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biography, GLBTQ+artists, KeithHaring, NYC gay culture, AIDS activist, Art as Witness

 RADIANT | The Life and Line of Keith Haring | by Brad Gooch | Hardcover; 512 pgs. | $40.00 | photos & art prints | http://www.harpercollins.com

Keith Haring believed that ‘Art is for everyone’ and from cryptic drawings on subway tunnel walls or blazing neon AIDS awareness messages over Times Square or painting huge humanitarian murals, Haring brought his artwork to the people.

He died at age 32 from AIDS, but his indelible legacy lives on. Brad Gooch’s engrossing biography Radiant is a fine line portrait of the artist, his art, and his times. It is among the best of Gooch’s bio-histories of gay artists and GLBTQ culture in New York in his writings, most notably a brilliant portrait of Frank O’Hara in his 1986 biography ‘City Poet’ and in his unblinking memoir Smash Cut.

Keith was born in Kutztown,  and Gooch brings to life the era of American Dream conformity and conservative mores. His father Allen was in the Marines, a draughtsman and worked as an electrician. At home he was amateur artist, and he would teach Keith basic drawing skills with such games as STOP where two people start drawing and when one says stop they trade pictures and continue the piece.

. Gooch quotes interviews Keith had given after he was famous about growing up in Kutztown, his love for his parents, who  rebellious nature. He was a free spirit from the start, escaped the environs through tv and his art. He was a Christian foot soldier for a while but started to question some of the church’s tenets, he also started smoking grass and partying, but all the while becoming more involved with his art. He bonded with several other artists in his school who became lifelong friends and sometime collaborators on his projects when he became successful.

Just out of high school, Haring hitchhiked across the country with his girlfriend, camping out, picking up jobs on the road, and circling back to Kutztown. Haring decided to go to a commercial art school in Pittsburgh. It was a valuable steppingstone for his early career decision not to become a commercial artist, but he connected with many of the instructors there and other students and knew he had to get to New York City.

Haring holed up at the YMCA and soon landed at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and was driven as an artist to develop his own style and also plunging into the downtown performance art and anti-establishment art world. Meanwhile, he was living the 70s post-Stonewall liberated scene of gay and sex club liberation. His queer identity immediately expressed in his work. Haring stayed connected with his art pals from Kutztown and at various times continued to collaborate with them on projects.

He hung out with the a-list of queer artists, and whatever he was also driven to connect with the community at large with his public art. He admired the graffiti artists who painted on subway cars, walls, and every space available. Haring started to use wheat paste to message and develop his ‘automatic line’ the art version of  Kerouac and Burroughs style of ‘automatic writing’  Burroughs came to one of his early art and poetry exhibits in the Village.

 Even when Haring was in art school, his teachers recognized his mastery of ‘The Line’ and templates of hieroglyphics, Sumi, and other calligraphic and sculptural art forms that Haring studied as vocabulary that he would employ for his infinite ‘line’ Haring’s ability to illustrate labyrinthine panoramas, vistas, storytelling murals, earthy creatures that were connected to otherworldly

Haring’s infused his social and political artwork to confront apartheid, crack-addiction, GLBTQ rights and AIDS awareness artwork was a rallying cry for action for New York’s gay community at a time when there was virtually no support from city, state, or federal agencies.  

Millions of commuters saw his anti-drug billboard ‘Crack is Wack” looming over the Grand Central Pkwy toll bridge. He was using his art as PSA Safe-Sex information and excoriating the Reagans policies. More agitprop imagery and messaging concerning apartheid. His pink-triangle AIDS posters Silence = Death imagery was everywhere.

Haring was, like Jean Michel Basquiat, at the forefront of street and gallery art in NYC, they were being sought after and commissioned by the most prominent galleries in Europe, early in their professional careers New York subway riders continued to happen upon his cryptic imagery, uptown and downtown in the tunnels where he filled in blank advertisement frames.

The performative aspects of Haring’s projects were another aspect that maximized his engagement with the public at large. Music was always blasting in his space, studio, club, gallery, environment and fueling. He would paint in large spaces and outdoor structures and his work and his moves were dancey and he would attract an audience. Haring went to the gay clubs in New York every night. He could be in Europe for one of his exhibits and he would jet back to New York for a 24-hour break to dance all night at the club.

Haring was traveling regularly to Europe and Asian countries. He was in demand in high end galleries and hung out with top money and the trendiest clubs   and down. By the mid-80s, he was everywhere. And even though his connection to street art had changed, he was engaged in more public works spaces.

Gooch illuminates the insular art world, a world that was busted open by new performance art bohemians like Haring and Basquiat, adventurous entrepreneurs who were converting derelict buildings and part of the Soho scene), a world away from the vaulted uptown art world. Warhol, who was by the 70s, was becoming more reclusive, but befriended and even mentored both Haring and Basquiat.

Gooch’s descriptives of Haring as a non-stop artist and partier start to cloy as filler in some chapters, but only momentarily. With widespread success also came some criticism in the influential art publications, a writer in ArtForum writing about his quickly made exhibit at the Shafrazi Gallery was redundant and uninspiring.

A large public glass art mural he painted in two days in Melbourne Australia was defaced, and there were accusations that his figures were appropriations of ancient Aboriginal paintings. Haring stated that he never seen any of that native artwork.

Haring took everything in stride. Writing in his diary at point, affirmations about what his art was and why, and looking for more ways to be a vessel that transcends and transmits energy in real time. Meanwhile he most valued his maintained his childlike vision of painting, magic, even as he continued to develop craft and outsized public projects.

On his 26^th birthday, just back from a gallery exhibit of his work, he wanted to spend some of the money he was racking in and rented out the Paradise Garage for on a night that they were regularly closed for business. filled it with his friends, colleagues, and the venue regulars.

Haring purchased a building on an industrial block on Lafayette and turned it into the Pop Shop, selling a variety of items donning his artwork. He also redesigned the whole interior, the store itself was the installation. He was accused of selling-out, prompting a re-examination of his talent and work. In the end, his detractors didn’t dent his artistic standing or hurt the success of the shop as Haring’s contingent of admirers flocked to the opening.

 By the late 80s, Haring could no longer ignore what was happening in his body. He had swollen lymph nodes for more than a year. By then anyone who was sexually active with multiple partners in the late 70s and early 80s, were among the most high-risk group of being exposed to the virus. Haring kept traveling and creating new work until his illness stopped him. Radiant is a beautifully crafted portrait of Keith Haring’s contributions to the world and his inspiring artistic spirit.

NOTES: 1 more pass/ edit to 750 for CV

JazzPhilly

Tags

composers, GLBTQ+ lit, Jazz, opera, quartets, singers

Verizon Hall, Philadelphia – April 7, 2024

Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones

 The E-Collective | Turtle Island Quartet

Justin Austin, baritone | Adrienne Danrich, soprano

 In 2021 The Metropolitan Opera launched their post-Covid season with Terence Blanchard’s opera ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones.’ It would be the first time in the Met’s 140-year history they would  stage a work by a Black composer. And in this case an opera with a jazz score and a libretto based on New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s memoir about his struggles with sexual identity, bullying, racism and being a victim of sexual abuse by a relative.

Given the Met’s affinity to European opera repertory which remains the core of their programming,
Blanchard ‘Fire’ was a gamble and when its success marked a turning point for a new generation of operagoers and certainly in terms of musical and artistic diversity. The opera has been screened in movie theater and Blanchard won the 2023 Grammy for Best Opera Recording.

Both ‘Fire’ and his earlier opera ‘Champion’ about the life of African American gay welterweight boxer Emile Griffith. Premiering at the Met in 2022 also proving to be a knockout hit solid hit with audiences and critics.

Blanchard is now on tour with concertized excerpts from the opera and is currently on tour and his band The E-Collective, the Turtle Island Quartet and Met stars soprano Adrienne Danrich and baritone Justin Austin performing key arias and duets.’

Blanchard opened the concert with two orchestral compositions from his album paying tribute to jazz great Wayne Shorter, who died in March 2023 Pianist Fabian Almazan opens with somber solo of ‘Absence’  (composed by bassist David Ginyard) that just blooms into a radiant jazz elegy.

It was followed by the Blanchard composition ‘I Dare You’ opened with a rhythmic string passage by the Turtle Quartet ala Beethoven and just broke out into a raucous jazz jam with the E-Collective musicians. Blanchard told the audience that the title came from Shorter when broadcaster Tavis Smiley asked him ’What does jazz mean?’ to which Shorter replied ‘I Dare You.

All the musicians onstage Blanchard’s musicians were in the zone for the rich musical territory of
Blanchard’s opera hybrid of signature fusion jazz idioms and symphonics and arias performed by
classically trained singers..

Kasi Lemmons’ libretto doesn’t soften the theme from the book concerning racial bullying, homophobia and trauma of childhood sexual abuse that perpetrated by Blow’s cousin and uncle.

The excerpts included in the concert include the scene with the songs ‘Peculiar Grace’  ‘Secrets Unveiled’ ‘Burning Memories.’ Justin Austin’s rich, soulful voice handling such explicit lyrics as – ‘I was a lonely boy who craved attention. He said it was just a game he wanted to play. My spirit left my body. I was powerless. I was bereft like someone died. Was it my fault? my curiosity?– sung with flawless technical artistry and moving pathos.

Soprano Adrienne Danrich’s golden upper range was equally powerful technically, but in some passages, it was difficult to understand some of her sung dialogue at key points. But, that aside, their vocal performances were electrifying. Meanwhile Blanchard’s breathless, trumpet lines, smolder, flare, and blaze, telling this story is cathartic and transcendent. Austin’s final aria by Austin with the moving refrain ‘Gone Are’ representing his liberation from personal demons.

April is Jazz&Poetries Month

Tags

&Poetries, jazzmasters, LJWpoetry, Thelonious Monk

Monk Dream

fr The Music Rooms

                      No, actually,

this same damn dream

   & unaccompanied piano

                            wondering in this wilderness

echoing universal seed sounds

floating trees

branches timelapse

hid in the geometry of every forgotten leaf,

they can’t talk about

their flight

the breakdown

the disappeared

while thundering mouths saying less than nothing.

but bodies saying it all.

These same days that we

      play at playing

we’re here because we’re because we’re here

really dissonant any chord changes?

rewound from another field or deafening coda

because       before you know, because if

after then  these notes are all laid out before the

dreamscape

scrolling arpeggio of

Lilac notes quarter notes dead notes sexnotes severed notes grave notes tortured notes poisoned notes swallowed notes escape notes lynched notes baby notes shotup notes radiant notes atomic notes screaming notes

Oh & who was it who

said music is really between the notes?

maybe I did

well it doesn’t matter

they are all there in this

prelude of wanderlust

  asking what

this music be and I just tell them ‘

it tells you what time it is

that’s all

and let them figure it out

No one can talk to me when he’s like this, they whisper. sounds good

to me          rhythm space

vanished at azimuth

they are expecting

swing, well you know        

   I am flying my chromatic garden sometimes on a

earthy sphere on

a chromatic cliff on Delos, no? maybe I won’t return (maybe yes)

        No time for Monk to be deeper his dream

maybe I’ll wake up

play something that they won’t be able to hear

until we’re all back uptown riding out that infinite blue

note

BooksBooksJazzBooks

Tags

big bands, composers, Ella, jazzmasters

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald

By Judith Tick

Hardcover; 560pgs; photographs

http://www.wwnorton.com

Judith Tick’s essential musical portrait of The First Lady of Song

Judith Tick’s biography ‘Becoming Ella Fitzgerald’ chronicles Fitzgerald’s prowess as a jazz innovator and vocal artistry. From her early days of personal struggles losing her mother at an early age, growing up in Yonkers, NY, her time in a girl’s reformatory (for deliquency) where she sang in a choir, to her nonstop life on the road, in the recording studio, and international fame as ‘The First Lady of Song’ and signatory of what was established as ‘The Great American Songbook.’ Ella’s groundbreaking collaborations among the male dominated titans of jazz like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie is the stuff of jazz mythos.

Fitzgerald’s family life, her relatives, her brief marriage, her other affairs, Tich delves into basically as they relate to her life in music. Fitzerald went to great lengths to maintain her privacy. and her many humanitarian causes, work for civil rights, for orphan children, and education for Black youth, that she preferred to keep out of the limelight.

Ella’s remarkable career started at her first big break in the famed Apollo Theater competitions, Ella bombing first as a ‘snake hip’ dancer which brought her to some fame in Yonkers, but didn’t impress the Apollo audience, so she sang instead, won the contest and the rest is music history.

After several successes on the club circuit and studio work, Fitzgerald career really took off when she was hired as the proverbial ‘girl singer’ for the Chick Webb Orchestra a sensation at the storied Savoy Ballroom.

Webb initially didn’t want any singer, man, or woman, to be a member of his Savoy Ballroom orchestra, where the heavyweights of the big-band era of the 20s and 30s had raucous competitions, with a crowd of rapacious dancers hot for the top tier bands. Webb had to be talked into it, but before long, he took her under his wing and nurtured her early career. Webb recognized that Ella was one of those rare singers whose interpretive artistry was completely unique.

Ella demonstrated to Webb that she had something no one else had and could hold her own and who her phrasing and pitch was unique, instinctively she considered her voice as an instrument equal to the rest of the players. One of the key concepts that cued her affinity to scat singing pure notes, phrases, or idiosyncratic vocalizing. Rendered with innate swing and intonations that could only come from Ella a

  .

As Tick illustrates, Ella never stopped evolving as a singer, she continued to work on her craft, taking risks, crafting unique collaborations with jazz giants and followed Webb’s advice to always ‘keep current’ with popular music trends.. From the beginning she was a jazz, blues, scat master and balladeer who easily crossover in other genres with her own agency, whether the music industry supported her or not. Her live concerts had immediacy and engagement with audiences the world over.

Sy Oliver, Ella’s chief arranger at Decca was asked if she abided by his arrangements and he replied “He responded quote hell no. Ella knows exactly what she wants, and nobody tells her otherwise. If she’s not happy with an arrangement I’ve made, she’s perfectly capable of making one up herself. She’s saying, and that was all I needed to know.

Tick does chronicle her relationship and brief marriage with Bassist Ray Brown. Brown was with Dizzy’s Gillespie let Brown go, as Tick reports, could have had something to do with their nuptials. Later the bassist formed The Ray Brown Trio and Ella was expanding her repertoire and developing her singular artistry. Meanwhile, she was touring non-stop, and setting a relentless performance schedule, a pattern that she maintained into her 70s, until her health prevented her from continuing.

Ray Brown had joined Granz’s first of its kind Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) tours in the US, and eventually so did Fitzgerald. They were now playing the club circuits and the concert jazz venues. There were inevitable strains in their marriage, after a six-month separation, Ella and Ray reconciled, but problems continued and they eventually divorced. Granz took JATP on its first triumphant tour of Europe, with a punishing tour schedule that included Sweden, Norway, France, Italy, and Germany. Ella was les jazz hotter than ever in Paris.

Despite her stellar standing as a jazz vocalist, near universal praise from critics and unique crossover into so called ‘popular’ genres in the 50s Ella’s record sales sagged, Basically, because she was in a category by herself. She also wasn’t appearing on television shows or performing in the top tier venues on par with white performers.

Her close friend Dorothy Dandridge noted that Ella also wasn’t getting booked in the top nightclubs because she wasn’t considered beautiful enough. Tick recounts the famous story of Marilyn Monroe assuring  the owner of the ‘Tiny Room’ on Sunset Boulevard that she would be in the audience every night if Ella was performing there. Monroe was much in the new at the time, having recently divorced Joe DiMaggio and was one of the stars of the hit movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” During the filming, Monroe’s vocal coach told Marilyn to listen to Ella for performance tips and became an avid fan. Fitzgerald Because of Monroe’s public support Fitzgerald commented in interviews “After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again….”  

Granz convinced Ella to do a recording of songs by Cole Porter for his new jazz label Verve. She had her doubts and others did too, including Porter himself. Working for arranger Buddy Bregman for the first time, to everyone’s surprise she decided that she would not embellish, dramatize, or bring her personality into the song. Fitzerald telling Bregman that she would, simply “just sing it.”

Meanwhile, Granz was pushing Ella into bigger recording projects and this particular one had Fitzgerald nervous, especially since he was rushing her the studio sessions putting more pressure on the musicians, engineers, and the soloist, with principal recording covered over three days, just before Ella went on another JATP European tour.

By the 1950s, Fitzgerald, reluctantly started to record her songbook series, which she had been pushed to do by jazz impresario Norman Granz. The Songbooks became a masterpiece series of recordings of songs of Cole Porter, George & Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn, Rodgers & Hart, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Ella’s nonstop touring in the US and internationally was taking a toll. Coming off yet another JATP month-long tour that had Granz’s support staff vowing ‘never again’ because of the relentless traveling schedule. Ella was back on the road the following week. And she stayed on the road for the rest of her life, until age and ill health stopped her.

Intermittently Tick returns to Fitzgerald’s private life, but again mainly as it intersected with her career directly. A brief account of a chance affair in Paris, for instance, turned into a very public scandal when gossip about him being an ex-con grifting off of Ella. Gossip that Ella set the record straight just as publicly.

Her son Ray Jr. was an aspiring drummer who, at age 15, like millions of other teens, loved the Beatles. Through the 60s & 70s Ella never stopped performing, and still looked for ways to stay current. Back in London in 1964, the first thing she did was go to the Beatles Abbey Road studio and record with the group’s producer George Martin.

As popular music trends changed dramatically Ella wanted to be part of it, and continued to tour, continued to ignore her health, even after she had been hospitalized several times. Eventually her diabetes worsened, and she had to stop performing. Her musical legacy continues to be recognized by generations of singers and musicians in every genre and Tick’s biography is an engrossing biography of a musical trailblazer, a jazz titan and an inspired artist who did it her way against all odds.

PhillyDanseMetros

Tags

BALLET, Choreographers, dancers, PhiladelphiaBallet

Philadelphia Ballet | Dance Masterpieces | March 14-16

Academy of Music, Philadelphia

On the well-worn heels of Philadelphia Ballet’s run of Angel Corella’s Giselle at the Academy of Music the dancers were back on pointe, in slippers and even sneakers, for their Dance Masterpieces triple-bill of ballets by Alvin Ailey, William Forsythe and most triumphantly, Twyla Tharp. These back-to-back programs featured alternating casts to showcase the versatility, ensemble performance esprit and strengths of the full company through its ranks.

Jack Sprance in ‘The River’ | photo Alexander Iziliaev

Ailey’s 1970 ballet ‘The River’ with its dynamic original score by Duke Ellington s score with jazz symphonics, chamber works and big-band swing scoring Ailey’s dance evocations of water. The open scene ‘Spring’ with 15 dancers flowing onstage symbolizing its force-  pooling, dispersing, surging, and glistening in natural beauty evokes by these dancers after the group sequence, Arian Molina Soca dances a powerfully serene solo peppered with thrilling tour’s en l’air.

In the central duet ‘The Lake’  featuring dramatic lift sequences is danced with sterling technical artistry by Iseda and Austin Eyler. In ‘Giggling Rapids’ Lucia Erickson flirts on point with Isaac Hollis, a (jazzdance jokester) move to Ellington’s 60s era big-band swing turned into unfussy romp of seduction (. ‘The Falls’ is a le jazz percussive hot for the allegro trio -Javier Rivet , Nicholas Patterson and Denis Maciel  burning the floor Ailey’s in a tag team dance off of tornadic turns, muscled jetes and fiery footwork. Maraya Pineiro simply mesmerizing in the solo ‘Vortex.’     Then the finale ensemble with Soca and Iseda reunited. This underrated period classic from Ailey and Ellington still looks fresh as a new spring. .

Oksana Maslova and Jack Thomas in ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated‘

William Forsyth’s ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated’ made in 1987 is a choreographic industrial abstract with dancers in studio togs moving to the jarring clangs and clashes of composer Thom Willems/Lesley Struck industrial score. The dancers in academic configurations, severe phrases and decidedly machinal attitude. Forsythe’s hardwired balletics, featuring disparate solos and duets occurring simultaneously around the stage, Steely, Stoic, and technically impressive in its execution by the dancers, but the concept  cloys and agitates midway through. Cutting through the clockwork moves, there are more interesting interactions-  a duet moment, a human interaction, an expression of human connection (Some Elevated vis-à-vis an industrial world, no?.   

Ashton Roxander, Lucia Erickson, Russell Ducker & Mine Kusano ‘In the Upper Room’ | Alexander Iziliaev

Twyla Tharp’s ‘In the Upper Room’ (1986) is truly a masterpiece, scored to music by Philip Glass, proves a electrifyingly dreamy ballet on this company. The dancers appear and vanish out of a curtain at the back of the stage and dense fog. They are clad in stripped rumpled PJs and red skirts and skinnies on the women and the men shirtless. Dancers in slippers next to dancers in sneakers both pirouetting and partnering with equal power.

Among the many outstanding performances-  Zecheng Liang a stellar classical dancer, was in top form in Tharp’s idiosyncratic vocabular that is peppered with ballet variation. slicing through the air like a bolt of lightning and landing on a cloud. Mayara Pineiro and Jacquline Callahan clockwork duet in red pointe shoes could hypnotize Freud.

Set on the company by veteran Tharp stager Shelly Washington, this cast sustained uniform precision and lustrous esprit landing Tharp’s concepts of ‘at ease’ choreography peppered with sharp ballet virtuosity.  There is no connotation of romance or sexuality, but it is so sexy, warm, witty, ecstatic, and fierce.

It is its own movement world, fueled by Glass orchestral propulsion’s perpetuo molto. It still looks as startlingly fresh as last night’s dream. But indeed, in this program of modern masterworks, all of the dancers distinguished themselves. In the propulsive final passages this ensemble is radiant in the Twylazone and by the extended cheers by this audience at the end they were as well.

DanceMetros

BalletX Spring Dances at the Wilma

Photographer: Whitney Browne for BalletX
Featured: Savannah Green

The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia was sold-out for the opening night of BalletX’s Spring Series with a triple bill featuring premieres by choreographers Jennifer Archibald and Nicola Wills and a revival of Jodie Gates’ stirring 2017 ballet ‘Beautiful Once.’

With close to 100 new ballets in their repertory, Artistic Director Christine Cox continues to collaborate with choreographers from the US and abroad. Cox established the Choreographic Fellowship program that has become a creative haven for both established and emerging dance makers.

Opening the concert was Gates’ ‘Beautiful Once’  scored to the arresting orchestral (and vocals) by composer Ryan Lott as ten dancers float in all dancing different expressive choreography in a defuse pool of light they form a circle, the women on pointe, in a fluid stream. The break off into pairs and a series of duet ensue. .  

 Ashley Simpson slides across the stage on full-pointe and dances a  pas de duex with Jarard Palazo. Jared Kelly and Francesca Forcella in a lyrically athletic duet. Actually, all of the five couple captivate in different ways with interpretive artistry. Each expressive, meditative, and intimate in different ways. Gates tapping into all of BX’s strengths in balletic fusion that ignites this company. Innovative lifts, expressive movement, philosophical and body electric. The energy in the room is cathartic and  ‘Beautiful Once’ on this cast, as it did in the premiere run in 2017, has the look of a BalletX signature work.

Photographer: Whitney Browne for BalletX
Featured: Jonathan Montepara, Annika Kuo, Lanie Jackson, Jared Kelly

A torch song opens Nicola Wills’ (BX 2024 Choreographic Fellow) opens ‘Two People in Love Never Shake Hands’ with a torch song by Joep Beving that conjures the voyeuristic dance-noir atmospherics with the women dressed in long statin dresses by Christine Darch (ala MGM’s Gowns by Adrian) and the men is retro suits milling about looking to hook up. The outsider is romantic Jared Kelly who wanders on stage with a bouquet of roses amid 10 dancers in the midst of a raucous party scene. And lurking on the sidelines lurk  two dancers clad in tight black outfits and play cards at a table and intrude on the scene to move people together- or pull them apart. Are a steely eyed couple dressed in black who represent the random inner emotions of the party goers, and drolly expressive as danced by Jonathan Montepara and Annika Kuo.

In the shadows upstage is a live string quartet -Maria Im (Violin), Alexandr Kislitsyn (Violin), Caleb Paxton (Cello), Branson Yeast (Viola)- performs original chamber/cabaret music by composer Adam Vincent Clarke

The partners dance around each other, but the couple in black hover over the characters and dance out what is going on inside the psyche of said couple. Lanie Jackson and Jared Kelly dance an anguished solo, but finally reach their moment of emotional truth, The specters remove their clothes (to flesh-tone briefs) and to dance Wills’ sensually liberating duet. Wills ballet strikes as overpacked with ideas at key moments, That aside, it was obvious that most of the audience obviously were completely seduced by the dancers and Wills’ stream of dance consciousness.

Photographer: Whitney Browne for BalletX
Featured: BalletX Company

In her ballet ‘Maslow’s Peak’  Jennifer Archibald seeks to strip away masks of a dancer, to release their inner truth that the choreographer can tap into) Archibald explain is “ the point where the dancer reaches the realization of self-fulfillment and its implicit implications.”  A full company piece with 15 dancers in costume designer Emily Morgan’s  shorty black tights skirted in the back and kneepads to protect Archibald’s dance-warrior choreography of body drops, spidery moves, and hurtling slides across the dancefloor. The feral athleticism fused with thrilling balletic aerials and sharp unison ensemble passages. Archibald’s builds a structure of quicksilver pure dance set to percussion master composers Zakir Hussain and Mickey Hart. Archibald’s symbolic and literal narrative is in development, the choreography in this piece is developed, meanwhile, this ballet is a preview to Archibald’s dance adaptation of William Golding’s novel ‘Lord of the Flies,’ scheduled for 2025.

BooksBooksBooks

Tags

Ukraine, Volodoymyr Zelensky, War Journalism, War Journalist

THE SHOWMAN — INSIDE THE INVASION THAT SHOOK THE WORLD AND MADE A LEADER OF VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY By Simon Shuster

William Morrow/HarperCollins; Hardcover; January 23, 2024; $32.99; photos

http://www.harpercollins.com

 ‘The Showman’ by TIME Magazine correspondent Simon Shuster chronicles the first year of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and into the remarkable leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the former comic actor, who has outwitted Putin and mobilized an efficient military and ordinary citizens to take up arms against Russian forces and fight for a sovereign Ukraine.. .

Shuster had been reporting on the unstable political situation in Ukraine since Putin seized  Crimea in 2014 and installed puppet officials to stoke dissent among Russians living in Ukraine. Under a hollow treaty (Minsk Agreement) with Russians promising disarmament and peace between Ukrainians and Russians. As one official put it to Shuster, Putin’s tactic was a classic ‘Trojan Horse’ to bide his time, in a classic, to eventually take over the entire country.

Shuster had also been following the showbiz career of Zelensky, successful on stage, TV and movies in both Ukraine and Russia for over two decades in 2019. He played a fictional president on his hit TV show and his character articulated the Ukrainian’s rage of government corruption, so convincingly, it turned out that when he ran for president in 2019, he won.

The title of the book is not a jab at Zelensky, but an acknowledgement of his skills as an inspirational leader staring down Putin’s tyranny, and garnering support from western allies, most of whom assumed Putin’s forces would roll its tanks over Kyiv almost immediately without resistance.

But as the world soon found their invasion was ill planned and they completely underestimated Zelensky, his military and the Ukrainian people who proved a fearless civilian force. By 2019, the US was reporting that Putin was deploying weaponry, with his troupes positioning on the Belarus-Ukrainian border,  convinced an incursion on Ukraine was imminent.

Zelensky continued to hope that the invasion wouldn’t be as severe as US diplomats and European allies were warning, though in the days leading up to the war he finally realized it was happening. It was a costly mistake, which Zelensky immediately corrected.

.Zelensky chose Valery Zaluzhny to head of Ukraine’s armed forces, he had already been preparing troops without the Zelensky’s knowledge. His tactics to scramble Russian intel and strategically mobilize troops to avoid detection by the Russians. On the eve of the invasion Zelensky gathered Ukrainian oligarchs, including media giants who he had alienated by shutting down their platforms, and industrialist urging them not to flee the country. He declared martial law which gave him unilateral powers. Meanwhile  there was also increased personal risk to himself and his family.

Putin’s military was meant to occupy Kyiv in the first phase of the war, a plan that collapsed almost immediately. Documents found on a dead Russian soldier of the elite force had a long-outdated map of Kyiv from the 1980s, that shockingly had been used to plan the  invasion. Ukraine’s held the city and their victory in Kyiv immediately exposed the weaknesses of the Russian military so much so that they were no longer perceived as an indomitable force.

Still the Russian assaults in other regions were becoming more lethal, as Russian forces advanced. Days into the incursion, Zelensky traveled to the Bucha, a suburb at the western edge of Kyiv, where he met by a local priest who took him through the bombed-out town and to torture chambers where soldiers and civilians were massacred.  .

In the first month of the war a million Ukrainians were displaced or fleeing relentless bombings in metro areas and across the country. The massacre at Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, was a key event in the president’s resolve drive Russian forces out however long it would take.

Shuster writes “on the day after Zelensky’s visit. He made Bucha the centerpiece of a brutal speech to the UN Security Council. Appearing on a massive screen above the hall, as he narrated the video that revealed Ukrainians being “…..shot in the back of the head or in the eye after being tortured, who were shot on the streets,  who were thrown into a well so that they die there in suffering, who were killed in apartments houses, blown up by grenades and who were crushed by tanks in civilian cars in the middle of the road…  Whose limbs were cut off and throats were cut. Who were raped and killed in front of their children.”   

What UN Council saw on the screens was so violent and graphic, some members had to avert their eyes. He continued to push Ukraine’s allies in Europe to facilitate the pathway for his country to join NATO and the European Union. At the same time, he got the impression that the US and other allies expected him to capitulate with Putin, something he vowed that he would never do.

.When Putin surrounded Mariupol with a compound of soldiers, as well as protecting several hundred citizens, mostly women and children. Putin sealed them off without electricity, food, water. He had planned to release gas in the structure. Put amazingly, their internet access wasn’t cut off and Zelensky was able to address them directly and the people trapped inside were able to communicate through his social media platforms.

Even with the Ukrainians were winning key battles, securing territories, and getting robust support from the west, they were also shell shocked by civilian and military casualties, with the country being decimated by constant air strikes,

By autumn 2022, Zelensky’s was losing wide support across the country, and his political rivals in country were capitalizing. Against his own belief of free expression, he silenced his rival TV channels spreading lies and propaganda against him. Key victories over Russian forces also brought wide support for his commander general Valery Zaluzhny, there was even talk of him becoming president.

Against military advice that it would be too dangerous for the president, Zelensky also traveled to the site of Ukrainian soldiers and officers in a region that the Russians had agreed to a cease- fire. It was instead a deadly trap set upon Ukrainian troops through the use of wire cluster bombs, which are prohibited under international rules of engagement. 

Even as Zelensky garnered support from the European Union, the US and NATO nations in military and humanitarian aid, Zelensky feared that support for him was waning as the war and its brutal realities dragged on for months. But his nightly addresses to the people on social media were very effective in keeping unity and morale up.

Zelensky appointed a more aggressive military commander who would not hold back fighting Russian forces, by then manned with the ruthless Wagner group of soldiers released from Russian prisons to fill out a dwindling Russian army. Zelensky also brokered drone missiles from Hungary something that Putin didn’t anticipate or could track.

.As the first winter at war loomed, the rifts between Zelensky and Zaluzhny were more apparent. Zaluzhny wanted to mobilize a forces to reclaim territory in the south, but it would, according to the president take too much time. Instead, Zelensky saw the immediate opportunity to defeat Russian forces in Kharkiv. He went around his Zaluzhny and commissioned Oleksandr Syrsky, the second highest ranking officer to launch the attack which proved wildly successful and a high stakes victory for Ukrainian troops.

 Zelensky traveled to the city for a victory speech, which humiliated Putin and sealed, at least for the moment, Zelensky’s support among Ukrainians, was fulsome and triumphant as the war entered the long winter leading into the second year of the war. .

Shuster also reports, briefly on first lady Olena Zelenska, and their children, who for their own safety had to be separated from the president. In one of the most moving chapters of the book, Shuster describes Zelenska’s work to secure humanitarian aid for Ukrainian children, even addressing the US congress imploring them for more military support, and describing incidents of Ukrainian children being torn apart by Russian bombs

 Shuster’s was with Zelensky and his staff, officers, and in the field with Ukrainian troupes. He doesn’t hold back on reporting Zelensky’s miscalculations, and even the difficulties visited on his family by his political ambitions. He brings dimension to his portrait of Zelensky- politically practical and as forthcoming, brave, and compassionate as he is guarded, cynical and avenging.   

Now, as necessary military aid for Ukraine to stop Putin’s war becomes political game for Republicans in the US Congress, reporting on the geopolitical realities of the war get pushed aside for vapid and exploitive headlines. In the breech, ‘The Showman’ is a reminder of how much is at stake. Shuster reporting is detailed, authoritative and altogether a riveting eyewitness account of the first year of the war and fascinating portrait of a once in a generation, transformational world leader.

BooksBooksGLBTQ+Books

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booksbooksbooks, Fiction, GLBTQ+ literature, justin-torres, national-book-award

BLACKOUTS | by Justin Torres

by Justin Torres

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | http://www.fsgbooks.com

The unnamed narrator in Justin Torres’ novel Blackouts is a 29-year-old gay man, sometime hustler, fabulist, suicide survivor who has ‘blackout’ episodes, real and imagined. He wanders through a desolate landscape to seek a gay elder named Juan Gay, who he met ten years earlier when they were both incarcerated in a hospital psych ward. He finds Juan living out his last days in a derelict desert asylum called ‘the Palace.’  

Juan has a photographic memory (or so it would seem) recounting the narrator’s previous 18 day stay at the hospital with ‘nene’ as he calls him- who tried to commit suicide. Now camped out at the Palace ‘nene’ as Juan refers to him is at a crossroads and can’t reconcile his past can’t navigate his future, living day to day a self-confessed loser to the extent that he habitually loses personal items, as Juan points out to him might be pathological and has included – keys, wallets, official IDs, and foremost in his mind on this journey back to Juan, his gold cross necklace that Juan had given him ten years before.

Now Juan is coaxing nene piece together his past by asking specific questions about losing things, his travails with his abandoned family and his singular experiences as a hustler who Juan coaxes out more ‘whore stories.’  So, he relates hustler tales in exchange for Juan’s and he claps back the elder with equally prodding questions. There is a lot of gay lore and fabulism spun as Torres mixes truth and illusion.

Their stories are further contextualized by Juan’s history with a lesbian couple who took him in, lovingly when he was a child. The couple ‘Jan’ and Zhenya researchers on homosexuality and gay culture of the early 20^th century. Jan interviewing gay folk and collecting research data on medical and psychiatric malpractice (read torture) and the criminalization of homosexuals. Torres laces the book with documents, photographs and illustrations, and other evidence of these officiated attacks against homos.

One of the most startling visual elements in the book are the pages that document interviews with victims of with whole sections blacked out, and only trigger words of so called ‘deviance’ are revealed. Now nearing death, Juan is lost in a world of memories on being a lost queer child discovering a world where homosexuals were rejected, bullied, and criminalized. And the cultural legacies of those experiences are still triggers in real and imagined ways embedded into nations, cultures, and religions.

By way of Juan & the narrator’s storytelling, Torres pays homage to the gay literary icons of the past- evoking Wilde’s ‘de profundo,’ Williams’ Streetcar’ and most directly Argentine novelist Manuel Puig’s ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ as Nene and Juan co-write a film script about a young hustler who is hired by a man who infantilizes him. This is obliquely reflective to both of their experiences as abandoned and wandering gay men from different eras. It strikes as a little forced, as inserted in the middle of Juan’s oral history of his childhood in the care of Jan and Zendaya taking him in and emigrating to Spanish Harlem in the 20s.

There are so many layers of truth and illusion spun in BLACKOUTS that it’s not only hard to keep all the narrative threads straight, the categories are simultaneously blurred. Within this fictional maze there is a century of lived experience between these men and those GLBTQ they conjure from their lives and their

Imaginations. Some sections intoxicating lyrical prose. The Blackouts in the ‘Sex Variant’ documents, redactions that one can only guess at- erasures about the lived experience of generations of GLBTQ individuals, whose personhood is being hidden, erased, or disappeared, either for their own protection or for their own peril.

Meanwhile the story of Juan’s guardianship by a lesbian couple Jan and Zhenya, who were actually  researched gay and lesbian sexuality in the early 20^th century. Images the Hirschfeld and Kinsey from the studies of sexual variants’

As engrossing as Torres’ illusory writing is, the fragmented style, however valid to his prose form, cloys in key spots. But past that, the emotional and intellectual challenge of BLACKOUTS refracted mirror of lives ruined, erased, or disappeared by antigay forces. is a timely j’accuse of a new era of oppression and hate against GLBTQ+ people. Torres’ fragmented tale of systemic erasure and attacks on queer people is also a stirring manifesto of self-liberation. Last month Torres was deservedly awarded the National Book Award for his queer tale as revelatory, as it is viscerally cryptic.

&Poetries

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LJW POETRIES, The Music Rooms

Prelude in transit     fr The Music Rooms

          ~wordless darkness that underlies all verbal truth~Perhaps something only music could suggest (Arthur Miller)

steel-blue shadow
clawing out of the room
Sutured behind a wing,
vanished into mercurial skies,
Unwritten, unspoken,
    unanchored infinity
        or elusive escape
    through the hands
retold by time signatures by Chopin’s
vanquished eye
       Seduced away
    witnesses of
catastrophic days
       absent of reason
   of any
Remembering
but their stories
    scored to vanquished waltz
conjured from embers
Of a burned book
       or prelude in transit
        one Riveted to the track
         as pulverized recisitive
vanished in a silent night
         When it is played again
           seamlessly for the first time

DanceMetros

Tags

Balanchine, dancers, NutcrackerBallet, PhiladelphiaBallet, Tchaikovsky

 Philadelphia Ballet polished production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker

Philadelphia Ballet is one of just a few US dance companies licensed to perform George Balanchine’s 1954 minted version of The Nutcracker and a week into their extended run at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the production looks better than ever, a showcase for the whole company from principal dancers to students from the company’s dance school.  

Les Dickert’s precision lighting design enhances Peter Horne’s drawing room cum atrium set designs and Judanna Lynne’s beautifully enchanting period costumes in the gilded 19th century opera house environs of the Academy. 

All of the production elements in Act I enhance Balanchine’s ritualized template in of The Nutcracker’s enduring appeal, however brushed up by Balanchine’s neoclassicism, can still lumber along as the adults and children pantomime old-world rituals at a Christmas holiday gathering. But subtle refinements in the pacing of these scene by artistic director Angel Corella and his production team, notably. Jamie Santoro, (Children’s Ballet Stager) and PB’s ballet school director Davit Karapetyan has animated the children’s cast to a new level of immersive artistry.

As Fritz Casey J. Davis is full of party mischief, darting around the guests and taunting his sister Marie played by Cailyn Talley, both are good actor-dancers with magnetic presence. Sterling Baca brings both wit and warmth as Herr Drosselmeier the mysterious guest who entertains the children and presents Marie with the Nutcracker doll, igniting her dream of a Prince. Baca often dances romantic roles and is proving a strong character dancer as well. IIya Beck also a standout as the courtly Nephew and the Nutcracker Prince.

The first magical dance in Act I performed by Jorge Garcia Alonso who turned the two-minute tin-soldier virtuosity, a contra-limb flat footed tour de force solo. Also making the most of dance minimalism en pointe as danced by Fernanda Oliveira and Lucia Erickson in the mirroring dances as Harlequin & Columbine. 

When the party ends and Marie goes to sleep she dreams of a Nutcracker Prince come to life and dreams of him battling, along with the children’s brigade, the Mouse King, and his mousey minions. Then Marie is spirited away to the Land of the Sweets but not before a stop in the woods with the blizzard of ballerina Snowflakes, a dazzling display of Balanchine’s choreographic ensemble precision and esprit de corps, all the more dynamic with the Philadelphia Boys Choir serenading vocalese from the Academy stage boxes.

Among the highlights in the Land of the Sweets divertissements’

Yuka Iseda makes the Arabian Coffee a subtler but no less seductive solo of Balanchine’s harem vamp. Siobhan Howley and Yuval Cohen lead the Spanish Hot Chocolate Dance, Corella sharpening the flamenco(esque) choreography by Balanchine with more Seville fire.

The ‘Tea’ dance has been stripped of its more offensive ‘oriental’ tropes, and much for the better- . Gone are the offensive gestures and subservient costumes. Ashton Roxander with partners Madelin Winters and Ava DiEmedio present ‘Tea’ Ashton Roxander out of a giftbox so he can fly into aerial splits and scissoring battlement.

Thays Golz leads Marzipan Shepherdesses quintet with Jacqueline Callahan, Gabriela Mesa, Erin Patterson, Julia Vinez- This ensemble’s quicksilver pointe work fleet and charming. Demi-soloist Isaac Hollis brought the house with his breezy precision and exuberance in the Candy Canes dance (a role that Balanchine danced when he was a lead character dancer in the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet.

And soloist Alexandra Heier brought fire and ice as Dewdrop with glittering arabesque variations and turn, capped off with air-slicing grand jetes, moving in and around the corps de ballet Flowers, who nailed the fluid dynamics of Balanchine’s geometric canon lines.

.The finale with Sugar Plum Fairy Dayesi Torriente and her Cavalier Arian Molina Soca looked a bit off pace in the opening moments of their central pas de deux. Torriente delivering vibrant diamond pointe work. But after their solo passages, they flew into sync after their solo passages. Soca airy jetes circling the Academy stage with breezy sharpness, then tossing off steel centered pirouettes.

The other aspect that captivates throughout the Philadelphia Ballet’s Nutcracker is Philadelphia Ballet Orchestra under the direction of Beatrice Jona Affron. Affron is a Tchaikovsky specialist and the orchestra’s performance on this night- from the thrilling rhythmic drive, the precision orchestra balance, the translucent sound-world engulfing the rafters of the Academy. Affron sculpts all its glittering symphonic dimensions in the Academy. Among the outstanding soloists- violinist Tess Varley and harpist Mindy Cutcher, flutists Edward Schultz and Elissa Brown.