I'm excited to do foettes which is such a high ambition for one who can hardly perform a single turn. Pirouettes from fifth are hell. I like them from fourth.

2006-02-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

We've graduated from Saturday Pointe Class to Friday AND Saturday Pointe Class. Geez, my Achilles tendon is killing me and I've successfully murdered two more nails. We tried nailing pirouettes on pointe but I landed on my butt after spinning half of the way. Butt sore but at least I got around by 180 degrees which shouldn't be so bad compared to not being able to releve and turn at all.

Oh did I mention the blisters? Yeah, I have five as of latest count. Where in the world are they coming from?! I'm taping all of my toes already and using a spacer. All this padding calls for serious experimentation. I'm thinking the bruised toenails and blisters are obvious signs that I haven't gotten the right "concoction" of padding yet. That or I really need new toe-pads.

I still love ballet.

2006-02-04T07:16:00.000-08:00

Our 2006 Ballet Curriculum

Barre

Plié (Ecarté)

--- tendu to 2F/grand plié/side stretch to barre/side stretch away from barre/1A-2A-allongé+rise/tendu to 1F/2 demiplie/grand plié+rollover+rise/stretch forward/stretch back/tendu to 2F/swivel to effacé/plié on 4F/tendu back +stretch back/plié on 4th/tendu front+demiflex/stretch front+tendu front/close to 5th/2 demiplié/grand plie+rollover+rise/port de bras barre front side/port de bras barre back side

Tendu

--- 3 tendu heel, on third tendu point. do to front, side and back/demi plié+rollover+rise balance in bras bra

Battement Degagé

--- Start from 1F. degagé to 1F, degagé to front, degagé to 1F, degagé to back (2x)/degagé to front (4x)/degagé to back(3x)/degagé to 1F. Reverse./Plié+rollover+rise, balance in first.

Rond de Jambe

--- Start from fifth./Rond de jambe a terre en dehors 2x, plie on third/cloche to back, retiré passe to front(3x)/Rond de jambe en l'air (F-S-B), close back. Repeat reverse.

Battement Tendu

--- fifth. to front (3x), swivel, close fifth. fifth to front (3x), swivel, side, close back. fifth to back (3x), swivel, close fifth. fifth to back(3x), swivel. close back. to side (3x) swivel to barre, swivel back. close back. to side(3x), swivel away from barre, swivel back, close front.

Developpé

--- coup-de-pied, releve passe, developpe to side hold for five counts, close to fifth (4x) do to back and front, 4x each.

Battement Frappé

--- Front, Back, F, B, F, Side, B, F, B, F, B, S, F, B/do one set without demipointe making sure to strike floor then another set on demipointe.

Battement Fondu-Developpé

--- start on fifth, prep to demipointe/fondu>devant+demiflex+demipoint/ fondu>a la seconde+demiflex+demipoint/ fondu>derriere+demiflex+demipointe/close fifth, pas de bourre/inside leg to attitude as you swivel, ponche, recover to arabesque, close front. repeat.

Grand Battement

--- start in fifth. throw front, point, close, arms in fifth. cloche, arm to arabesque, close back. throw back, point, close. cloche, arm to fifth, close front. throw side+arm in second, point, close front. degage to side, fondu+arm to bras bra, throw side+releve, close fifth, full port-de-bras (F-Br-B-S) releve and full port-de-bras (S-B-Br-F)

2006-01-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Pictures do you a world of good. They don't only stroke your vanity (there, I've confessed) but they help bring you inspiration and encouragement and help you improve yourself especially when you're a beginner at ballet where you should begin at the age of 9 not 19.

I took a couple more shots of my feet tonight, being urged on by pretty "broken" shanks on my pointes that now cooperate with me.

Here's a non-turned-out coup-de-pied. I couldn't hold my turn-out on pointes when I first worked on my pointes. Plus, the shank is all-new and hasn't broken in.

Here's a coup-de-pied that has shows me I have more turn-out this time. But it tells me my turn-out needs more work. The shank is friendlier.

A etrechat that shows I have to go over more and I keep bending my knees.

A full shot that tells me where I need to improve: arms are crazy, knees and thighs aren't pulled up, I'm slouching, I'm leaning back, and my eyeline is low. Well, I was just warming up...

I just liked that one. Bad turn-out though. Heck.

My favorite for this shoot. That's me in fifth, from a weird angle. I have this weird thing with my arm though. I think that's fat.

2006-01-28T03:25:00.000-08:00

Hey, what do you know? My shoes broke in today. See the shank is hugging my arch!

It's great to have them working with me instead of working against me. I'm not sure if it's just psychological but I feel more balanced, more supported, and I'm having an easier time springing up.

I'm fresh from an exam so I decided to skip ballet class tonight. I just want to lie down and let all these post-exam dregs ebb out so that I can move on in life. It's a little sad but I'll be back in class this Friday and that, my friends, is something I live for.

Enjoy It Ladies!!!

2006-01-25T23:26:00.000-08:00

Okay, my legs are trembling from six sets of eleves and two sets of releves. I'm taking this thing seriously because my ankles are so weak.

Last Saturday, Ms. Mye started training us to do clean single pirouettes and attempt doubles. I went red in the face trying so hard and the other ladies were grunting and all. Good thing Ms. Mye says, "Ladies, I want you to enjoy pirouettes and not be terrified about attacking them. You'll get there in time." Man, she nevers fails to encourage.

About my pirouettes, I can so singles but they're rarely clean plus I'm slow on the spotting so after about six sets of singles I'm slightly tipsy. I'm cheating on the attempts to double as I start hopping to get me turning.

We have new barre work this year and it's good stuff. We have faster combinations and more strength training for the ankles. I can balance on first and second demi-pointe so that's another thing to celebrate.

Okay, just a quick update. G2G.

Second Post!!!

2005-10-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

Yey! There, it's looking, err, website-like. A couple more adjustments here and there, a tagboard and my profile...then it's set to go.

It took me the entire afternoon, between chores and watching our pregnant dog give birth, to come up with this. I'll be moving my Studio worthy entries from the Porch to here some other time.

For now, I'll just stare at this thing. Then, to bed. I'm wasted.

Under Construction

2005-10-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

I've decided to decorate this place before opening it to the public. Posting is a requisite to decorating here on Blogger so here goes.