uncoy.com | la vie viennoise

Rather amazingly the New York Times, David Brooks manages to argue from both sides of his mouth.

He is against the bailout of the big three auto companies, but he is for the bailout of the banks:

Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be.

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

This just doesn't make any sense.

I've just shot quite a brilliant show - Nikolaus Adler's Oedipus is Complex. I got some good shots but I missed a lot of the most powerful sections while shooting. Was I not paying attention? No, I was paying very close attention and watching my shots go by while withholding fire.

Boris Nebyla lets loose in Nikolaus Adler's Oedipus is complex
Shot with Canon 20D and Canon 50mm 1.4 1/160 sec f2.2 ISO800

What happened then?

Shutter noise. Oedipus is Complex was a live event and my friend Jörg was shooting a film version. So what we agreed with producer Nicolaus Selimov was:

• no shooting in quiet spots
• no rapid fire bursts (not something I'm inclined to do anyway - I pick my moments)
• minimal number of photos except in very high volume sections

And following this prescription:

• the performance was not disrupted by my shooting
• the photographs are quite good

But I did miss a lot of the strongest emotional moments with the performer alone on stage. And some of the sections which I do have could be even better (but I had a choice of three images instead of ten).

So both inspired and frustrated by this evening I went camera browsing for the first time in a couple of years (I've been very happy with my 20D, particularly since I put the Canon 50 MM F1.4 on it). I started by making a checklist for the perfect camera for dance photography:

Here are the camera requirements for dance (or classical concert) photography in order of priority:

Oedipus is Complex begins like Blade Runner with a dramatic voiceover - full of darkness and light.

From a crashed and cutup Volvo on the right hand side of the stage runs a red carpet across the full stage. Three austere single beds each under a single flourescent long hospital bulb. The bare brick walls of the Odeon distant in the dim light. A ruin of time.

A rich and jaded male voice intones a monologue scattered full of such phrases:

"I am a rat"
"The filth of the city"

In the distance, the sound of black rain.

Homunculus Theater 2008 Oedipus is Complex: opening dance

A beautiful young woman in a white blouse and black skirt drifts on and stares at the audience. A sixties Rolling Stones type song - think Paint it Black - starts to play and the woman begins to fling herself to the rhythms. She is gradually joined by another six dancers all convulsing with equal force.

At the end a blond man (Karl Schreiner) with the dangerous looks of Billy Idol at his prime remains alone with the young woman. The narrator tells the story of their love, as Laius bends Jocasta over the bed to take her crassly from behind. An ironic contrast to the narrator's beautiful final phrase "the earth moved" - a moment full of truth concerning the origin of children and the nature of love.

Oedipus is born from between Hein's legs as she sits on the right front bed with Schreiner. Plop, Kun-Chen Shih flops to the ground. A prophetic voice intones about how he will kill his father.

Kun Chen Shih born as Oedipus with mother Anna Hein

Two of the dancers (Karin Steinbrugger and Amadeus Berauer who alternate between dancing and observing, like a miniature Greek chorus) take the young Oedipus away and raise him.

When Oedipus returns, quickly enough a mass fight between the full cast starts to a soundtrack of soaring 80's pop. The fight ends in a head butt from Kun-Chen Shih to Schreiner, with Schreiner sprawled dead at the front of the stage.

Homunculus golden girls Martina Haager,
Anna Hein and Karin Steinbrugger mourn the fallen Laius

Man or beast. Where is the boundary between us? This is a theme that Damien Jalet often explores on the boundary of his larger pieces with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

On stage Damien Jalet live on the boundary between man and beast. His contortions on stage have a sinister aspect. He rolls and crawls, often ending in a fierce growl.

Tonight he took this theme and devoted the evening to transmutation between animal and human.

Damien-Jalet-Three-Spells

The opening piece began with two mythical creatures with grasping mouths doing some strange dance of love and combat, kissing and biting one another. The movement was front lit throwing up macabre shadows on the wall behind.

Eventually one of the white furry animals perished and the remaining animal attacked a supine young woman, who gradually struggled back against the beast and stood up. She was wearing a black veil and jewellery. Her translucent black silk top revealed a gorgeously proportioned body.

Jörg Haider was the first person I met in Austria outside of my girlfriend's family.

Anna was dancing at the opening of the Carinthian Summer Musical Festival in July 2003. I had been in Austria for about two days before the festival. We'd had time to go swimming once and then it was off to the lake and Anna's performance there.

We were both thinking about the dance - mainly about her costume and Anna's hair. She'd had to get her head shaved for the asylum scenes in Lapinthrope. Wigs, scarves, hats were all proposed to make hide her shaved head. In the end the bare head prevailed (it's a lot easier to dance modern without something precarious glued to your head). With a woman as beautiful as Anna that summer, there's a lot to distract the audience from the length of her hair.

On the way there, I heard Haider would be there, in his role of Landeshauptmann to open the festival.

Of course, I'd heard of Jörg Haider before. Even in Canada we got news of the Austrian politician who was supposed to be a new Hitler, threatening the rise of a fourth Reich.

Based on what I'd read in the press, I expected to find a brute - either foaming at the mouth and shrieking like Hitler or a portly sadist like Goering.

Instead, an elegantly attired fortyish and athletic man in an immaculately tailored Italian suit rose and spoke for over half an hour. If Haider had notes, he didn't need or use them much. It was the first time I'd heard a long speech in German, outside of the vituperative extracts from Hitler's rallies.

jorg haider speaks

Haider's voice was resonant and clear, the structure of his sentences as well tailored as his suit. Little acquainted with the German language at that time, I was only able to follow the phonetic balance of Haider's rhetoric.

The audience was as rapt as I'd ever seen at the speech of a politician. From Haider's end there appeared to be little grandstanding - none of the whipping up of the crowd that so cheapens many politician's public speaking. Just an engaging speech.

Like most young Carinthian women living in Vienna, Anna had an obligatory loathing of Haider. Later I learned why from Astrid. If you didn't profess anti-Haider sentiment, you would instantly be blackballed back in Vienna. You would be ghettoized as an undesirable Carinthian.

Margaret Wallman had a strange and wonderful life. Where others would have seen curses, she found blessings. In 1938 where she was the very popular ballet director, the Direction of the Vienna Staatsoper summarily dismissed Wallman on the grounds of her Jewish origins.

Wallman hardly missed a beat. She emigrated to America but ended up in South America running her own dance company for some of the happiest days of her life. When Europe had stabilised after the war, Wallman returned in 1948 to Milan. Her prolific career as an opera director took Wallman regularly to Salzburg and Vienna.

Between times she found time to choreograph Greta Garbo's dance scenes in Anna Karenina.

For the Berührungen festival, choreographer Renato Zanella, another former Staatsoper ballet director, decided to tackle Wallman's not uncomplicated life story. Zanella's path through Wallman's life is impressionistic, sketching out what Zanella believes are the key moments of her spiritual and creative path.

Margarete Wallmann in her days as a dancer

A long hagiographic proflle of Alexei Ratmansky, mainly about his tenure as Artistic Director of the ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre, appeared in the New York Times last month: Russian Revolutionary.

Alexei Ratmansky at Bolshoi rehearsal

I remember seeing one of Ratmansky's early choreographic works in Canada. He was an independent at the time. I wasn't all that impressed. It was a small piece with just a few dancers, and somewhat pretentious.

A few years later, almost out of the blue, Ratmanksy got the call to join the Bolshoi as Artistic Director. The post had become musical chairs for grownups. I was there for the end of Yuri Nikovlaevich Grigorovich, Vladimir Vasilyev and Vyacheslav Gordeev. Alexei Ratmansky has brought a certain stability to the post, remaining there for five years. Curiously the main stage of the Bolshoi has been closed most of that time

And during his time in Moscow, some of the dancers have lambasted Ratmansky in the press.

Older Bolshoi stars didn’t sympathize with Ratmansky’s desire to introduce new work or update fossilized 19th-century classics. (“ ‘Swan Lake’ is dead,” Ratmansky told me one day, shaking his head. “I wish I could change it, but it would be suicide.”) The popular principal dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze, whose picture was in the Samsung ad on the front of the theater, was widely quoted as saying that none of the Bolshoi stars respected the artistic director. Ballerinas made faces behind his back.

I can just see Kolya (I remember the year Nikolai joined the Bolshoi Theatre and I remember the first two seasons when he had his first small solo roles) hitting back. Nikolai lives for the great classics.

Moreover, there is nothing fossilized about the Bolshoi versions of Swan Lake. The version current when I was in Moscow as Yuri Grigorovich's strong restaging. Even if they have gone back to a more traditional version, Swan Lake has not been stagnant, but regularly renewed.

The lack of respect makes a certain amount of sense. Ratmansky admits himself that "Russians always need strong leaders" and that this isn't his style:

It will be five years of running the company. From the outside it seems like everything was good, we got really good reviews, the tours were very successful, but I’m not sure the rebuilding of the company will last. Big companies are very complicated. And I know I’ll be losing something of myself if I keep doing this job. I have no time for my own work. As a public person I always have to be perfect, I have to pretend I know the answers. I can’t pretend I know all the answers anymore. The Russians always need strong leaders, but to be an honest artist you have to have doubt, or be willing to entertain doubts.

I'd like very much to see some of the work Ratmansky created while in Moscow. Created might be the wrong word, as many of the works seem to be recreations of lost works, like the "Flames of Paris". Ratmansky in the end - even in the short piece I saw - was always about deconstruction. Rather than the matter itself, Ratmansky wanted to look at the illusion: Meta-choreography.

To my mind, the whole meta and deconstructionist trope is the most worn out and the most cliché of all the subjects. Who doesn't know that art is an illusion by now? Or heard a thousand times that all matters are relative. Better passion and truth or truth and beauty, some values beyond deconstructing the form itself. Too easy.

Even if Chip Brown's article is almost Soviet in its heroic and reverent tones, it's great to see substantial and in-depth dance writing in the main stream press.

We need more of this.

Fortunately I don't have to live in Texas and get emails like this young woman:

It seems like every day I am inundated with email forwards, usually from church members, extolling the virtues of our nation's leaders and the current war.

Dead Iraqi Civilians

The hypocrisy of it is not lost on her:

What really gets under my skin is that these emails are, nine times out of ten, from the holier-than-thou types who go to church six times a week and spend all of their spare time there as well. The type that won't let their kids watch the Disney channel because it's too violent. The type that scold adults for saying "shoot" or "darn" because it's just a substitute for a "bad" word....They're the ones that are always sending me these emails about how wonderful it is to bomb cities full of women and children because of a lie. They're the ones talking about how wonderful the leaders telling us those lies are. And they're the ones that are blindly supporting a candidate who openly advocates more of both.

Hopefully more Americans and more Christians are awaking to the catastrophic consequences for an entire people. It is incredible that this blatant land grab - frankly akin to the Third Reich's bloody occupation of Poland - is taking place every day as we speak.

My post about Palestinians and Indians remains as valid today as it was then. One can now make the parallel to Iraqis and Indians, with Americans as themselves, a century later.

It's a good thing that there is finally hope that the American military will be back in safe hands next year. But there's a ways to go before Barrack Obama is elected.

This was my fourth choreolab in Vienna. Except it wasn't in Vienna. For some reason, the Vienna Ballet Club moved their marquee event to St Polten. Now St Polten is fine but it's over an hour from Vienna. I missed the Friday night premiere so I can't tell what attendance was like for that night, but on Sunday the crowd was very, very ballet, apart from the Hungarian ambassador to Austria and a few other political luminaries.

Una Zubovic - Lisa Cano in Vesna Orlic's Parfum

Nothing against St Polten, but please bring choreolab back to Vienna, to the Odeon or Museumsquartier and to a wider public. choreolab should not be a private event for the Staatsoper inner circle and dancers.

The evening was very short running just over an hour with six choreographies. Gone were the past years of incredible forty five minute works from Vanessa Tamburi or Patricia Sollak. We were treated with only miniatures in this year's choreolab.

• The implosion of the music business beginning strangely with F.D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Peter Drucker's management analyss. The article concludes with case studies of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Peter Gabriel discussing in a serious way what might replace it.

  Despite any claims about deceased actors who snoozed through their Alzheimer's dementia in the White House, the Soviet Union failed because their economy tanked. They went bankrupt in a foolish glut of military spending trying to convince the U.S. that it was a equal or superior military force. Now the U.S. faces a similar situation, in a world without cold war arms racing, the U.S. outspends all the nations of the world combined on it's military. This is completely unnecessary, a loss of treasure that could be used for the good of all, and directs the nation into needless conflicts that are not "defensive"in nature. Ironically the same mindset that bankrupted the U.S.S.R. is now bankrupting the U.S.A.

• album cover art through a case study of the Hipgnosis set who created many Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and 10CC covers. The desmise of the LP has lost us an art form.

  
  Hipgnosis Album Art

• a review of current and past war propaganda. "Terror" verus "Shock and Awe".

  Here's an excerpt:

  When the colonists opposed the British, and dumped tea, it was called a "party". Sounds like fun. They, who combine to fight back, we call the "axis of evil". But when we are lucky enough to pull together 3 or 4 countries that still agree with us, we call them "an alliance of the willing."...
  
  It is war. People are killed in order to allow one group of rich men to prevail over another less rich group. We don't fight for honor, though the men who fight have the best intentions because they don't know any better. They follow the bouncing ball and sing the song, ooh rah, and people die while my finances, peace of mind and safety quickly fade.