Nervous intensity
Speaking of the ballet “Agon” – and we were – I noticed this quote from the man cast in the original, Arthur Mitchell, about the qualities of his partner Diana Adams:
Diana’s nervous intensity made the whole pas de deux work because it’s not so much the difficulty of the steps or how flexible you are, it’s the precariousness.
I hadn’t seen that when I wrote the post. But that’s a succinct way to put what I was driving at.
But I wonder whether today’s audiences see or care about the difference. For one thing, you can’t notice a difference if all you’re seeing is today’s often-heartless technical wizardry, in which all sense of what I called “vulnerability” and Mitchell called “precariousness” has departed. Maybe even the idea that “precariousness” would be a value in ballet is foreign to today’s audiences. Maybe they choose technique over everything else.
But one of the values of YouTube as I see it is that it allows new generations to see for themselves and compare, even if it’s only in two dimensions rather than three. I often notice with all the performing arts – and that incudes music – that there are many young people commenting at YouTube who seem to notice and mourn what has been lost, while many others are just puzzled by the technical imperfection of the olden days.
I certainly am one who mourns what is lost. Starting several decades ago, I became far less willing to attend theater, for example, as well as movies and dance. Not only had prices skyrocketed, but quality was uneven at best and often much worse than that, even for highly-praised productions. Art exhibits are suspect too, not only the newer art generally but the relentless PC message of the words posted on the walls to explain even (or perhaps especially) the older art.
No doubt some would say I’m out-of-date, and/or remembering a past that never was. Perhaps these feelings really are part of getting older, and then old. But I think I’m talking about something very real, something that can be seen with the eye and felt with the heart.
It occurs to me I was a bit unfair (though I wasn’t being critical) on the last thread, saying that this is commonplace. The difference here is Neo is saying you can sense the impact at the time on Youtube from the physical strain of the performers. My comment about Lenny Bruce seeming tame would apply to a youtube of him as well, since you can’t go back in time to when obscenity was shocking. Since this involves Stravinsky, his Rite of Spring supposedly caused a riot at the premier, but now no one bats an eyebrow at it, and even if the premier could be seen on youtube it wouldn’t make much difference.
My point still stands, though, that pushing boundaries has diminishing impact unless the boundaries keep getting pushed farther, which itself gets to be tiresome. A couple of years ago we had King Lear played by Glenda Jackson. Shocking! And now this year in NY we’ve got both Hamlet and Timon played by women. Yawn.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
It seems to me I heard the same lament when digital music albums replaced vinyl – that the tiny imperfections of the acoustic recordings were what made them more “live” than the somehow-techno-babble-stripped-down audiotapes, and then even more-so CD recordings.
I do remember a friend in college who had “cutting edge” audio-tapes, on the big 6″ or better reel-to-reel machines.
My ear is not good enough to hear a difference.
Neo, have you watched much ice dance? Did you see the free dance of Chock and Bates this season? I think you’d like it.
A general observation, as I know nothing about ballet and have never watched as much as two minutes of one. But …
Everything looks acrobatic and power driven nowadays. I was at a basketball game the other day. Even the damned national anthem performance (nowadays a ridiculous and pointless exercise, apparently meant to encourage feelings of solidarity among people who have no use for or truck with each other normally) was an occasion redesigned to showcase the ability of a 13 year old phenom to produce a prodigious volumetric output along with a supernaturally sustained wailing vibrato.
The tastes of the denizens of the Kingdom of Noise continue to rocket onward toward whatever destination they are ultimately aiming for or descending into.
Who knows where, or what, that might be.
I pull up to a traffic light in winter, and my SUV starts reverberating with the pulsating bass of some giant loud speakers coming from somewhere. I look around. There are only a couple of smallish compact cars nearby, with windows rolled up and little motionless troll-like occupants peeping just over the steering wheel. I’m not sure which vehicle it is, until I notice the side windows of one of the cars vibrating. This is insane. You’d have to be a suicidal moron to do such a thing; probably drugged almost insensible to even withstand the volume; and completely devoid of even the slightest awareness of the better possibilities life offers.
They are going to be deafer, and sooner, than my ex rock band [local types] acquaintances.
This is a race to the bottom. The question is : “Why?”
DNW – why not? What ELSE is there in life, other than sensation? And if you like some sensation, the only way to like it more, is … higher volume. More intensity, Further from the “normal” in whatever off-normal direction is being taken. Music, dance, art … politics, too. The further from “normal” (boring? Not-Special?), the better.
We were at a ball, with normal ballroom dancers from the local Nitra Academy of Dance, excellent group dancing. Which I like more than ballet, and these young not-yet pros did lots of fun looking steps better than amateurs, but not as polished as the current competitors in the dance competitions. It always looks like the pro-dancers are involved in the agony of perfection, rather than the enjoyment of moving with their partner. Looking for those thrills of victory, by agonizing during the dance, rather than waiting for the agony of most-likely defeat.
The sterile near-perfection of the gymnastic style of ballet dancing means a loss of emotional connection. They don’t look like they are enjoying each other – but seldom do ballet dancers look like it, and that’s a big reason I don’t like ballet so much.
Today most folk want the easy, perfect life; and easy, perfect parties; and easy, perfect jobs. With meaning, but not too difficult.
Neo contrasts the old vs new ballet: something in the choreography to be struggled against, a heightened tension and stress. Now there is no such thing.
Is there really the thrill of victory, when it comes so easy, so naturally? In Maria’s circus movement, there is a visible amount of arm trembling, hinting at how unnatural the movement is, and how precise the timing must be. Despite her fantastic training and flexibility. But I see no joy in achieving it, nor much real connection with her partner.
Her commentary about the steps – are you there for me? will you follow me? support me? can you handle me? The ballet, as an answer to these questions, makes more sense and is better. Too bad I saw the old one first. One must be trained to see and know of the questions, before being able to appreciate the answer. Like 42.
At the ball where we danced with lots of smiles, there was also a performance of sport pole-dancing – part gymnastics, part erotic strip club movements. One of the top Masters of Europe, a lovely Czech woman, did a great, erotic, gymnastic routine on the slanted pole with two large circles at top and bottom, where she could sit (like on a moon’s crescent). I taped it on the phone. We deleted it. Too erotic.
A lovely woman spreading her legs, widely and invitingly, was beyond our boundary of public sharing, but that boundary is being pushed out. What is to be private? One of the boundaries being pushed is ending intimacy thru public sharing of all your moments. I’m sure too much sharing leaves many feeling empty … and suicidal / addiction prone.
Roger Scruton came to be a conservative partly thru aesthetics. I suspect Neo’s regret at the tradeoff made in ballet, more gym – less love, is part of the push away for PC progressive boundary pushing.
Pole dancing is on its way towards being an Olympic sport — where the gym will become ever more important, and the erotic motions, like leg spreading, will lose their sexiness.
Tom – your description of the decline of dancing from enthusiastic sharedjoie de vivre into solitary sterile eroticism is very perceptive.
I have a good friend whose ear was good enough to hear the differences between reel-to-reel; cassette tapes; vinyl albums; and live, plus the cassette live recordings he made (high cost amateur rig).
Yes, a big audiophile, before PCs were popular (~1979 ish).
He could also hear the differences in various phonographs. Plus, he designed and built his own special tone arm for a high end record player. He didn’t like CDs for many years, but the CD tech “got better” with filters and modulators, so the sound was smoother.
Usually the biggest differences in sound were because of the speakers. But tho I could usually hear the differences, based on familiar songs, I often found I like one set of speakers for some songs, and the other set for other songs.
I don’t like the tinny MP3 sound, but that’s what my kids listen to. They don’t like the full CD sound!
Tom Grey on January 28, 2020 at 8:17 pm said:
… I often found I like one set of speakers for some songs, and the other set for other songs.
I don’t like the tinny MP3 sound, but that’s what my kids listen to. They don’t like the full CD sound!
* * *
I can actually understand that some speakers would have properties more copacetic with some songs than with others, probably based on instrumentation and how it was recorded.
As for the kids — it’s all about what you’re used to.
The history of Western music is replete with those stories, as the use of the full diatonic scale and harmonies slowly developed.
The shift from natural scales to the tempered one was positively nuclear.
One of my favorite cartoons shows a violinist at a pulpit announcing, “I will now play something that was wildly radical in the 17th century but is conservative and spiritual today.”
(A cartoon by Calvin Grondahl)