Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Dancing into a minefield

Suzanne Lopez, left, talks with two dancers at the Joffrey Ballet rehearsal space on Randolph.

     Plays have scripts that tell actors what words to say, plus occasional stage directions, indicating how to deliver a certain line or when to move in a particular direction — the most famous being Shakespeare’s notation in Act III of “A Winter’s Tale”: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”
     Music has chains of notes representing various pitches and durations, with extra instructions delineating whether they be played loud or soft, fast or slow.
     But how do ballet dancers know where to step?
     There are videos, of course, and a complex system known as Benesh Movement Notation, resembling notes on a scale. Neither works particularly well.
     “I can tell when someone learned off an audition video,” said Suzanne Lopez, one of two choreography directors from the Joffrey Ballet for “Anna Karenina,” opening at the Civic Opera House on Wednesday. As for the notation system, “It takes years of learning how to do that,” she said, “and I’m not qualified.”
     So how does a troupe learn a new ballet? Surprisingly, the way dancers are taught their steps in the 21st century has much in common with the way bards were taught to recite “The Iliad” in ancient Greece.
     “It needs to be person-to-person,” said Lopez. “It needs to be passed down. Copious notes. I have a giant binder for ‘Anna Karenina,’ constantly updating.”

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3 comments:

  1. You've said things that needed to be said. For the first time in my life I see my liberal brethren engaging in a moral mobius loop, standing hip to hip with fascists. Suggesting we punish ourselves for the sins of someone else is the kind of zero calorie righteousness usually reserved for right wing anti-abortionist types. Those of us on the left don't need to climb aboard that smug, self deluding train.

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  2. Art transcends geographical and ideological boundaries. Artists belong to a community all their own, regardless of their heritage.
    Regarding how one learns, there is no substitute for person-to-person. There is no substitute for human contact regardless of what is being learned. The advent of online courses has been a huge step in the wrong direction.

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  3. I find it hard to imagine Anna Karenina as a ballet -- it seems to me that the psychological subtlety, the agony of Anna, the humor, of Tolstoy's writing would be lost. I suppose the proof of the pudding would be to attend a performance. No doubt I'm dead wrong. However, the last quarter of the novel, often criticized as unnecessary and rather boring, could indeed show by dance the futility of the Pan-Slavic "Lost Cause," the puerility of Vronsky's joining up with a bunch of deluded fanatics trying to establish a new world order at the expense of their own lives and millions of others with no stake in the game.

    john

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