dance | The Casual Blog

July 28, 2013

Farewell to Cory Monteith of Glee, and a new pop science book on the unconscious

Last week I was greatly saddened to hear of the death of Cory Monteith, the actor who played Finn in the TV show Glee. For a couple of years (though less so recently), Glee was one of my happiest guilty pleasures, a sweet spot on the largely mindless and boring TV firmament. I wouldn’t care to defend Glee as wholly original. It is, at one level, mostly about recycled pop songs, dance video conventions, and predictable plot lines. But they sing and dance with more than just precision. The total effect is of youthful energy and exuberance. Pop music that I never much cared for when it was new becomes fun and sometimes even moving.

The existence of gays who were sweet, talented, and creative has been a major point of Glee, and it has pressed for tolerance for gays as a central value. How much has this affected the American zeitgeist? Some, I’ve got to think. The poll numbers of Americans supporting gay marriage have gone from negative to positive during the show’s run. Gay marriage is legal in several states, and the Supreme Court has gotten on board. Making anti-gay jokes and comments is becoming less socially acceptable. This is progress.

Cory Monteith was probably the least flashy of core Glee cast in terms of good looks and song-and-dance talent. But he served as the anchor, allowing those around him to emote without floating into outer space. His relative normalcy gave the show more texture and sweetness than a simple music video. He was a point of stability.

It was surprising, at least to me, to learn in his obituary that he “struggled with substance abuse,” and his death was attributed to a combination of alcohol and heroin. Plainly, he was a talented and hard-working actor. It simply is not possible to put out a weekly TV show without lots of hard work, and the supercharged Glee production numbers have got to be incredibly taxing on actors and crew alike. Monteith performed consistently at a high level, so it seems safe to say that he was not completely controlled by addiction. I don’t know more than that about his back story, and I won’t speculate. As I said, I’m sad such a talented young actor is gone.

I hope his death will encourage others to avoid addiction to dangerous drugs, but I also hope it will nudge forward the shift from a moralistic view of addiction. The “struggling with addiction” language in the news reports suggests a more medical view of the problem, instead of the traditional junkies-are-evil-zombies view. Glee reruns will give testimony for years to come that Monteith was so much more than that.

There’s still a lot we don’t understand about our brains, but also so much we’re learning. I just finished a new book on this fascinating subject this week: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow. Mlodinow, a physicist by training, covers some of the same territory as Kahneman and Gazzaniga, taking an evolutionary perspective on the brain and describing research into conscious versus unconscious processes and the social nature of the human brain. But his emphasis is different, and in some ways more practical.

For example, he spends little time lamenting how little of our lives are lived at a conscious, rational level, instead emphasizing how useful and efficient our unconscious processes are. Yet we normally overlook this part of life or deny the extent to which it is critical. We trust our reasoning processes without noting their common biases and errors. We rely on our memories without accounting for their imprecision and shifts. Even our most basic perceptions and emotions are prone to manipulation and error. But Mlodinow is not a pessimist. Like Kahneman, he is ultimately hopeful that understanding how prone we are to mistakes and delusions can help us improve our lives.

The photos above are from my latest photo safari to Raulston Arboretum on Saturday morning. As usual, there were new things blooming, including some spectacular lilies. Also there were quite a few butterflies, including a gorgeous tiger swallowtail.

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May 26, 2013

A fun Memorial Day weekend on the Outer Banks — eating, talking, running, looking at wild horses and birds, and reading

Jane and Keith’s beach house in Corolla, NC

Again this year, my sister Jane invited us out to the Outer Banks for Memorial Day weekend, and we happily accepted. The beach is a good place to relax and restore. After weighing the pros and cons, we decided to drive out in Clara, who with her sporting heritage rides rougher than the Suburu Outback, but is also prettier and more exciting. Traffic wasn’t bad. We went at the speed limit plus 9, and the heavy complement of state troopers along I-64 tolerated the overage.

Charlie the Boogle

We got to Corolla about 9:30 p.m., and everyone was up and happy to see us. We enjoyed a glass of Keith’s merlot before bed. We also met their new dog, Charlie, a friendly beagle-boxer, or boogle. The camera made him a little nervous.

The next morning was sunny but chilly and windy. Keith prepared an egg casserole and fruit salad for breakfast, and we caught up on family news.

We also talked a bit about technology and biology. I briefed them on some of the progress on understanding the human microbial community, which I read more about in the piece by Michael Pollen in last Sunday’s NY Times. Pollen wrote, “It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes . . . . To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this ‘second genome,’ as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents.”

This is mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting stuff. One researcher says “we would do well to begin regarding the human body as ‘an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.’” We’re just starting to understand some of the links between human health and microbial health. It’s a huge mistake, which most of us have previously made, to think of all germs as things that should be exterminated. Certain bacteria are essential to health, and problems in the microbiome appear to relate to chronic disease and some infections. Human health can be thought of as “a collective property of the human-associated microbiota . . . that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.”

The Pollen article is a great introduction to this subject, which is also discussed in The Wild in Our Bodies by Robert Dunn.

After breakfast, I went out for a run with my nephew David, now 13 and growing fast. David has fallen in love with lacrosse and is getting lots of playing time as his team’s goalie, so I figured he would probably run me into the ground. Instead, he developed a major cramp problem, and so we did more walking than running. I learned about his prize-winning science fair project, which involved growing and measuring characteristics of a fast growing plant called brassica rapa.

Keith cooked an amazing lunch – cucumber soup and pasta asparagus salad. Then we loaded up in the 4WD sport ute, and drove north on the beach looking for wild horses. Past the lifeguard station, we turned left into the sand roads through the gnarled trees and bushes of the maritime forest. We found several horses. It’s cheering somehow that these big animals can make their own way in small wild areas surrounded by development. We also saw a fox.

I had time for some reading in the afternoon, and got a good start on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who died recently. This is his first and most famous book, and perhaps the most famous work of African literature to date. I was immediately hooked. The prose combines the muscular economy of Hemingway at his best with the vision of Faulkner, with an overarching tenderness and humanity. The story is about African village life, which, it turns out, has many of the same emotional components as our lives.

I also read more of More Balanchine Variations by Nancy Goldner, which is a book about various Balanchine ballets. Goldner is a generous-hearted critic, and she loves her subject. It’s so hard to bring dance to life other than by dancing, but she comes close.

One other major bit of reading was chunks of the complete poems of Wallace Stevens. I came close to reading them all last year, before shelving the project some months back. Stevens is challenging, and not uniformly great – some of the poems seem mannered or even mad. But the greatest poems are both beautiful and profound. My favorite is still Sunday Morning, which is a sly, subversive, arresting, sensual, and humorous. I memorized it, and it still gives me goosebumps at the end, with its powerful image of “casual flocks of pigeons make/ ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

Stevens proposes this joy in nature as an answer to religious asceticism, and it works for me. It also makes me look at the world with different eyes. For example, in back of Jane and Keith’s beach house, purple martins are still numerous, and still flying fast feeding on insects. It was a pleasure to watch them.

We played a new beach game on Sunday afternoon. It’s one of the many variations on horse shoes, but a good one. Points are scored by throwing a string with weighted balls on each end around a bar. They couldn’t remember the name of it, but no matter. It was fun!

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May 19, 2013

Some good news re my eye, and seeing the beautiful Giselle

On Tuesday it was time for another checkup at the Duke Eye Center to see how my left retina was faring. I’d noticed recently that I was seeing better out of that eye – still blurrily, but enough to be of some practical use. But I’d been cautioned by my rockstar retinologist, Dr. M, that because of the scarring from my first operation, there was considerable uncertainty as to how the healing process would progress, and the weeks just past would be a critical phase. I tried not to think about it.

At the appointment, after a four-hour wait (aargh!), I was pleased to find that I could read some of the letters on the eye chart (which I could not at the last visit) and tell with confidence how many fingers the PA was holding up in front of me. After studying various images of my eye and peering into it with his magnifying instruments, he said, “I like what I’m seeing.” He told me we’ll need to operate in a couple of months on my new cataract and do a bit of clean up work, but it looks like my vision will improve. This is good.

On Friday I saw the Carolina Ballet’s last ballet of the season, Giselle. This is one of the most famous works in the canon of classical ballet, but I’d never seen it, and was excited to finally make its acquaintance. The production was beautiful, and also unexpectedly touching.

The ballet is a simple, then tragic, then supernatural love story. Giselle is a sweet peasant girl who is loved by a fine peasant boy but wooed and won by a stranger who turns out to be a Count in disguise. When she finds out that the disguised Count is engaged to an elegant royal lady, she goes mad (very like Lucia), and dies. In the second act, she joins a large group of other deceased jilted maidens, known as the wilis, who dance beautifully together and wreak vengeance on cads such as the Count. But it turns out that the Count really loved Giselle, and she comes to his rescue at the end. Happy ending! Well, sort of – Giselle’s still deceased. You’ve got to get into a romantic frame of mind to enjoy this, but you almost can’t help it.

Lillian Vigo was a beautiful Giselle. At her best, Vigo is masterfully elegant, particularly in adagio passages, and she was lovely this evening. She has the most amazingly graceful long arms! She was sweet and vulnerable, engaged and engaging. It is amazing how much emotion a human body can convey without speaking!

Richard Krusch was a surprisingly complex Count Albrecht, by moments either outgoing or withdrawn. Krusch is a marvelous dancer, but he he can at times seem remote. This evening, he seemed completely and intensely present, and stunning, not only in his athleticism, but in his human engagement.

I also admired Cecilia Iliesiu at Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis. Ilesiu is powerful in every respect; she commands the stage. She immediately established that the Wilis were no joke — even if they have a funny name, they were not to be trifled with. The wilis were numerous and gorgeous in white gowns. The effect of 20 ballerinas in tight formation, hovering on pointe, is both pretty and kind of scary.

On Sunday afternoon I went to see Giselle a second time. I wanted to see Lola Cooper, our pointe shoe sponsoree and friend, perform the peasant pas de deux. It seems quite technically demanding, and Lola rose to the challenge. I thought she looked wonderful.

It’s interesting how different dancers can discover and express very different aspects of the same role. I thought Jan Burkhard was superb as Giselle. Her dancing was fully realized and wonderfully expressive, ranging from sweet tenderness to the agony of madness. It was really moving — I got goosebumps. I came away with a new respect for her range and depth. In this performance I also particularly enjoyed Marcelo Martinez as the Count, who took some real chances and was thrilling, and Lara O’Brien as Myrtha, who was regal and mysterious.

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March 9, 2013

An eye exam, a veggie burger, and a new ballet

It was a busy week at work, with many new issues popping up as I tried to address the existing backlog. I also made a visit to the Duke Eye Center for an exam in preparation for my eye surgery next week. My ophthalmologist, Dr. Prithvi Mruthyunjaya, seems both brilliant and humane, but his patients have to spend an awfully long time in the waiting room. This was also true of Drs. Denny and Casey. Is this a retinological tradition? Are damaged retina patients more-than-usually patient? Dr. M. described my prognosis as “guarded.” At a number of levels, I felt not so great.

On Friday Sally and I did dinner and a ballet. For dinner, we made our first visit to Chuck’s, a new place on Wilmington Street that features in gourmet hamburgers. We quit eating cows many years ago, and so initially assumed Chuck’s was not for us, but then were told on good authority that they made the best veggie burger in town. It was, in fact, really good. It had flavor and pleasing, chewy consistency. And it didn’t fall to pieces.

The Carolina Ballet led off with a new work called A Street Symphony by Zalman Raffael. It was set to hip hop music, which, as almost everyone knows, is music emphasizing pulsing polyrhythms and rhyming gritty lyrics, and deemphasizing melody and harmony. I developed a taste for hip hop a few years back, when I found the Sirius radio hip hop channels, and found it to be good music for driving a sports car. I liked the raw immediacy and experimental transgressiveness. It is also, of course, good dancing music, but hip hop dancing seems worlds away from the ballet tradition.

Combining radically different movement vocabularies could be a banal experiment or a disaster, but Raffael succeeded brilliantly. His work Rhapsody in Blue, presented earlier this season, was soundly designed and had some marvelous flashes, but seemed more the work of a skilled apprentice than a master. With A Street Symphony, he has arrived, with a strong sense of architecture and humor.

The work is made up of seven songs, with the dancers arrayed in solos, couples, and ensembles. The set and costumes are minimalist, with the women wearing gauzy tutus of various colors pulled above their tights. In the beginning, the pounding rhythm is unsettling, and the first piece, Clockwork, uses a robotics theme that is fairly familiar. But Alicia Fabry’s replicant is both energized and vulnerable, with limbs shooting about at amazing speeds and a startled doe-eyed gaze.

I also really liked Jan Burkhard and Yevgeny Shlapko in Best of Me. Jan is a dancer with an sensual quality, and here she was fearless. Classical dance walks a fine line with respect to sex: it candidly reveals dancers’ bodies and deals with intimate subject matter, but almost never references the act itself, and is careful not to push the red button. But hip hop is sexy, and Jan embraced it. So did Eugene, who had a rangey freedom that recalled the hood.

Lindsay Purrington was really touching and beautiful in Cry Me a River. She did various transformations, including a streetwise tough and a Swan Lake swan. At one point her tutu started to fall to pieces, which added an unplanned degree of tension to the performance, but she dealt with the issue with grace, eventually ditching the thing stage right, and strutting boldly forward. Adam Crawford Chavis lifted her magnificently overhead.

This was unquestionably ballet, with pointe shoes and the traditional vocabulary, but augmented with exciting movements from urban street culture. The most successful dancers seemed to personalize their roles, though some stuck close to the familiar classical lines. For one, Margaret Severin-Hansen, who is a fantastic classical technician, was sharp and intriguing, but seemed to me to hold back a bit from the street. On the other hand, I thought Sokvannara Sar, Nikolai Smirnov, and Cecilia Ilieusiu all found interesting individual ways of combining the upmarket and downmarket.

Anyhow, I really liked A Street Symphony, and also Robert Weiss’s new work Idyll, set to Richard Wagner’s lovely Siegfried Idyll. It featured three couples and flowing lines. I was looking forward to The Rite of Spring, but it came after the second intermission, and I was just too tired to take it all in. Sally thought it too was wonderful.

It’s time to subscribe to next year’s ballet season. We’ve been going on Friday nights for fourteen years and have excellent front-center orchestra seats, but I think we’ll switch to Saturdays. On Fridays I often find myself tired after a busy week that includes 5:30 a.m. workouts, and not always able to hang in there intently for a full evening of beautiful performances. Our NC Symphony subscription has been on Saturdays, and so we’ll have to manage some conflicts, but it seems worth it.

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October 28, 2012

A piano tuning and a ballet board meeting

My Steinway grand piano (an A) is a gorgeous musical instrument, but it is subject to entropy. It needs a regular tuning, and lately a few notes in the lower-middle range sounded overly bright to me.

On Saturday, Phil Romano, a master Steinway technician, tuned it and did some voicing by needling the hammers. Phil was about to take off on another tour with Paul McCartney, and shared some interesting stories of Sir Paul’s performing in the Queen’s Jubilee, the Olympics, and South America.

With the benefit of Phil’s good tuning and voicing, I had a gratifying session with my instrument on Saturday. Recently I’ve felt a bit stuck on the same musical plateau. Although this has happened from time to time over the years, each time it’s uncomfortable, as I wonder whether I’ve gone as far as I can go. An essential part of the joy and challenge of the classical tradition, for me, is forward movement. It’s true that I’m now playing better than I ever imagined I would, but still, I would see no point to practicing if I didn’t expect to achieve greater technical and artistic mastery. This is one of the reasons it is so important to have a teacher — to get you unstuck when you’re stuck.

Anyhow, today felt as if I was getting unstuck. For a devoted student of the piano, there are few things more pleasurable than a freshly tuned Steinway. I played some of my favorite Chopin, Debussy, and Liszt works, and made some headway on my assignments from Olga — Rachmaninoff’s Elegy and Chopin’s etude op. 25 no. 12. Also, for a special treat, I read through some of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The Waltz of the Flowers really works as a piano piece! I’d like to polish it up for the holidays if I can find the time.

Speaking of the Nutcracker, this week I had my first meeting as a new member of the board of directors of the Carolina Ballet. I’m really pleased to be able to help support this wonderful company. It’s also good to meet other people who really love ballet. As Ricky Weiss pointed out at the meeting, not everyone likes it, and some actively dislike it, but those who care about it care a lot.

In his report, he noted that we have a particularly strong group of dancers now. In the all Balanchine program, he had four different Apollo’s. It is, he said, an extraordinary thing, particularly in a company of this size, to have four males who are all capable of fully expressing this difficult role. (In an interesting coincidence, this morning the dance critic of the New York Times discussed Balanchine’s Stravinsky ballets and led off the discussion with Apollo.)

There are lots of things to be happy about, including the company’s large number of performances, the large number of new works, and the consistently high standard of performance. Weiss noted that the current group of dancers have achieved a high level of individuality, by which I think he meant they are artists who express not only the classical tradition but also themselves.

At the same time, there is a real concern about company finances. This is no great surprise. Since the recession of 2008, times have been hard for lots of people, including lots of arts organizations. But realizing this does not lessen the difficulty for this particular organization. I continue to think that there are more people around here who would enjoy ballet who haven’t yet discovered it, including some who would find it rewarding to help support the company. I hope so.

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October 12, 2012

Wonderful Balanchine ballets, and friends

We just loved the new Carolina Ballet program, A Balanchine Celebration, which we saw when it opened on Thursday night. It ran the emotional gamut, from wrenching (Agon) to carefree (Who Cares?), all, naturally, by George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century.
It was all wonderful, but I have to mention especially Lara O’Brien and Eugene Barnes in the Agon pas de deux, with music by Stravinsky. As I mentioned to Lara afterward, it truly made me uncomfortable, as it surely is meant to do. She took the angular movements to a frightening extreme. I was reminded of something I once read about Suzanne Farrell: she made the audience sweat. Margaret Severin-Hansen and Pablo Javier Perez were deft and delightful in Tarantella. I also had a new appreciation for Jan Burkhard in Valse Fantaisie and in Who Cares. She’s got a spunk and sass, which worked particularly well in the Gershwin.
I need to give a special note of appreciation to the pianist for the Gershwin, Karl Moraski. I was on the second row, practically inside the piano, and could hear every detail. In my jazz period, I listened to multiple versions of all these iconic standards, and learned not just the tunes and harmonic structures, but also the words to all these songs. Moraski was faithful to the spirit of the music; Gershwin would certainly have approved. I spoke to him afterwards to congratulate him, and verified that he had done the arranging. I noticed that the dancers seemed to be smiling a lot during the Gershwin, and wondered for a minute if they’d been coached smiling. Then I realized I was smiling a lot, too. The great music, and Balanchine’s lighthearted ballet translation of MGM musical-type dancing, was delightful.
Last year we made a contribution that made us the pointe shoe sponsors of Lola Cooper, and so we always watch her performances with particular interest. She had a charming pas de deuz with Nikolai Smirnov in the Gershwin piece, S’Wonderful. She’s got a ton of warmth and vitality, and just keeps getting better.
One of the great things about having exceptional artists in the 42d largest city in America (as opposed, say, to the first, second, or third) is you can, if you want to, talk to them. Earlier in the week, I’d sent Ricky Weiss a link to a Ted Talks talk by the choreographer Wayne McGregor. At intermission, he told me that he really appreciated my sending it, and he absolutely hated it! It was contrary to everything he believed dance should be trying to do. He found it hollow and superficial. I didn’t think it was quite that bad, but what do I know? As I told Ricky, whatever the merits ot McGregor’s choreography, I thought it was worthwhile that the Ted conference was engaging with dance, and it suggested another avenue for exploring and communicating about creativity. Ricky seemed to be of the view that there was no redeeming quality. He just couldn’t stand it.
At the other intermission, we had a glass of wine and a chocolate in the donor’s room, and two of the new dancers of the company came up and introduced themselves: Colby and Laren Treat, who are twin sisters from Ilion, New York. I was so impressed that they had the gumption to come right up to us and start talking. That’s not an easy thing to do, for a young person or any person. They were really friendly and had interesting things to say about the program.
I feel so fortunate to be able to meet and be inspired by all these artists. It’s one more great reason to live in Raleigh, NC. Earlier in the week, I had lunch with my friend David Meeker, who was recruiting me to join the board the City of Raleigh Museum. David is still in his twenties, but has contributed significantly to civic life by founding the Busy Bee Cafe and developing the building with Beazley’s and other properties. We agreed that Raleigh had come a long way and had a ton of great things happening (e.g. arts, food, sports, commerce), but was still struggling with its branding. I thought the museum might help develop a richer understanding of Raleigh, and agreed to consider joining the board.
As I’m posting this, we’re in RDU airport (free wifi!) about to depart for Italy. is our first trip there, and has been a long time coming. I almost made it when I was sixteen, and was recruited for an orchestral music program by the NC School of the Arts in Siena, but lacked the necessary funding. I almost made it six years ago, but then my Mom fell ill. So now we’re going to do it. I’ve reviewed numerous guidebooks, and listened to 15 CDs of Pimsleur’s Italian. I think it’s going to be great. More to come.

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September 16, 2012

A fine start to a new dance season

Looking south from Casa Tiller at sunrise.

Raleigh, where I live, is definitely not New York or San Francisco, but still, it has interesting people, universities, sports, and good restaurants. Also, lots of beautiful trees. And a thriving arts scene, including excellent music and dance. I’m particularly proud of our ballet company, the Carolina Ballet, which punches way above its weight class, both in terms of great choreography and great dancers. It started its fifteenth season this week.

On Friday we had a fine dinner at Poole’s Diner and then saw the new program, which features four works by artistic director Robert Weiss. Weiss, an alum of the City Ballet, is a legitimate and distinguished heir of George Balanchine, and he’s still creating masterworks. Each piece of the new program was quite different from the others and touched on different emotional places.

My favorite was a new piece titled Meditation from Thais, with familiar music by Jules Massenet. It was an adagio pas de deux performed by Lara O’Brien and Marcelo Martinez. The dancers, both in white leotards, began clasped together in single shape, which gracefully transformed itself and then divided into other aspects. There were no program notes on the piece, probably because the subject was clear: a man and a woman. It was sensuous. Lara is at once willowy and strong, and in this piece, intensely tragic.

The other new Weiss ballet was Intimate Voices to music by Jean Sibelius. Its theme seemed to be families and loss. The distinguished cast was headed by Melissa Podcasy, who is retiring after this program and assuming new coaching duties. Fortunately, she’s still in great form. The first movement had gorgeous Edwardian costumes, with the ladies in pastels and hats and the gentlemen in tails, and ended with a patriarch’s death. The scenery involved projections of country scenes, which were effective. I found the piece touching and look forward to seeing it again.

We talked with Ricky Weiss at intermission. He was happy with the performances, but worried about the company’s finances. Ballet is a labor-intensive business, and even with dancers working for less than seems fair and reasonable, the costs are high, and balancing the budget is a constant challenge.

The most cheerful piece was the first one, set to Prokofiev’s first (“Classical”) symphony. This involved classical costumes, complete with tutus, and a more traditional movement vocabulary. The last piece was Symposium to music of Leonard Bernstein, which is one of my favorite Weiss ballets. Eugene Barnes was particularly wonderful as Dionysos.

On Saturday we walked a few blocks to the SparkCon street festival and looked at dozens of pastel drawings on the Fayetteville Street pavement. There were musicians and circus performers, and lots of spectators. At sunset we went to the top of a parking deck at Salisbury and Hargett and watched hundreds of chimney swifts darting and swarming, and finally dropping into a large chimney.

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May 20, 2012

Carolina Ballet’s brilliant Beethoven, and a Porsche track day

Clara at VIR on May 19, 2012

Sally and I went to the Carolina Ballet’s final program of the season on Thursday night. Ballet has so much emotional power. How fortunate are the dancers who can embody it and touch us with it. As they move, our minds move and feel. Could it be our mirror neurons? Perhaps that, combined with a common tradition and vocabulary of movement. Maybe, when all the stars align, we connect at a fundamental level with the dancers and the dance, and are changed ourselves.

On Thursday, we saw the world premier of Robert Weiss’s new ballet, Beethoven’s Ninth, and found it very powerful. The music is iconically familiar, but apart from the familiar ode to joy, extremely strange. Weiss’s creation honors the tradition of the music, and also brings it into the present. He uses a large cast and a lot of movement. The stage surges with high-speed running, leaping, and spinning in every direction, creating tension and excitement. It’s wonderfully dense and complex, like the music. The work seems more about groups and relationships than about individuals. I thought it was truly brilliant. Is this possible? Could a work of amazing complexity and transcendent beauty shine forth in Raleigh, our sweet but modest mid-size southern city Of course!

On Friday and Saturday, I took Clara up to Virginia International Raceway for some track driving fun. Both days were mild and sunny. There were dozens of beautiful Porsches, along with quite a few BMWs and Corvettes, and onesies and twosies of other vehicles. I was paired with Mike T, a very experienced teacher and Corvette guy.

There are seventeen turns in the 3.27 mile VIR course, and each one is different. Mike expected me to know them by name, and have a plan for each one. As we did laps, we communicated through in-helmet headsets. He coached me through each turn and gave instant feedback, such as, “You turned in too early,” “You need to brake earlier,” and, occasionally, “That was good.”

Like a lot of accomplished people, Mike was a perfectionist, and it was difficult to satisfy him. I felt a bit discouraged. At times he seemed to be coaching me towards a high-speed disaster, which in retrospect I think was the result of my not getting some of his vocabulary. Anyhow, there were some close calls involving taking too much speed into corners. But as the laps accumulated, the percentage of good turns increased, and I was passing most of the cars in my group. Mike didn’t make me feel great, but he may have helped me move me towards the next level.

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April 21, 2012

Cutting wood, not fingers, trying a good new Italian restaurant, and enjoying the Carolina Ballet’s Carmina Burana, but worrying about the dancers’ low pay

On Friday afternoon a group from the Red Hat legal department worked on a Habitat for Humanity house in eastern Raleigh. It was a warm, sunny day. I managed to work up a good sweat nailing boards together, and pulling apart ones I didn’t line up properly before I nailed them.

I also spent some time cutting boards with a circular saw. My father was a passionate woodworker, and the sound of the power saw brought back childhood memories — of trying to watch TV and not being able to hear it because of the power saw. Dad was always worried that his or someone else’s children would hurt themselves with his power tools. He did not generally encourage visits to his wood shop, and managed to implant in me the idea that little fingers can be sliced off very easily. This is a particularly horrifying thought for a pianist. Thus I was probably a more deliberate sawer than most.

Afterwards, after knocking off some of the sawdust, a few of us had a beer at Sammy’s, a sports bar. We learned that Barrett is coming into the home stretch towards his wedding day, with a Caribbean honeymoon in St. Lucia to follow, and Madeline had decided that her next vacation will be in Curacao. I encouraged them to try some scuba diving. Madeline said that she had some claustrophobia issues and a dread of fish bites, and so she was not overly keen, but Barrett seemed game.

That evening Sally and I tried Tuscan Blu, a new Italian restaurant in the warehouse district. We got there at 6:20 with a view to finishing in good time for the ballet by 8:00, and were the first ones there. It was empty, but we quickly got a good vibe from the friendly staff. When we asked about wine, our server summoned the owner, a big, gray-headed, Italian guy, who, instead of discussing the matter, brought us out a bottle of Italian chardonnay that he said we would like. We did. People began to come in, and the place started buzzing. The olive oil in the salad dressing was excellent, as was the pear and ricotta fiochhi. We’ll be going back.

The Carolina Ballet featured a revival of Carmina Burana and three short new works inspired by a local exhibit of the art of Alexander Calder. This was our fourth Carmina, and I’ve liked it better each time. It is a rich, complex work. Lynn Taylor-Corbett’s choreography melds with Carl Orff’s powerful, strangely ancient-yet-modern choral music in a way that seems organic: it feels as though the music and dance were created together, instead of sixty some years apart. . The performance on Friday had a quasi-orchestra (two pianos and percussion) and the 140-voice Raleigh Chorale, well conducted by Al Sturges, made a big, pleasing sound.

The work opens with a group of male dancers in business suits with leather briefcases, which is both humorous and disconcerting. We quickly realize that it’s about our society, with a range of characters from Wall Street operators at the top to laborers at the bottom. The theme is the power of the goddess Fortuna — in other words, luck. Characters from all walks of life excitedly scratch lottery tickets, and are disappointed, and scratch again. Suddenly, one wins! And his life and the group’s is reorganized. One lover is discarded, another appears, then a child, who a moment later is a young woman. Temptations (lust, greed, etc.) arrive, and corruption develops, followed by pain and loss. The wheel keeps turning, with more rounds of the lottery, and eventually, there’s a new winner.

Yevgeny Shlapko played the Man Who Wins (the first lottery winner) with grace and maturity, and stylish athleticism, and paired well with Melissa Podcasy, who had beauty and depth as Woman Who Yearns. Their Daughter Who Dreams was played for the first time that night by Lola Cooper, who was both funny and graceful in conveying the excitement and storms of adolescence, including having a first cigarette. Marcelo Martinez was Man of Darkness, a personification of evil that was both frightening and seductive. I was very happy to see Alicia Fabry back after her injury as A Lost Soul, a role in which (against type) she projected a tragic neuroticism.

The first half of the program had works by Timour Bourtasenkov (a principal in the company), Zalman Raffael (a member of the corps), and Tyler Walters (now on the faculty at Duke). I particularly enjoyed Lindsay Purrington and Yevgeny Shlapko in Raffael’s piece, The Ghost, with music by Darius Milhaud. Walters’ I Mobile to music by Prokofiev was an intricate, modernist work that connected well to the mobile idea.

Afterwards, we met Lola at Humble Pie and caught up. She told us that there had not been much time to put together Carmina Burana, and she hadn’t had a chance to rehearse with the orchestra. She said she hadn’t tried smoking until the night before, and worried that she might have a coughing problem in performance. We talked about the problem of the extremely low salaries of the dancers, and particularly those in the corps.

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. These extremely gifted young people have spent most of their lives in sustained dedication to their art, and have overcome enormous odds to join the few who are paid professionals. They’re incredibly successful — sort of. They get the satisfaction of practicing their art at the highest level, but get paid at a level that is ridiculously low. Paying for the rent, the car payment, and groceries is difficult, or perhaps just not possible without a second job (which is very difficult to put on top of the time demands of the company) or help from parents or elsewhere. If we care about dance, we need to care about the dancers, and figure out a way to pay them a living wage.

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March 18, 2012

Sharing piano music, buying a painting, and going to a new ballet

Stuart is not overly excited about our new painting

What does art mean to life? I’ll take a strong position, and say, simply, everything.

My brother, Paul, and sister-in-law Jackie were passing through last week, and we convened for dinner at Zely and Ritz. But first, they came up to our apartment to see the view and have a cocktail. I wanted to play some piano music for them, but hesitated to propose it. Sharing serious music just isn’t something people normally do in these modern times.

I also recognize that for some people it would be an imposition. I think my playing is thoughtful and nuanced, but it isn’t perfect. Even if I were a seasoned professional concert artist, it would still be true that my nineteenth and early twentieth century repertoire would not be to the taste of everyone. Although it amazes me, I understand that some people find it bewildering or boring. I hope this is mostly because of lack of education and exposure — which is one reason I think it’s important to share it.

Fortunately, Paul and Jackie studied music in college and enjoy various genres. And so I played for them some Chopin (the Nocturnes in c-sharp minor and D flat) and Debussy (the First Arabesque). They sounded good, though maybe a little stiffer than when I play for myself alone. Playing for someone else dramatically changes the sensation of making music. Perhaps it’s from adding adrenalin. Things that seemed settled can become unsettled. Sometimes new beauty emerges, and sometimes things fall to pieces. This is one of the reasons I was happy to have these family listeners — without listeners, it’s impossible to learn how to communicate the music. Paul and Jackie seemed to enjoy it, and were very gracious.

At lunch time on Wednesday, Sally and I met at the Adam Cave gallery to look at some paintings. Sally had followed up on a review she’d read with investigation on the Internet, and come up with some works that might work for us by Byron Gin. Adam, the proprietor of the gallery, had agreed to pull together his stock of Gin works, and told us more about the artist. We both felt excited about Three Birds and a Cup, and discussed it more over a lunch at the Remedy Diner (great veggie sandwiches and rock music). The next day, we decided to take him up on his offer to take the painting home and see how it looked before committing.

Three Birds and a Cup, by Byron Gin

I think it’s a touching, slightly funny and engaging painting. The house sparrows look like quizzical house sparrows, but the space looks vibrant blue and gold paint. The yellow cup looks like a cup. The eye and mind shift back and forth between the birds and the cup, and the natural and human world. I find it nourishing and stimulating.

Friday night, we ate at Buku before going to the ballet. It was unseasonably mild, so we sat outside at dinner. Buku has increased its vegetarian offerings, and the ones we tried were good: baba ghanoush, arepas, and lentil wat. I also had the flight of three half glasses of Chilean wines, which were quite delicious.

At Fletcher Hall, we heard choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett speak on the new work to be performed that evening, The Little Mermaid. We’ve liked many of LTC’s works, including Carmina Burana and Carolina Jamboree. She’s a very engaging personality, and articulate and down-to-earth about what she’s trying to do.

She didn’t put it this way, but The Little Mermaid seems designed for ballet newcomers and kids. This was somewhat true of her The Ugly Duckling, but I found Duckling more elegant and touching. Jan Burkhard as the mermaid was lovely and girlish, and fun to watch, and Randi Oseteck as the sea witch was a great villain. And I particularly liked Lindsay Purrington as the sly village girl who tricks the prince. She made the part more sympathetic than the story might have suggest, so that I was sorry when she got her comeuppance. The costumes were mostly delightful. But I found the music intensely cloying, and the narration at times plodding.

The second half of the program was duets of a serious and more classical nature. I particularly enjoyed Lara O’Brien in an intensely tragic Weiss pas de deux with music by Gustav Mahler (one of the true greats). Peggy Severin-Hanson and Marcelo Martinez were powerful and delightful in Le Corsaire pas de deux. It was great to see this significant chapter in ballet history brought intensely to life.

I recently finished reading Apollo’s Angels, a history of ballet by Jennifer Homans. I found some of it heavy going, particularly the early stages, but it was worth it all for the last couple of chapters, including her writing on Balanchine, which was full of insight. It’s unfortunate that she ends the book on a sour note in which she opines that ballet is dying. From where I sit, there’s still a lot of life. I just checked the repertoire list of the Carolina Ballet, and noted that they’ve presented versions of many of the works that Homans discusses and treats as high points of the art. I’m so glad they’re here.

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Category: dance