Fran Lebowitz: on learning about ballet and choreography from Jerome Robbins — 12 Comments
At point 2:10 in the clip, she creates one of the best visual metaphors ever: All of the words in the dictionary were lolling around my desk smoking cigarettes and glaring at me.
wonderful
So too, ballet.
Hope I get there some time. It’s not been exactly my world, but something tells me, go there.
I thought they wrote ballets too. A story board maybe? You can’t just assemble dancers without an idea of what you’re gonna do with them can you?
SteveH: some choreographers plot it out ahead of time. But that’s very unusual. Ordinarily the work is made on the dancers, who act as a sort of clay the choreographer molds.
SteveH: this is NOT Robbins choreographing; it’s Robbins rehearsing some dancers. But it shows how a choreographer demonstrates (funny bit towards the end where Robbins shows the female dancer some of the nuances of expression of the female part):
Ok. So you have the music which is predetermined, and everything gets created off of that? I think i get it.
SteveH: yes, usually nowadays the music comes first and is something already written, and the choreographer also usually has a general idea of what he/she wants to do (whether to tell a certain story, or express something about relationships, or just express something in the music).
It’s complicated, though. Ballet scores were (and still are) sometimes commissioned. For example, some of Tchaikovsky’s greatest ballet masterpieces were written to order, with the choreographer saying, for example, “give me eight bars of triumphant music for the entrance of the Black Swan and von Rothbart.”
Lots of fun!
Your revelations and examples are not only entertaining and diversifying for readers, buy they help so many of us who can’t do it, or never did (and likely never will) understand it….so much better!
I always thought the “main story” of the ballet was created/choreographed in advance — etched out or loosely written and then through rehearsals with dancers, filled in and detailed. Never realized it is so improvisational. (Not meaning it changes with every performance, but that so much of its creation comes through “dancing it out” (if there is such a phrase).
Because they’re rarely notated, when classic works are reworked, is most of the dance derived from videos of performances? What did they do before the video camera?
Thanks
csimon: Videos are used as an adjunct, but they are not enough. They are sometimes utilized just so the company members can learn the steps. But then the real work begins.
After that, usually someone familiar with the piece (preferably someone who was part of the original cast, or who learned it in the past from someone who was, or from the choreographer him/herself) comes to the company to mount it on the dancers—tell them the nuances of movement and expression, those little things they can’t learn from a video. That’s the way roles were always learned in the past, in a one-to-one transmission from earlier interpreters.
You can see videos of this process on YouTube. Earlier I wrote a post about it, here (the video showing the process is here; unfortunately, embedding is disabled).
This is weird. Because i’m thinking surely a composer writing the score for a movie needs to immerse himself in the visual first. But maybe not. And do deaf people enjoy a good ballet that was built around something they can’t appreciate? 🙂
SteveH: I have read that many deaf people enjoy ballet because it expresses music in a way that helps them feel the music (and its rhythm, which they also can sometimes feel as vibration).
“SteveH: I have read that many deaf people enjoy ballet because it expresses music in a way that helps them feel the music (and its rhythm, which they also can sometimes feel as vibration).”
True story: I am a musician and have played bass for many years in local clubs here in the SF Bay area. Years ago I was playing upright bass with an acoustic combo at a small bar and there was a group of people at a front table apparently enjoying the music and moving rhythmically to it (tapping their feet etc.). I went to talk to them during a break and it turns out they were deaf but could feel the vibrations of the bass through the floor!
At point 2:10 in the clip, she creates one of the best visual metaphors ever: All of the words in the dictionary were lolling around my desk smoking cigarettes and glaring at me.
wonderful
So too, ballet.
Hope I get there some time. It’s not been exactly my world, but something tells me, go there.
I thought they wrote ballets too. A story board maybe? You can’t just assemble dancers without an idea of what you’re gonna do with them can you?
SteveH: some choreographers plot it out ahead of time. But that’s very unusual. Ordinarily the work is made on the dancers, who act as a sort of clay the choreographer molds.
SteveH: this is NOT Robbins choreographing; it’s Robbins rehearsing some dancers. But it shows how a choreographer demonstrates (funny bit towards the end where Robbins shows the female dancer some of the nuances of expression of the female part):
Ok. So you have the music which is predetermined, and everything gets created off of that? I think i get it.
SteveH: yes, usually nowadays the music comes first and is something already written, and the choreographer also usually has a general idea of what he/she wants to do (whether to tell a certain story, or express something about relationships, or just express something in the music).
It’s complicated, though. Ballet scores were (and still are) sometimes commissioned. For example, some of Tchaikovsky’s greatest ballet masterpieces were written to order, with the choreographer saying, for example, “give me eight bars of triumphant music for the entrance of the Black Swan and von Rothbart.”
Lots of fun!
Your revelations and examples are not only entertaining and diversifying for readers, buy they help so many of us who can’t do it, or never did (and likely never will) understand it….so much better!
I always thought the “main story” of the ballet was created/choreographed in advance — etched out or loosely written and then through rehearsals with dancers, filled in and detailed. Never realized it is so improvisational. (Not meaning it changes with every performance, but that so much of its creation comes through “dancing it out” (if there is such a phrase).
Because they’re rarely notated, when classic works are reworked, is most of the dance derived from videos of performances? What did they do before the video camera?
Thanks
csimon: Videos are used as an adjunct, but they are not enough. They are sometimes utilized just so the company members can learn the steps. But then the real work begins.
After that, usually someone familiar with the piece (preferably someone who was part of the original cast, or who learned it in the past from someone who was, or from the choreographer him/herself) comes to the company to mount it on the dancers—tell them the nuances of movement and expression, those little things they can’t learn from a video. That’s the way roles were always learned in the past, in a one-to-one transmission from earlier interpreters.
You can see videos of this process on YouTube. Earlier I wrote a post about it, here (the video showing the process is here; unfortunately, embedding is disabled).
This is weird. Because i’m thinking surely a composer writing the score for a movie needs to immerse himself in the visual first. But maybe not. And do deaf people enjoy a good ballet that was built around something they can’t appreciate? 🙂
SteveH: I have read that many deaf people enjoy ballet because it expresses music in a way that helps them feel the music (and its rhythm, which they also can sometimes feel as vibration).
“SteveH: I have read that many deaf people enjoy ballet because it expresses music in a way that helps them feel the music (and its rhythm, which they also can sometimes feel as vibration).”
True story: I am a musician and have played bass for many years in local clubs here in the SF Bay area. Years ago I was playing upright bass with an acoustic combo at a small bar and there was a group of people at a front table apparently enjoying the music and moving rhythmically to it (tapping their feet etc.). I went to talk to them during a break and it turns out they were deaf but could feel the vibrations of the bass through the floor!
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