January 07, 2007: Everything is no Longer Beautiful at the Ballet

Regular readers, as well as those surveying my current Tag Cloud, have probably detected my interest in opera; and, here in San Francisco, that interest is well satisfied by the San Francisco Opera. As is often the case, our Opera House divides it time, roughly equally, between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. So I am frequently asked if I spend as much time at San Francisco Ballet performances as I devote to the Opera. I have answered this question in the negative so many times that I think I am now well-enough rehearsed to express it in text!

Those who know more about my than Google is ever likely to reveal know that, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I was fanatical about the dance, writing regularly for Boston After Dark and sending dispatched from Boston to Dance Magazine. New York was the place to be for such fanaticism, but Boston was not that bad. In fact, it was in a used bookstore in Boston (one of the best places to gather material about dance history) that I first met Leslie Getz, who probably had the most awesome collection of dance-related literature I had ever seen, all in an apartment in Palo Alto! Leslie was the one who taught me the aphorism of dance history that shaped much of my personal aesthetic: Fokine was the Father, Balanchine was the Son, and Ashton was the Holy Ghost. Two other choreographers eventually shared close proximity with this "holy trinity:" Anthony Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

On the popular front this was a time when Jerome Robbins was attracting a good deal of attention, particularly after the impact of West Side Story. He came up through the ranks of the early efforts in American ballet choreography; and, at a time when I would drive from Boston to New York every chance I had to catch the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, his "Afternoon of a Faun" was a fixture in the company repertoire. Similarly, Ballet Theater would do his "Les Noces" regularly. With all this as context, Robbins decided to "return to his roots" by introducing "Dances at a Gathering," a near-epic setting of Chopin piano music, complete with an on-stage pianist. (If imitation is the greatest form of flattery and parody the highest art of imitation, then the greatest honor to Robbins' effort came when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo added "Yes Virginia, Another Piano Ballet" to their repertoire!) I was never particularly happy with Robbins working at this scale (I was even less happy when he tried to take on the "Goldberg Variations"); but this was where the "buzz" was (even if we did not use that noun in those days).

Run the time-line closer to the present when I discovered that San Francisco Ballet was going to include "Dances at a Gathering" in one of their seasons. My wife had never seen it; but she was curious about the company and had a lot more enthusiasm for Chopin than I usually do. I had not seen the company since 1967, when they had visited Jacob's Pillow; and they had gone through a lot of changes since then. So we went, and I am afraid that it did not take me long to start grumbling. What I began to realize was that the days of my fanatical interest in dance were actually the "twilight period" of the "good old days;" and it was unclear when the sun would next rise.

Back in those days, of course, one could not live by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Cunningham alone; but the alternatives could be pretty disappointing. Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino tended to have the strongest hold on consistently putting out disappointing stuff. Time magazine may have been excited about Joffrey's "Astarte;" but all I ever remembered was the way in which the cyclorama had an erection! Nevertheless, even the most rabid fans would still go to see the Joffrey Ballet because they performed "The Green Table;" and they did it very well, probably because the original choreographer, Kurt Joos had an active had in its reconstruction. Also, when we could not go to "live" performances, we would seek out movie revival houses, not just for old ballet films but for Hollywood musicals with "real" choreography in them. Balanchine frequently confessed to being a great admirer of Astaire, and you do not have to watch many of the RKO films with Ginger to see why.

So why is there now such a long dark night of an art form I once loved so passionately? The best explanation I can give is that it all comes down to energy. From the evidence I have gathered, "The Green Table" is a perfect example because Joos understood the role of energy in both theory (some of which he apparently got from Laban) and practice. Both Astaire and Kelly were masters of energy control; and, in Astaire's case, that came in through his very conception of choreography. Every now and then I see a choreographer (such as Forsythe) who seems to understand the role of energy; but that understanding does not matter very much if the dancer's can't "get it." Here in San Francisco I really could not fault the local company on any of the steps in "Dances at a Gathering" (particularly since, given the volume of them, my memory was not that strong); but my grumbling all had to do with the fact that I experienced no sense at all of how to control energy in order to turn the steps into dance.

Will this trend change? That is impossible to predict. When Balanchine came to the United States, no one expected that American ballet would rise to a level that had been associated almost exclusively with its Russian heritage; but, between Lincoln Center, City Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York could justifiably claim to be the Dance Capital of the World. Perhaps it will regain that title. Perhaps San Francisco will make a serious play for it. More likely, however, we now live in a digital culture with far less admiration for such performing arts, which means that the best we can hope for is that any records we have of any of those art forms be properly preserved for posterity!

November 18, 2006: Bach as Coltrane; Coltrane as Bach

I am in the final stages of working on the B-flat (first) partita from Part I of Johann Sebastian Bach's Clavierübung. I have worked my way through all of the "French Suites" and about half of the "English;" but these really go to the next level. What I have discovered is that, while nothing (or at least almost nothing) about Bach can ever be called "routine," there is at least a bit of predictability in the English and French suites, while the movements of the partita just keep going and going into new territory, sustaining the attention over longer intervals of time (and challenging the performer to get the mind around committing the whole thing to memory). Coltrane lovers know what is going on here. The partita movements are in the same league as (or perhaps anticipate the league of) Coltrane improvisations, based on an explicit (if not always familiar) foundation and then quickly spinning away from the foundation and orbiting around it for awesomely long periods of time. Coltrane also shared with Bach the ability to take something that was very (if not too) familiar (perhaps so much so that people had grown sick of it, as in Mary Martin singing "My Favorite Things") and turn it into something that was both the same and very much other (not to mention on a much more epic scale: the quartet performance of "My Favorite Things" recorded in Paris on November 17, 1962 clocked in at almost 24 minutes). I check into some of my Coltrane background material for any mention of Bach, but I could not find anything. On the other hand Coltrane was never one for talking very much about he did. I recall seeing Stravinsky on television the night that "The Flood" was broadcast; and, after a few routine sentences, he said, "I don't want to tell you more; I just want to play you more." Trane would have understood; and my guess is that Bach would have, too.

October 04, 2006: The Dangerous Concept of "Pattern"

It may be the many of the exaggerated claims recently being promoted, whether about digital libraries or sharing poetry, all fall back on the assumption that "pattern" is a mathematical concept that can be readily manipulated by powerful software. The fact is that this is a dangerous misconstrual of the concept of "pattern," which can only impede efforts to engage software to facilitate the management of documents, whether those documents are the contents of a digital library or someone's favorite collection of poems. When a word is capable of causing that much trouble, my general inclination to be rid of it, and that is what I propose to do.

Rather than simply expunge the use of the word "pattern" from our current discourse, I would like to modestly propose that we consider, as an alternative, Gerald Edelman's concept of "perceptual categorization." This concept was first discussed at length in Edelman's Neural Darwinism and progressed to the primary leitmoitv in his study of consciousness, The Remembered Present. While this may strike some as little more than a word-game move, I believe there are significant ways in which Edelman's model of how the brain forms perceptual categories constitutes a departure from mathematical models of patterns.

Most important is that, while there are a variety of objective criteria that can be used to identify and define patterns, perceptual categorization puts the human subject (the perceiver) squarely in the middle of the loop. If document management is ultimately about supporting sharing and if sharing is to be an intersubjective activity (and what else could it be in any practical setting?), then we cannot abstract the subject out of the picture (at least, with my own personal convictions, I cannot). If we further follow Edelman’s lead, we also encounter some interesting properties of perceptual categories and how “wet brains” deal with them.

First of all, perceptual categories are fluid. Edelman firmly rejects the idea that any part of the brain is implementing anything like a store-and-retrieve memory system. Rather, categorizing is something the brain is always doing (probably even when we are dreaming); and a lot of that categorizing is recategorizing.

Equally important is the brain evidence Edelman has mustered that demonstrates that different parts of the brain deal with categories in space and time, respectively. Most pattern theories tend to assume that patterns in time are the same as patterns in space, because you can just include a time dimension as one of your “spatial” axes. However, when you bring human subjects into the picture, time is not just “another dimension.” We have known this since Aristotle (read his separate treatises on physics and memory to give your own gray cells a real jolt); and we are just beginning to discover how this plays out in our brains.

This then takes me to my third point: As I previously asserted, the discursive dimension is a dimension of performance. Because it is a dimension of performance, it is a temporal dimension and therefore firmly requires temporal perceptual categorization. (At this point you need to shift from Aristotle on physics and memory over to his “Poetics!”)

September 29, 2006: Poetry Document Management?

JP Rangaswami's latest venture into social software seems to involve his love of poetry. Here is how he puts it:

What matters is whether we can use the power of many and group selection and wisdom of crowds and collaborative filtering to come up with something like this. if you liked poems A and B then you are likely to like poem C.

My initial reaction was to approach the problem through social networking. I proposed that the path to recognizing both categories of and links between “creative artifacts” (such as poems) leads through an understanding of the social networks of the creative artists themselves. Randall Collins has already pursued this line of thought in the domain of philosophy in his wonderful book, The Sociology of Philosophies. I figured one could apply the same reasoning to poets.

Very few creative minds work in isolation. (Ezra Pound has a wonderful canto about what it was like living with Yeats when Yeats was composing a poem.) I know of only two “isolationist” examples, neither of whom is a poet: Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Faulkner. (Faulkner’s dismal stint within the Hollywood system only reinforced his need for such isolation.) My guess is that the social networks of poets are not that different from the social networks of philosophers that Collins analyzed, except, perhaps, that they may not be limited to a single domain, such as poetry. Consider, for example, the social network that formed around Serge Diaghilev at the beginning of the twentieth century, which included composers, painters, and poets, as well as the choreographers and dancers of the Ballets Russes.

Then I realized (with some help from Cornelius Puschmann) that I was falling into a trap. I was thinking about JP's problem as if it were a problem in document management; and, at the end of the day, poems are not documents! The essence of (almost?) every poem lies in performance; the text is little more than an attempt to represent that performance in a static form. (The same is true of music. The music is in the performance, not in the printed notation the performer may be using.) This premise makes JP’s problem even harder, if not impossible. Having worked as a performing arts critic, I have some vague intuitions about both categories of and links between performances; but, because performances are dynamic processes, I am not sure I can articulate those intuitions very well. Once again I have found myself confront the problem of the inadequacy of applying noun-based thinking to verb-based situations!