For dancers, dance teachers, and those who love dance. – Page 47 – A website for dancers, dance teachers and others interested in dance

Ode To Nut Vets

December 4, 2014 by 4dancers

Film_strip_original — Milwaukee Ballet’s Valerie Harmon, photos by Rachel Malehorn

by Rachel Malehorn

Dancers! The troops of Nutcracker, we

Aspire to revisit, we strive to be

A tireless force of Christmas cheer

To fill the stages year after year.

We dance in roles we’ve always known

From smallest mouse to Prince on Throne.

What keeps us warm onstage as Snow,

Or feeds our need to improve…to grow?

Please don’t forget: show twenty-two

When you prepare for your pas de deux,

More like than not, in row twenty-three

A smile and two shining eyes will be

Watching you, this child enthralled.

Ballet! No over-crowded mall

Or cartoon special on TV

Could fill her heart with so much glee.

It’s old to you but new to her,

The costumes, lights and sets confer

Grand majesty and pomp and ‘stance;

For you, it’s just a boring dance.

No matter who you are or where,

We dance for audiences there.

They buy their tickets to watch our shows

But no one in his seat will know

Exactly what we have in mind;

To our thoughts, they are completely blind.

And so! An opportunity:

To reinvent my inner chemistry.

Today I sat up straight and said,

“The steps are marching through my head,

But PNB and ABT, SFB and Joffrey

All with different choreography.

But one thing never changes: score!

Tchaikovsky’s genius doesn’t bore…

Then I craved it, had to know:

“What other music for this show?”

And lo! (O thank you Internet)

My uttermost desires were met.

Perk up – my plums, my Cavs, my flakes,

And listen to this mix…those breaks!

A soundscape filled with classic tunes

Yet unexpected flair; I swoon

And smile to think of this instead –

Onstage, these songs inside my head:

We are a dancing multitude, we

Are diverse as art should be.

Each Sugar Plum herself unique,

Why not an inner techno beat?

And so, my friends, just for your pleasure,

I have compiled this list of treasures.

If you need an inner smile,

I hope these will be worth your while.

Variations on “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”

Pentatonix – A la Bobby McFerrin, this version features an arrangement almost entirely comprised of voices

Berlin Symphony Orchestra – this “Red Baron” remix has a sweet driving beat and plenty of synth. If you like Manheim Steamroller, you’ll love this.

Pomplamoose – If you’re feeling spaced out and would like to indulge in your otherworldly mood, listen to this version. You will feel as far away from this world as you already feel from reality.

August Burns Red – When you just need to get pumped up, and your favorite thing is lots of electric guitar.

Duke Ellington – His version of Sugar Plum Fairy is called “Sugar Rum Cherry,” and sounds just as sweet. This is part of his well-known arrangement of the rest of the Nutcracker Suite, which I would recommend if you need to class it up.

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones – For you, if you get inspired by listening to an incredibly talented banjo player.

Modern Mandolin Quartet – If you prefer mandolins.

Flex and the Bully – Ok, some of you might not know what dubstep is. I might describe it as an intravenous caffeine injection. Weird to listen to before a performance of The Nutcracker? Depends on who you are.

Woody Phillips – Love power tools? Love ballet? Listen to this!

The Barking Dogs – Love dogs? You get the idea…

Glove and Boots – Well, this is just silly. Gorilla sings Sugar Plum?

Brian Setzer – This isn’t the Sugar Plum Fairy, but it is a pretty great big band medley of Nutcracker favorites.

The Invincible Czars – A band worth listening to, especially if you are a sucker for bands that have formidable “shticks” that actually work. For Indie music lovers and people who love to hear classics totally reinvented and performed by talented, hip, young musicians.

Blue Claw Philharmonic – And finally, this album has as many options as you could ever want: for Sugar Plum alone, there is Dance EDM (Electronic Dance Music,) Jazz Big Band, Country Dance Music, Music Box (as in a tiny little music box given to children,) Dubstep, Grand Piano, Mashup, Metal Dubstep, Trap Hip Hop, Classical Guitar, Metal Remix, and Hip Hop.

Whatever your inspiration for your Nutcracker season, I hope at least these selections will put a smile on your face and allow you to listen with fresh ears to Tchaikovsky’s brilliant score. Happy Holidays!

Milwaukee Ballet’s Nutcracker will run from December 13th to December 27th.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Contributor Rachel Malehorn received her formal training at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School and continued on to graduate from the prestigious Nancy Einhorn Milwaukee Ballet II Program.

Since joining the Milwaukee Ballet, Malehorn has enjoyed performing works created by Val Caniparoli, Petr Zahradnícek, Mark Godden, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Jerry Opdenaker, Matthew Neenan and Alejandro Cerrudo. She has also performed as a semi-finalist in Palm Desert for the Dancing Beneath the Stars Competition, participated in the Northwest Professional Dance Project and danced with Texture Contemporary Ballet.

This is Malehorn’s eighth season with the Milwaukee Ballet.

Grier Cooper’s WISH: The Writing Process

December 3, 2014 by Rachel Hellwig

by Grier Cooper

The first advice I ever heard about writing was to write what you know. This made a lot of sense to me, particularly with fiction, because it’s much easier to describe things we’ve experienced ourselves. WISH is a book I’d been wanting to write for a long time, because I wanted to share things that have shaped who I am. Ballet and other forms of dance have always been a part of my life so it felt very natural to use ballet as a setting for my story. Almost every little girl (and many adults too!) dreams of becoming a ballerina and for those who never experience it firsthand it’s an absolutely fascinating world and a dramatic contrast to another major theme of my life: growing up in an alcoholic family. I wanted to find a way to weave the two themes together to create a story of empowerment.

I’m a very visual person so I always begin a project by creating a vision board. I find pictures in magazines that resemble the characters and settings I imagine and put them together in a giant collage. These vision boards hang right next to my desk so I can look at them when I need to. It really helps to have that visual cue; it may sound weird but I swear I hear my characters talking. I also write character sketches for all of my characters before I begin writing. I think it’s important to figure out your characters’ motivations, likes, and dislikes before putting them in action.

I began writing WISH many years ago, in between writing a bunch of other things. The first draft took me a little over a year to write. I wasn’t working with an outline; more of a vague sketch of where I wanted the story to go. I’ve since learned how helpful it is to outline first – I could have saved myself a lot of time and headache. A good, solid outline makes it much easier to look at things from a big picture perspective before you start writing. For instance, you can tell beforehand if the transitions between the chapters flow well.

The actual process of writing a story is a sort of indescribable magic. I don’t think it’s the same for everyone. The only way I can describe it is it’s as if I am watching a movie in my mind. I see and hear everything going on and create the narration. The words flow from somewhere inside of me (my head, my heart, both?) and I write them down as they come. It’s incredibly exciting to have a story take form, even more so if you reach a state where the words just flow. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to that flowing state…some days things flow, other days they trickle or drip.

Once the first draft was done it felt good to have a finished project, but a first draft is nothing close to polished (although I’ve heard that John Irving gets pretty close). I knew my story needed a lot of work so I spent several months editing it and patching up holes in the plot. Then I put it away in a drawer.

It helps to give a manuscript time and space before you work on it again. It’s as if you see it all with fresh eyes. It was actually kind of painful to read the book at that point—all I could think was oh my God! This is terrible! I have to fix it! It’s incredible to see how much we grow as writers over time—even in just a few short months. That’s one of the things I love best about writing…not only do we keep improving the longer we do it, we can keep at it for the rest of our lives (unlike dancing professionally).

I was also lucky enough to work with a group of local writers – a stellar critique group I found through the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). It’s important to get feedback from other people about your work, especially people who know the craft of writing and write in your genre (in my case, young adult). For the next year and a half, we worked together, pounding out the chinks in our books, one piece at a time. It was fun to meet with other writers around a big table, share yummy treats and give and receive advice about how we could improve our work. My critique partners asked a lot of questions, often about things that I hadn’t thought about.

Even after the work I’d done revising and implementing some of their suggestions, my novel still didn’t feel finished. That was a little hard to sit with, but I wanted the book to be as good as it could possibly be. I tinkered more, focusing on a few last pieces that weren’t quite there. This is going to sound counterintuitive, but I wrote the beginning last and it was the hardest part! I read about what makes a good beginning; I found a lot of helpful tips online, mostly from agents and editors. I reworked it lots of times until it finally felt right. I gave the entire book a final pass by reading it out loud, word by word. Errors or clumsy language are much more obvious when you say them out loud.

Of course, finishing a novel is just the beginning; there’s still a lot of work to do! I decided to shoot my own cover photo (I’ve worked as a commercial photographer for many years). Even creating the photo required a lot of planning in terms of costumes, makeup, hair, and lighting. I also do my own marketing and PR, which means – you guessed it – a whole lot more writing!

I’m now busy writing HOPE, the next book in the Indigo Dreams series. You can find me most days sitting at my desk working on it…after I walk the dog.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Grier Cooper has performed on three out of seven continents with companies such as San Francisco Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, totaling more than thirty years of experience as a dancer, teacher and performer.

She blogs about dance in the San Francisco Bay Area and has interviewed and photographed a diverse collection dancers and performers including Clive Owen, Nicole Kidman, Glen Allen Sims and Jessica Sutta. She is the author of Build a Ballerina Body and the new ballet-based young adult novel, WISH. Visit Grier online at http://www.griercooper.com

The Washington Ballet Takes On “America’s First Great Ghost Story”

December 2, 2014 by 4dancers

Washington Ballet AD — Septime Webre, photo by Dean Alexander

by Matt de la Peña

It’s a ghoulish Halloween morning in Chicago (winds reaching up to 50 mph, hail projected for the afternoon) and Septime Webre is talking America’s “first great ghost story.” The Washington Ballet artistic director, now in his 15^th season at the helm of one of the country’s most versatile dance companies, is in the midst of his latest creation, an adaptation of Washington Irving’s spine-tingling classic, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Webre has found a distinctive niche during his tenure at WB, a company he took over from the legendary Mary Day in 1999. His vision of The Nutcracker — set in 1882 Georgetown — has become a must-see event of the season. The Washington City Paper called his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “an incredibly creative spectacle, pure and simple.” His adaptations of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises have proved to be ambitious ventures, offering a brand new vision of two American classics.

Webre and I spoke at length about Sleepy Hollow, his fascination with literature, and his plans for Halloween. Below are excerpts of our interview.

Can you tell me about Sleepy Hollow and how it came to be?

So about five years ago I launched a project called the American Experience. It’s a project to develop full-length ballets using great works of American literature. It seemed to me that our American story has not really been told in the ballet medium. [The Washington Ballet] started by adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, then last year I adapted [Ernest] Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Sleepy Hollow is the third installment about America’s first great ghost story.

That’s interesting you say that our American story has not been told; it seems odd that we, as Americans, wouldn’t take more interest in our own stories when it comes to ballet.

American ballet came into its ascendancy under Balanchine and the aesthetic has been abstract — a modernist aesthetic. So much of our stories are still stories written by old dead white guys. They’re so Eurocentric. The [American Experience] project is an effort to develop works in a different direction. It’s been fascinating to build these new ballets from scratch. In the case of the Hemingway and in the Gatsby projects, those works are so rich; it was a process of editing out information. In the case of Sleepy Hollow, it’s a thrilling, twenty-page short story. It’s very concise. The process has been the opposite; it’s been one of exuberance and extrapolation. It struck me early on that the headless horseman is haunting Ichabod Crane but one doesn’t know why. So I’ve developed Ichabod’s back-story. In a moment of anger, Ichabod picks up a sword and decapitates [a British soldier], essentially creating the Headless Horseman. The haunting is a Karmic guilt that Ichabod carries with him through his life. He moves to Sleepy Hollow to escape that torment.

Your fascination with 19^th and 20^th century literature is well known. You’ve created The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and you’re in the midst of tackling Sleepy Hollow. What intrigues you about those particular time periods? [Read more…]

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Or, Why I Still Love Nutcracker)

December 1, 2014 by 4dancers

atlanta ballet's nutcracker — Alessa Rogers as Marya in The Nutcracker, 2012. Photo by C. McCullers

by Alessa Rogers

For most ballet dancers, the holiday season means Nutcracker as much as it does Santa and presents under the tree. It’s a tradition- something that we know will be there, that we can count on every December. But we can also count on that dreaded moment of walking into any coffee shop, bookstore or mall from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day and hearing the Waltz of the Flowers playing on repeat. It’s enough to drive many dancers absolutely crazy. Nutcracker is not without its flaws and the first Nutcracker rehearsals of the year- some as early as September- are always the scene of good-natured grumbling. Dancers love to hate Nutcracker. But despite the endless repetition, the strain on our bodies after many consecutive shows, being away from our families for the holidays and the music that we can’t get seem to get away from, maybe this year we should have a different perspective on Nutcracker, one that’s a little less Scroogey.

Benefits Of Nutcracker For Dance Companies

After all, ballet companies depend on Nutcracker to keep them afloat. 72% of total tickets sales for the entire 2013-2014 season at Atlanta Ballet came from Nutcracker tickets. That’s over two million dollars in revenue that can go towards putting on financially risky but perhaps more inspiring (to dancers) repertoire later in the season. While we might wish that audiences would crave those expensive mixed rep shows and cutting-edge choreographers as much as we do, maybe we should try to be more grateful that Nutcracker, at the very least, fills the seats.

Last year, almost 50,000 people came to see Atlanta Ballet’s Nutcracker. In an economy where support of the arts can be sluggish that is incredibly gratifying. People want to come to this ballet! So while I might groan when I hear the Sugarplum music on every other commercial on TV, when the curtain goes up I have to remember that the people in the audience chose to be there and it is my job to make it memorable. It should be an honor to the dancers that the audience chose to spend their holiday at the ballet. This might be the only ballet they see the whole year and it might very well be the first time they have ever seen ballet at all. So regardless of if this is my 30th and last Nutcracker of the season, it is something that I remind myself before every single show- that for somebody out there, it is their first time. You never know how one performance might affect and inspire someone. Think of how many of us dancers got our first exposure to ballet by seeing the magic of Nutcracker!

Benefits Of Nutcracker For Dancers

[Read more…]

Finis: A Look Back At Dance Photography

November 30, 2014 by 4dancers

by Christopher Duggan

Jacob’s Pillow Dance just announced four dance companies that will be performing at the festival next summer 2015: Martha Graham Dance Company, Michelle Dorrance / Dorrance Dance, Jessica Lang Dance and New York Theatre Ballet.

I have photographed three of these dance companies at the festival in past years, and I’m looking forward to photographing more dance next summer. A look back below.

Jessica Lang Dance

See more by visiting Christopher’s blog entry on Jessica Lang at the Pillow.

Martha Graham Dance Company

See more by visiting Christopher’s blog entry on Martha Graham Dance Company at the Pillow.

Michelle Dorrance / Dorrance Dance

See more by visiting Christopher’s blog entry on Dorrance Dance at the Pillow.

Contributor Christopher Duggan is a wedding and dance photographer in New York City, the Berkshires and beyond. Duggan has been the Festival Photographer for Jacob’s Pillow Dance since 2006. In this capacity, and as a respected New York-based dance photographer, he has worked with renowned choreographers and performers of international acclaim as well as upstarts in the city’s diverse performance scene.

Christopher Duggan, Photo by Julia Newman

He photographs dancers in the studio and in performance, for promotional materials, portraits and press, and he often collaborates with his wife, Nel Shelby, and her Manhattan-based dance film and video editing company Nel Shelby Productions (nelshelby.com). Together, they have documented dance at performances from New York City to Vail International Dance Festival.

Christopher Duggan Photography also covers the finest wedding venues in the Metropolitan and Tri-State areas, in Massachusetts and the Berkshires, and frequently travels to destination weddings.

His photographs appear in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Knot, Destination I Do, Photo District News, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Dance Magazine, and Munaluchi Bridal, among other esteemed publications and popular dance and wedding blogs. One of his images of Bruce Springsteen was added to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and his dance photography has been exhibited at The National Museum of Dance and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

His Natural Light Studio (http://www.christopherduggan.com/portfolio/natural-light-studio-jacobs-pillow-photography/) at Jacob’s Pillow is his most ambitious photography project to date – check out his blog to see more portraits of dance artists in his pop-up photo studio on the Pillow grounds.