Tag Archives: Martha Ullman West

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

OBT’s ‘Chromatic Quartet,’ Take 2

Leave a comment

OBT performs the world premiere of Matyash Mrozewski's "The Lost Dance." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, keeps a sharp and steady eye on the dance world for a variety of publications. A week ago she reviewed the opening of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s “Chromatic Quartet” program for The Oregonian. (Art Scatter’s Bob Hicks followed with this take on Oregon Arts Watch.) Then, on Friday night, Ullman West returned to the Newmark Theatre to see what a week’s experience and some different casting had done to the show. Sometimes, quite a bit. Here’s her report.

*

By Martha Ullman West

Just as you think you can’t stand to see Lambarena again, ever, Yuka Iino dances the lead female role with such charm, such energy, such abandon and such pleasure, you want to see her do it again.

Grace Shibley and Brett Bauer in Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto." Photo: Blaine Truitt CovertI had fully intended to leave the Newmark Theatre at the second intermission Friday night, having watched many companies (well, three) perform a ballet I don’t think really works. But I was curious to see how convincingly Iino and Chauncey Parsons would de-classicize themselves in Val Caniparoli’s blending of tribal dance and ballet. In movement that is antithetical to classical epaulement, Iino was terrific, Parsons had the right energy, and Yang Zou’s undulating shoulders looked like they’d been oiled at the joint.

Continue reading OBT’s ‘Chromatic Quartet,’ Take 2 →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Timeless TBA: art & politics in ‘Giselle’

Leave a comment

“We could do with a regiment of Wilis to haunt the halls of Congress,” Martha Ullman West declares, and then she tells us why. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, who reviewed Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s current production of “Giselle” here for The Oregonian, expands on her ideas for us, moving the conversation into the twilight territory between arts and politics.

Giselle (Haiyan Wu) and the peasants in "Giselle" at OBT. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

By Martha Ullman West

With no apologies whatsoever to PICA and its annual TBA festival, Giselle is a sterling example of time-based art.

The creators of this collaborative piece from 1841 – composer Adolphe Adam, choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, and librettists Vernoy de Saint Georges and Theophile Gautier – were seasoned, rather than young, creatives.

Coralli and Perrot were making some distinct innovations in ballet technique, particularly pointe work, which gave new prominence and independence to ballerinas. You can see this particularly in Act II, where the women balance in unsupported arabesques. And the librettists were expressing, or reflecting, some political ideas just seven years before Karl Marx (who came from the Rhineland, in which the ballet is set) issued the Communist Manifesto.

So the ballet is at once time-based and timeless, a great work of art, providing a cathartic experience in the theater as well as much food for thought. Oregon Ballet Theatre’s new production (staged by Lola de Avila, and repeating this weekend) looks distinctly old, but because of the commitment and talents of the dancers, it speaks to our concerns as well as our hearts.

Think about the libretto. The class divide (or “war,” to use Republican hyperbole, and which our president isn’t causing) drives the plot.

Continue reading Timeless TBA: art & politics in ‘Giselle’ →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Mark Goldweber memorial January 22

Leave a comment

Art Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West sends along this note about the Portland memorial service for Mark Goldweber, the founding ballet master of Oregon Ballet Theatre, who died last month from lymphoma at age 53. Goldweber, who made and kept many friends here, moved on to ballet-master positions at the Joffrey Ballet and then Ballet West in Salt Lake City. Martha also wrote this moving memorial for Portland Arts Watch.

mark-goldweber-e1323825569587A  gathering at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 22, in the studios of Oregon Ballet Theatre (818 Southeast Sixth Avenue, Portland) will remember Mark Goldweber, who was company ballet master from 1988 until 1997, when he returned to the Joffrey Ballet, where he had been a dancer, to take up the same position. Goldweber, who was ballet master for Salt Lake City’s Ballet West when he died on December 9, was a superb dancer as well as ballet master. He set high standards for OBT that are still in place today.

Performance video will be shown, not only of Goldweber dancing, but also of ballets on which he had a real influence: his love of Romanov history as well as 19th century classicism was an integral part of James Canfield’s Nutcracker, and it was he who lovingly staged the company’s first production of Giselle. Speakers will include, among others, Carol Shults, former OBT dancers Daniel Kirk and Katarina Svetlova Thompson; Josie Moseley, and yours truly. Since space is limited, please RSVP to Carol Shults at carolshults@comcast.net

Bob Hicks, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Art and storytelling, Best Friends Forever

6 Comments

By Bob Hicks

The fun thing about art is that it always seems to come with a story. Not that the stories are more important than the art — at least, not usually — but they do have a way of getting a potentially esoteric subject down to the nitty gritty.

Alfred Maurer, "George Washington," Portland Art MuseumMartha Ullman West, whose tale about the painter Titian and the man-about-Europe Pietro Aretino provided the pith for our previous posting, took a break from the thickets of her book manuscript to send along another quick story, this one about the American painter Alfred Maurer, whose 1932 Cubist version of George Washington was included in a piece I wrote in this morning’s Oregonian about images of faces in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum. The story was a sidebar to my cover story about Titian’s La Bella, which is on temporary display at the museum. Martha’s father, to complete the setup, was the New York painter Allen Ullman, and her grandfather was the artist Eugene Ullman, so inside stories about artists flowed like wine in her childhood home.

Continue reading Art and storytelling, Best Friends Forever →

Bob Hicks, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Titian and the Scourge of Princes

Leave a comment

By Bob Hicks

Titian did not live starving and penniless in an unheated artist’s garret. He was wealthy and famous in his own time — more Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst, at least as far as the fame game goes, than Vincent Van Gogh.

Pietro Aretino, first portrait by Titian, c. 1512, at the Galleria Palatina in Palazzo Pitti in Florence.At least partly, that’s because he had a good press agent.

Mr. Scatter has been spending some time lately communing with the great Venetian High Renaissance artist, because Titian’s 1536 portrait of an unknown lady, La Bella, has taken up temporary residence in the European galleries of the Portland Art Museum. You can read about it in Mr. S’s cover story from this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian.

Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s most highly paid correspondent, tipped us off to the key role played in Titian’s life and career by one Pietro Aretino, a man known with less than complete enthusiasm in certain circles as “Scourge of Princes.” Historians have acknowledged Aretino also as a scabrous satirist (hence the “scourge”), a pornographer and a proto-feminist, a playwright and poet, and one of the finest art critics of his day. That’s why they called them Renaissance men.

Continue reading Titian and the Scourge of Princes →

Books, General, Martha Ullman West

Neon Panic: Crime of the symphony

1 Comment

By Martha Ullman West

I have had an addiction to detective stories (and coffee, I confess) since I was fourteen years old, when I read Agatha Christie late into the night, using a flashlight, in my dormitory room at the Quaker boarding school I loved.

booktransWe sometimes had interesting vespers speakers on Sunday evenings, and in my junior year Rex Stout, whose daughter was a year ahead of me, was invited to come and talk about world federalism. The author of the immensely popular Nero Wolfe series of mysteries took one look at the drowsy teenagers draped over their desks in the big study hall and decided to wake us up by telling us how to write a mystery story. There were diagrams, there were rules, there were myriad complexities to the craft.

I thought of that while I was reading Neon Panic: A Novel of Suspense (400 pages, $14,95, Vantage Point Books), by Charles Philipp Martin, a Seattle writer who lived for many years in Hong Kong, the setting for his first novel. It’s a good, well-paced, carefully plotted read, with interesting if somewhat one-dimensional characters and a fascinating mise en scene he knows well, and he’s to be commended for it.

Continue reading Neon Panic: Crime of the symphony →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Dance-plus: random notes from all over

Leave a comment

Drawing of the RMS Mauretania, from a cigarette card, ca. 1922-29. New York Public Library/Wikimedia Commons

In the past few months Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, has been (as The New Yorker likes to say about its own correspondents) far-flung. We could tell you how much flinging she’s been up to, but it seems more appropriate to let her tell you herself. We will mention, however, that one of her flings was up the freeway to Seattle, where the national Dance Critics Association held its annual meeting and presented her with its Senior Critic’s Award, an honor that recognizes her position in the loftiest echelon of the profession. Congratulations, Martha, once again.

*

By Martha Ullman West

It’s a long time since I’ve made my presence known on Art Scatter (except to comment, lazy me). Since I last posted, on April 10, I’ve seen quite a lot of dancing, a Greek ruin or two or three, Maltese, Sicilian and Spanish museums, the Holy Grail (or not…), a clip aboard ship of the latest royal wedding extravaganza. I also received a prize, for which I had to give a lecture, and that little task made me think about all of the above and more.

Just before I skipped town on April 23, I witnessed Anne Mueller dance ballet for the last time opening night of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s final show of the season, still at the top of her form, showing her range in Trey McIntyre’s funky Speak, Nicolo Fonte’s Left Unsaid, and Christopher Stowell’s Eyes on You. More down the line about the opening ballet in that program, Balanchine’s Square Dance, which I also saw New York City Ballet perform in May.

Earlier in the week, at Da Vinci Middle School’s spring concert, a motley batch of middle school-age boys, seven of them, performed, identifiably, Gregg Bielemeier’s idiosyncratic juxtaposition of small precise movement and space-eating choreography, improvising within the form. At an age when going with the flow ain’t a goin’ to happen, they did just that, and it was lovely to see.

And then I was off on a cruise of what was originally supposed to be the Barbary Coast and include Tunisia, where I’ve long wanted to go, but world events interfered so Sardinia and Menorca were substituted, as well as extra time in Valencia, where in addition to one of the Holy Grails (housed in the cathedral there) we saw a parade in traditional garb — little girls in ruffled dresses and mantillas, elderly gents trying to manage their swords — and after that, in Granada, the magical Alhambra. That’s a place I’ve wanted to see with mine own eyes since my father rendered in paint how he imagined it looked in the Middle Ages.

Allen Ullman, "Granada," 1966, oil and casein. Courtesy Martha Ullman West.

Continue reading Dance-plus: random notes from all over →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West wins a big prize

5 Comments

Excellent news has arrived: Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief corespondent, will be presented with the Senior Critics Award when the national Dance Critics Association holds its annual conference next month in Seattle.

Because Art Scatter World Headquarters has shifted temporarily nine hours east to Amsterdam, we got the word a little late — first, in an email from Martha declaring that she “was, frankly, stunned. And pleased”; then from checking Marty Hughley’s online story on the award at Oregon Live. Please look there for the details.

We’re thrilled that the dance critics have recognized Martha’s skills, and you should be able to see her use them again very soon. In her email from New York she mentioned that she’ll be seeing Balanchine’s Agon and Square Dance at New York City Ballet, and will be posting about them for us soon. Oregon Ballet Theatre has also recently performed Square Dance, so we’re looking forward to a little critical comparison.

All together, now, let’s give Martha a cheer: hip hip hurrah!

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Jacques d’Amboise, dancing and talking

Leave a comment

Groundbreaking ballet dancer Jacques d’Amboise, who created memorable roles in works by Balanchine and other stars of ballet’s American golden age, will be in Portland on Thursday, April 14, to talk about his new book I Was a Dancer. D’Amboise also choreographed for Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and appeared in dancing roles in the movie-musical classics Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Carousel. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, will introduce him before his talk at the Portland Ballet Studio. Come hear ’em both — and read what Martha has to say about d’Amboise below.

By Martha Ullman West

Writing about dancing ain’t easy, as you’ve all heard me say more than once. Like visual arts and music, this is non-verbal communication, and, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, people dance to say the things there are no words for.

Jacques d'Amboise in "Apollo." Courtesy New York City Ballet.Few dancers are as capable of eloquence with words as they are with their bodies, but there are exceptions. Jacques d’Amboise, one of this country’s first homegrown great male ballet dancers, is one of them, and he’ll be in town to talk about his new book, I Was a Dancer, this Thursday, April 14, at the Portland Ballet Studio. (6250 SW Capitol Highway, 7:30-9 pm, for reservations call 503-452-8448.)

I’ll introduce him, briefly. Then he’ll read from the book, show some clips from the superb DVD Jacques d’Amboise, Portrait of a Great American Dancer, take some questions from the audience and sign some books, which thanks to Annie Bloom’s Books, will be available for purchase at the studio.

Continue reading Jacques d’Amboise, dancing and talking →

Bob Hicks, General, Humor

Code o’ the West, rodeo clown edition

Leave a comment

By Bob Hicks

The other day we posted news of the Oregon Legislature’s impending adoption of the Code of the West as the official state, um, thing we adopt.

Rodeo clown Flint Rasmussen, April 14, 2007. Photo: Dave Hogg/Wikimedia Commons.The code’s as rugged as rawhide, which means it tends to get frayed if you leave it out in the rain. And it does rain hereabouts. Besides, some fella in Texas came up with the idea, and sells merchandise to go along with it. (We might actually go for a Code o’ the West jeans-pocket whiskey flask.)

The thing’s pretty much stampeded through the state House and is now sitting in the Senate holding pen. And while it’s tough to argue with the likes of “take pride in your work” and “do what has to be done,” in the interest of healthy public debate we’d like to propose for the Senate’s consideration a Counter Code o’ the West — something the rodeo clown in all of us might appreciate. (And let’s just say right here and now that being a rodeo clown requires an immense amount of grit, fortitude, courage and foolhardiness, not to mention a good supply of chewin’ tobacco.)

Continue reading Code o’ the West, rodeo clown edition →