Tag Archives: Black Swan

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Updates: Maryhill and ‘Black Swan’

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By Bob Hicks

The Plaza by GBD Architects. Watercolor rendering by C.S. Holmes.Maryhill Museum of Art officially breaks ground at 3:30 p.m. next Friday, Feb. 18, on its $10 million expansion project, which will give the Columbia Gorge landmark some much-needed elbow room. Between an expansive plaza and expanded indoor spaces, the project will add 25,500 square feet.  The museum will be open during construction: Maryhill’s 2011 season opens March 15. Read the update here on Art Daily. And read our original reporting here and here.

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Meanwhile, Scatterers who remember chief correspondent Martha Ullman West’s take on the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan — “In several places I got the giggles,” she wrote here about the ballet-bloodbath melodrama — might also be interested in Alastair MacAulay’s take here on the same movie, in which the New York Times dance critic considers Black Swan in Bette Davis terms. “Let’s also admit there have always been striking parallels between the ballet classics of the 19th century and the Hollywood women’s movies of the mid-20th century,” he writes. Let’s.

Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West

O bleak ‘Black Swan,’ flying from reality

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When Hollywood decides to depict a specific trade, dramatic license usually trumps veracity. Think all those cop movies truly depict an average day in the life and thinking of a policeman? How about the hilarious world of newspaper hacks in the likes of The Front Page? Black Swan, the new horror film with a ballet backdrop, is no exception. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West argues that if you think this is what the ballet world is really like … well, she can get you a very good deal on a bridge in Brooklyn.

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By Martha Ullman West

black-swan-movie-poster1Black Swan is not a film about ballet.

Oh sure, there are a few shots of point shoes, not to mention bleeding toes, company class, unconvincing rehearsals of small bits of Swan Lake, and Natalie Portman, who richly deserves for her acting (but not her dancing) the Golden Globe award she picked up Sunday night. She spent two years taking ballet classes, and lost a lot of weight for her role.

But here’s the rub. Classical ballet, and director Darren Aronofsky‘s profoundly Puritanical view of the art form, provide the mere framework for a film about a deeply troubled young woman whose cries for help are unheard, or denied, by a mother who thinks only of herself and an employer who seems only to think about sex.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Music, Theater

Hot links: hard nut, black swan, bad ‘Y’

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Mark Morris and his Dance Group in the Duffy Performance Space at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 2008. Photo: Klaus Lucka/Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris‘s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.

Nikolai Dimitriyevich Kuznetsov, portrait of Tchaikovsky, oil on canvas, 1893. State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow/Wikimedia Commons.You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday story ballet, but people who think that about it (a) aren’t paying a lot of attention to the dance itself, and (b) apparently haven’t read the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which both The Hard Nut and The Nutcracker are based. Morris took the narrative for his version, which premiered in 1991, directly from Hoffmann’s tale-within-the-tale, which is more sinister than your average sugar plum and which Hoffmann himself titled The Hard Nut. If you’ve never read the Hoffman story, it’s well worth it.

The Hard Nut returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music next weekend, and this morning’s New York Times carries a freewheeling Q&A interview with Morris by Julie Bloom. It offers a great inside look at Morris’s thinking and his approach to art. He declares himself a classicist in many ways, which I think is true, especially in terms of musicality. And he reveals that it was his love for Tchaikovsky‘s score that prompted him to create The Hard Nut in the first place.

Absolutely. Tchaikovsky strikes me as one of our most misunderstood major composers, a guy whose work is often dismissed as sweet and antiquarian. Hardly. Yes, his music is melodically gorgeous. Structurally, it’s like steel: tough and springy, and fully anticipating modernism. As Morris puts it, it’s “astonishingly advanced.”

Read the interview here. And don’t forget that Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s production of the Balanchine Nutcracker opens December 11.

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