Diana Vishneva and Vladimir Malakov in Giselle

Diana Vishneva and Vladimir Malakov in Giselle

RP sends 1st bet to prestigious ballet competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.