As proof that art is open to interpretation, one man in the audience behind me at the Southern Danceworks performance (Spring Dances) commented at halftime how much he preferred the first piece (Quips and Cranks) to the second (Make Like a Tree).  That was just moments after I wrote down that I preferred the second to the first.

I am just one guy.  And I fully admit that I know next-to-nothing about dance.  But I am trying my best to try.  Because I recognize that when it’s good, it can be extremely worthwhile.

Maybe I only thought I preferred the second because I was so drawn in by the excellent and engaging live music of the first piece (by violinist Karen Bentley Pollick and percussionist John Scalici).  Attention dance world: Live music makes everything better.  It would be true even if the music hadn’t been excellent.  Hire struggling piano players.  Amateur guitarists.  Surely there are plenty of musicians who are competent, would work cheapish or free, and would love an opportunity to collaborate with a bunch of dancers.  Any dance performance I’ve seen with live music has been preferable to just about any with canned music.  I’d have to guess, too, that the dancers like it better.

For me, the same pattern held true after intermission.  I’d say I enjoyed the fourth piece (Distinct Destiny With an Open Fist) more than the third piece (Quixotic).  But my hunch is that the man behind me would’ve preferred the third to the fourth.  Who can tell?

The point is that I’m no expert.  I’m just a dude with a keyboard.  I enjoy getting out to see stuff.  And I’m not too shy to write about it.  Everybody else’s thoughts are just as important as mine.  I love hearing the wide range of opinions.  And at the same time, I’m always amazed that these same people, with all these varied opinions, all seem to intuitively know when they’ve seen something amazing.

What I miss is having somebody else to discuss these shows with.  Sometimes this just means taking a friend with me.  But sometimes it means running into a friend in another venue, mentioning Southern Danceworks, and having that person say, “Yeah, I saw them too.”  Or talking to someone else who had a similar wow experience about Susanna Phillips at Opera Birmingham.  Which is the kind of moment that – repeated over time – takes a limited, personal experience and alchemizes it into culture.

Think about that.  No one knows my music.  But if a thousand people included it in a conversation next month, I’d become culture.  For years, The Mountain Goats were under the radar, but now they’re culture.  (Kind-of.)  Bo Bice 2004?  Limited.  Bo Bice 2006?  Culture.  So You Think You Can Dance?  Culture.

Which is one reason I push for bigger, fuller audiences.  For goodness sakes, if you’ve got a good product, don’t be afraid to give away tickets.  Especially if you know you’re going to have empty seats.  Don’t play to an empty room.  One of my favorite books is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and a good quote from it is: “What’s the point of giving an extremely subtle performance if basically no one is watching?”  It’s not enough for an arts organization to get grants and find corporate sponsors without spending equal time cultivating its audience.  The audience – culture – is the whole point.  What would the point be of failing to gather a crowd for Svetlana Zakharova?

Back to this performance… I thought the dancers did very well (Gauen Alexander, David Bauser, Jon Caspian, Lisa Gibbs, Jordan Mercer, Chinatsu Owada, Mary Margaret Scalici, and Roger Van Fleteren) and deserve praise for clearly working their toes off, though the choreography in these four pieces rarely singled out any dancer in particular.

Thanks to Gauen Alexander and the rest of the Southern Danceworks crew for the invitation.

On Thursday night, I went to see the Sanspointe Dance Company for the third time.  This performance was “Primary Subject” and featured six new pieces.  My favorites were “Measuring the Marigolds” (choreographed by Taryn Lavery and performed by Shellie Chambers, Noel Pollard, and Anna Walker) and “I made something for you” (created and performed by Rhea Speights and Justin Wallace).

I have a theory that all art can be analyzed as an amalgam of three things: an idea, execution of that idea, and charisma/personality.  But these things don’t interact with any easy mathematical precision.  If there’s a genius idea, you might not really need much execution or charm.  Similarly, a mediocre idea might can be turned into something worth seeing just through brilliant execution and high-wattage charisma.  If a girl’s got enough charisma, I might could watch her just stand there for half-an-hour.  But when you’ve got all three, you’ve got yourself a winner.

There are several things that Sanspointe does very well.  When they’re at their best, the Sanspointe dancers look like they’re having a good time and effectively convey this to the audience.  Even professional dancers often don’t do this well and can end up looking bored or disengaged.  For whatever reason, the Sanspointe dancers almost always make it look like fun.

I’ve said a lot that I love to see and hear dancers panting, sweating, and out-of-breath.  The cozy quarters of the Children’s Dance Foundation are ideal for that.  Being this close to your performers lets you see how thoroughly they’re enjoying themselves and the simple and intrinsic joy of movement.

Likewise, the choreography for Sanspointe can be gleefully fun.  I’ve laughed out loud at all three of the shows.  Which I assume is unusual for dance.  Maybe I’ve just got bad manners.  Or maybe I’m the only one who thinks it’s all so funny.  But I can’t help but think that the Sanspointe choreographers had humor in mind when they created certain moves or certain dances.

I’m sure there are as many different choreography styles as there are people.  Accordingly, the Sanspointe playfulness comes in many different flavors.  It might be spending several minutes between pieces preparing an aerial swing for “Deluge” – establishing the dramatic arc and tension for the audience – and then, after the music starts, refusing for the first few minutes to let the performer touch it in any meaningful way.  Or the good-natured act of putting a swing onstage in the first place.  It might be cursing the dancers with an “evil” hand in “Mind Over Me” – like Evil Dead 2 – to pass around and react to.  It might be making me focus on the dancers’ blue socks/shoes in “Measuring the Marigolds”.  And, of course, the obvious and laugh-out-loud humor of vibraphonist-dancer interaction in “I made something for you”.  Rhea Speights – a possible nominee for coolest person in town.

Also, some of the ideas were clear and good.  There was a place in “There was Morning and Evening, Another Day” where there was one dancer onstage with three chairs and I could follow the artistic idea of “How many ways can one dancer move with three chairs?”  Or in “Deluge”: “How can a dancer play with a swing – without swinging?”  Or in “I made something for you” when I grasped the idea, “What if the dancer interrupts and brats up the musician?”  These are themes – and an audience needs one to be able to follow along.  When it’s not going well, it’s usually because I don’t understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and why I don’t get it.

As long as Sanspointe follows the general format of idea (give your audience a theme), execution (provide a few flashy, “hook-y”, or interesting moves), and personality (look like you’re having fun in a way that remembers and engages the audience), I’m always open to seeing modern dance.  It only starts to lose me when there’s a bunch of dance-y dance happening without an obvious or coherent idea involved.  Or if there’s movement that starts to look similar, but without repeating anything in a way that provides a coherent theme.  Or if the dancers look bored or flat.  As an aside, I may be uncivilized, but I have an easier time appreciating dance that’s backed by a strong, organized beat (mum (or Star Dot Star?)) over something more noisy and dissonant (Kronos Quartet).  When they’ve got the good mojo going, there’s nothing stopping me from recommending Sanspointe shows to just about anybody.

Thank you very much to Shellie Chambers and the women of Sanspointe for inviting me and for striving to create new and cool art.

From the 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (starting with a statement from Jubal Harshaw):

“Abstract design is all right – for wallpaper or linoleum.  But art is the process of evoking pity and terror.  What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation.  Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.  These laddies who won’t deign to do that – or can’t – lost the public.  The ordinary bloke will not buy ‘art’ that leaves him unmoved.”

“Jubal, I’ve always wondered why I didn’t give a hoot for art.  I thought it was something missing in me.”

“Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art.  But it’s up to the artist to use language that can be understood.  Most of these jokers don’t want to use language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we ‘fail’ to see what they are driving at.”

***

For pretty much the whole past year, I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Alabama Ballet perform Rooster by Christopher Bruce.  As soon as I saw them advertise a piece that paired rock and roll (by the Rolling Stones, no less) with ballet, I knew I had to be there.  Rock is a language I understand.

In putting together this piece, Bruce used eight Rolling Stones songs (Little Red Rooster, Lady Jane, Not Fade Away, As Tears Go By, Paint It Black, Ruby Tuesday, Play With Fire, & Sympathy for the Devil).  I’ve never in my life had such a hard time at a public event repressing an urge to sing along.  How can you resist air-drumming to Paint It Black?  Is there really anybody who hasn’t been in a car and crooned “Gooooood-bye, Ruuuuuuu-by Tuesday, Who could hang a nyaaaame on you?”  Howabout the irresistableness of singing the “Who, Who?” backup vocals during Sympathy for the Devil?

And that’s the genius of it.  Stones music is accessible.  It’s a good choreographer working in a language that people can understand, rather than tacitly suggesting that it’s somehow my fault when all that instrumental, orchestral music might fail to move me.  The first person who puts ballet to Radiohead (or OutKast) gets a gold star.

Can there really be any disagreement that rock is popular music and that orchestral music is not?  No offense for fans of classical music, but if we held a popularity contest, it’d be a landslide.  For example, how many people last year bought tickets to rock shows versus those who bought tickets to classical music?  Or, go check what portion of Wal-Mart’s CD aisles are devoted to each.  Do you ever hear orchestral music played over the speakers at football games?  Is there really any chance that Tchaikovsky is going to make a comeback?

I would suggest that if you’re making a serious effort to try to sell dance tickets to a general audience, you might consider scheduling more dance that exploits popular music.  Turning that around, if you’re not using popular music, then you might consider whether you’re fully committed to inviting and welcoming the general public.

As an aside, it makes me wonder whether someone could use modern software to remix Tchaikovsky (or other classics) for the ballet and give it a modern beat.  Or whether it would’ve been awesome to have any decent rock band at the performance to cover these songs live.  Dance needs music.  And any live music makes it better.

Not to bury this point too deeply in the text, I loved it.  Just as importantly, I would bet that the dancers loved it.  And not just because they think they have to say they did – but because they were genuinely having a blast.  I could be wrong, but I think that kind of enthusiasm shows up in a performance.  All props to the guys (Gauen Alexander, Noah Hart, David Kiyak, Benjamin Linn & Brandon Ragland) and girls (Jennifer Ferrigno, Ellizabeth Gamble, Jordan Mercer, Chinatsu Owada & Noel Pollard).  Also, after mentioning her several times in a row, I think it’s probably worth saying that I might pay money just to watch Jennifer Ferrigno chew spaghetti.

Serenade was a perfect and beautiful compliment to Rooster and, as a whole performance, it made the Alabama Ballet cool.  Not in that way that teachers and colleges try to convince girls that it’s cool to study science and math.  But in a way that’s actually cool.  So much, that I have no problem saying that if you’re a Birmingham resident who tries to stay in the know, but you missed this performance, I think you really missed something.  And if the Alabama Ballet can’t use this as an opportunity to move towards the young, hip, and relevant, then it may be missing something equally as important.

Finally, I laughed out loud that the girls’ costumes in Rooster looked a touch like Sith Cheerleader uniforms.  Since no one but the hard-core dorks will grok that, I’ll provide links here, here, and here.  Way cool.

Thanks to Leslie Cooper and the Alabama Ballet for giving me the unique experience of looking forward to a ballet for almost a year (who knew that was possible?).