New York, New Yorker
Claudio Pinhanez 

 

Week 4: the dead choreographers society

After spending a week in New Orleans, attending SIGGRAPH, the huge computer graphics and digital effects conference, it was somewhat a complementation and a contradiction to see a collection of choreographies by Alvin Ailey. The first two, "Blues Suite" and "Pas de Duke" were sometimes beautiful, but either felt old or athletic. And athletic dance is always a crowd-pleasing, unfortunately, lots of applause for gymnasts. In "Memoria", a couple of absolutely bright choreographies involving a large number of dancers. But it was in "Revelations", a piece from 1960, that I could feel the power of his work. The combination of a live "gospel" choir, with non-obvious, non-athletic, beautiful choreography is absolutely gorgeous. In a moment, a solo dancer is led by a bass singer, "I Wanna Be Ready", his voice echoing through the theater, and the movements of the dancer, dressed in white, inside a white circle on the stage. Was it dance? Was it music? Was it magic? All of the above.

Leaving the theater, I start to envy the ability of dance to preserve and reproduce pieces like "Revelation". The envy came from my theatrical soul, the envy of not having the opportunity to watch performances of Artaud, Stanislavsky, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, or Nelson Rodrigues in their original views, or plays directed by Bob Wilson 20 years ago. The text captures the soul and mind of the playwrighter, capture them for the eternity, but the director's craft is lost forever, as well as the actors'. In some ways, the actors' input has no way to be redone or recorded, but direction and scenography can be preserver, in many ways. But in theater, it is always from ground zero, maybe this is the beauty of theater, maybe its weakness, in this age of reproduction and brand.

After going to SIGGRAPH, I am more hit than ever by the fear of branding, global business, consumerism, and social divide. There, I watched, perplexed, the keynote speech of Ray Kurtzweil, an eulogy to the future supremacy of technology of brains interconnected to computers, of eternal exponential growth. I was appalled by the lack of consistency, of true critical thinking, but it seems that geek America is more fascinated with itself than ever. Even worse, not only technology, but business growth is the word of order. Even more surprised I was after, talking to other people, who seem to accept, and, in some ways, rejoice, the inevitability of the divide among poor and rich, as long as they are not poor themselves. More interesting, they do not see the fact that, at some point, the tide has to turn, that revolution, or war, will come, in one way or another. I decide that I have to be in the right side of this war, when it comes.

Then walking through 5th Avenue just confirms this feeling, today, that something is really going wrong. Brand, brand, brand, a Disneyland of brand. Reading a book, I discovered that as much money is spent in direct mail as in advertisement in TV. In other words, if all of us refused to read/accept direct e-mail, we could free funding for a completely new set of TV stations (maybe even more money for arts and sports), or to double the spending in production. That's the logic of capitalism, better to send to the garbage can tons of paper (for the hope/certainty of a single buy) than to apply the same money in the production of content, even when interrupted by commercials. How a system such as this can be the most "efficient"?

Funny thing, to watch "Grease" on TV. The story of a pure girl that concludes that being more sexually aggressive is more fun. Would any studio produce this story today? It seems OK in the seventies, to talk about free sex, but not in the 00's. We are back to puritan days, and while walking at night around Broadway, I'm surprised by 300-people, mostly teens, in a political manifestation, bravely and passionately shouting slogs against free sex, divorce, sex before marriage. Maybe it's just part of a preparation for the Republican convention, maybe it's a sign of the times. Or of the futures.

I went to see the movie "X-Men", in a multiplex with 25 screens, but showing only 8 different movies. Nothing like a system able to provide "choice" to people, wasn't this the complain in the former Soviet Union. I entered in the X-Men for lack of option, and found some good story moments (coming probably from the original comics), coupled with a marketing structure of pre-creating a sequel. The movie does not end in any way, no villains are killed, no solutions are found, it's just the first chapter of a collection of sequels. I hope it doesn't continue, the screenplay is so blatantly designed to assure future revenue that it deserves to be forgotten. Not even memorable special effects, only the incompleteness of quasi-series such as "Star Wars", "Starship Troopers", and now, "X-Men". It's a pity that there is almost no natural selection with the some many mutants in the movie.

I go back home and watch "Tron" on TV, with its still interesting visuals, maybe too blue, ingenious, but still fun. Preserved for eternity, this bit of early computer graphics, sort of visionary, in its dichotomy between blue and red people. Well, it was produced before the end of the cold war, blue is good, red is evil. Red-evil was a bad choice of color for the socialists, anyway. What will be the color of the next revolution?

Following into my "The Dead Choreographers Society" weekend (no disrespect meant), I went to see "Fosse" on Broadway, a compilation of his most interesting choreographies (presumably). It's classic Broadway, some very good moments, a lot of circling pelvises, but hey, that's Fosse. No deep connection, no deep ideas, not even weaker ones. In many ways, watching Fosse's "All That Jazz" is much more rewarding and revealing about him, as much as the ideas of a choreographer can be more revealing that his own choreographies. He was a genius, as much as Alvin Ailey was, and I just regret not seeing a complete piece from Fosse. Anyway, it would probably be a long way to get to the magic of Ailey's "Revelation". No negative judgment intended, just that only few of us are fortunate enough to create a master piece.

 

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1