And more grad school joy

So not only is there the intellectual stimulation of being in grad school (I’m gettin’ me sum book larnin!), as exemplified by Bill’s visit today, there’s also the dancing side of things (a false dichotomy there between book larnin and dancing, but anyway…)  As in, I really think I’m getting a little better at this thing.  There are the incremental things, and then there have been two Moments.  Just like Bill’s visit is in itself enough to make it worth my time to have gone to grad school, likewise with these two Moments.

The first was last quarter in Abby Yager’s modern class (she danced with Trisha Brown.  Kinda nifty, don’t you think…)  It was just a moment of standing, which sounds so anti-climactic, but it wasn’t!  If you want details, let me know–I’ll give them in nauseating quantity–but suffice to say, it is a goal/hope of mine to have a moment of clarity like that again in my life.  If I’ve done it once, that means I’m capable of it, and I might be able to do it again, right?

The second was today in 8:45AM ballet.  (Yes, that’s right, 8:45AM ballet.  And I chose to take this class–it’s not required.  And I think that ballet before noon should be illegal.  Anyone smell a whiff of masochism?)  I’ve been taking class on pointe, because I like to be a spaz, which tends to make my pirouettes into a seeming petit allegro, as I hop my way out of them…  And even worse, this combination asked for an en dehors turn finishing by extending the working leg into arabesque as the standing leg plie-d.  Not my specialty.  But I would swear that what happened was I did two pirouettes, came to my final facing, stopped turning to balance on pointe for a moment, then smoothly rolled down into arabesque.  Now I know that physics says that’s not quite what happened, but it sure felt like it–and I have witnesses, too!

So two spectacular dance moments, Bill, and all my wonderful classes too.  Yes, grad school has been worth it.  But now, back to working on the midterm for the Postmodernism class.  Ack!

Let me pause and wipe the drool off my face…

And why would I need to dry my chin?  Just the minor matter of sitting in the same room with William Forsythe and listening to him talk for 90 minutes…  He’s amazing, articulate, engaging, a genius, and I am reduced to grabbing a towel and saying “wow”–would that I could come up with a response as articulate and engaging, but no, it’s drool and “wow.”

Since I don’t have great stuff to say, how ’bout what he said?  He talked about the lack of dance readership–not reading about dance, but looking at a dance itself and reading its structure and narrative–having some understanding of its dialogue.  The lack of this is a problem for the future vitality and survival of the field–when his now defunct Ballet Frankfurt was being reviewed by the powers that be as to its future existence, he said that “no one came to our defense because no one knew what to defend.”  Further, that “if we are the only experts, we are not doing ourselves a favor.”

So he is working on projects to make structural elements legible, material that people can look at and see the relationships, linkages, through-lines, and so on that occur.  You can learn a bit more about it here.  As part of this structural exposition, he also made the case for the classicism of his work.  It may look wild and chaotic and unrelated to classical ballet and classicism at first, but it is built on classicism, carrying those principles into a new evolution.  He got up and gave a demonstration of this process–it took a few seconds to do, would take pages to try to explain, but it was beautifully clear, showing how he builds upon classical ballet’s concepts of geometry and interrelations of the body by taking those concepts and continuing them in a “if this, then what” sort of process.  Take my word for it, it was a wonderful and convincing demonstration.

And as for the act of performing: “You want to give people the gift of your attention–I don’t want to see Arthur Rubenstein sit don at the piano and not pay attention…I ask of my dancers that they give everything they know about the art at that moment.”  Amongst all the demands of the world, it is so easy to lose the moment, not pay attention, give less than what one can do–his talk was a wonderful reminder of our real aims.