In which I talk about Ballet Austin’s 2012/2013 season. Disclaimer: I’m discussing an entire season of ballets and trying to keep it brief so there isn’t a lot of context if you aren’t already familiar with the ballets I’m talking about. Sorry about that.
Transcript:
Soo I’m back. Apologies to anyone who was waiting for updates. My spring semester was ridiculously busy this year with Latin, but in the gap before summer classes start I’m hoping to be able to put out a few videos. I’ve been wanting to do a vlog about ballet for a while now and since Ballet Austin’s 2012/2013 season wrapped up last weekend I thought it might be interesting to talk about it.
I saw nearly every production though I missed Cult of Color: Call to Color because the timing just never worked out. But I did see The Taming of the Shrew, The Nutcracker, The Rite of Spring along with its companion pieces, and Giselle. Seeing nearly an entire season of ballets has really taught me where my tastes lie. I’m much more of a fan of narrative ballets than less story driven modern and contemporary pieces. I think it’s at least partly because I don’t have the context and training to critically analyze non-narrative pieces so while I found The Rite of Spring and its companion pieces Allegro Brillante and Requiem for a Rose beautiful and moving I can’t engage with them as deeply as I can with more traditional story based ballets.
My two favorites this season, The Taming of the Shrew and Giselle, are both narrative ballets with very strong stories to tell. The Taming of the Shrew was the first ballet I ever saw and it set a very high bar and demonstrated that a ballet could be clever and witty as well as being beautiful and expressive.
The next ballet I went to was The Nutcracker. I actually ended up seeing The Nutcracker twice because the casting was different between the evening and matinee performances and I wanted to see my favorite dancer in all of his roles. Seeing different dancers in the same roles can be really revelatory. You get to see the personal flare that a dancer brings to the choreography which clarifies what choreography speaks to you and which dancers just have that spark that makes whatever choreography they’re dancing glow a little bit brighter. Now you may be wondering why the only ballet I saw twice didn’t get name dropped as one of my favorites. It’s because most of the action in The Nutcracker takes place in an extended dream sequence. Except for the opening and closing sections there really is no story to speak of, just a sequence of nearly independent dances. I’m not a big fan of dream sequences in general, they generally don’t carry a lot of narrative weight, merely serving as interruptions to the story, or if a dream sequence does have real world consequences for the story those consequences can easily seem unearned. In fact the dream sequence was the only element of The Taming of the Shrew that I wasn’t absolutely enamored of and that is really a matter of taste more than anything else. To be fair I don’t think that I could come up with a cleverer way of choreographing that particular part of the narrative of The Taming of the Shrew and The Nutcracker is more about pageantry than it is about story.
Giselle was the final ballet of the season. I was familiar with the story and was particularly looking forward to the second act as I was very interested in the wilis who seemed to borrow elements from faries, my favorite creatures in folk lore, in that they are unfathomably dangerous and fond of forcing people to dance to death. The choreography kind of ends up undercutting the power and menace of the wilis. They only truly come across as deadly dangerous during Hilarion’s encounter with them, seeming more tame than threatening for most of the second act and I found that disappointing.
I know it might seem like I didn’t like anything and that most of what I’ve said is critical, but I want to point out that there is generally more to say when you are being critical. It takes fewer words to say that something was beautiful and you loved it than it takes to pin down what elements of something are not to your taste or are less than perfectly executed and how they are so. So in closing I would like to say that this season of Ballet Austin was beautiful and I loved it. Also, I would like to thank Ballet Austin for making student rush tickets so accessible. I would not have been able to see this season of ballets from some of the best seats in the house without them.
This one feels like a flower by ~Zazu75
look what i made! 8D
Look at what my friend made. Isn’t it pretty?! (On a related note: isn’t she amazing?)
sign posted at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show at Webster Hall. discuss…
(photo care of @SPINmagazine)
I think that it’s their show, their rules. They do have a point about how it affects other people if you are holding up a device with a bright screen into their line of sight. Also there is a value in the unmediated experience of live events. In short I think there is room for events in which cameras are banned and ones in which they are allowed and that the decision should probably rest in the hands of the performers, but with room for negotiation from the audience.
What’s up tumblr? Not content with mearly showing me pretty dresses that I cannot wear because I am rather fond of not having my head cropped off you must now begin to show me pretty dresses that I cannot wear because I am rather fond of not having my torso cropped in half. What’s up with that?
(via sazuka57)
Basil Soda | Spring-Summer 2013
These dresses are beautiful, but somehow I do not feel like I could ever wear one as I have a head and apparently only people with their heads cropped off wear these dresses.
(via sazuka57)
President Obama, second inaugural address (via barackobama)
Is it really that hard to write a speech in which women and gay and lesbian people are included as if they are citizens and people in their own right rather than just through their relationships with others? I mean I appreciate the sentiments, but when you are addressing the citizens of the United States women are not just “our wives, our mothers, and daughters” and gay and lesbian people are not simply our “brothers and sisters”. THEY ARE US. I deserve equality not because I am someone’s daughter or someone’s sister, but because I AM A PERSON, me, myself, not my relationship to someone else.
Cabal. My dog. Oct 2003-Jan 2013. Best dog ever. Nothing else to say.
This news makes me sad. One of my dogs died late last year and my most comforting thought was the idea that my family was giving her into the care of Dream and Death and that they would look after her now. As the thought of Mr. Gaiman’s characters comforted me I hope that everyone who knew Cabal will find their own most comforting thought to hold onto.
Video Notes:
solid no- Mumford, Almost Famous, The Good Girl, The New Guy, All The Real Girls, Elf, Eulogy, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Winter Passing, Surf’s Up, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Tin Man, The Happening, Your Highness
borderline no- Manic, Abandon, Big Trouble, Failure to Launch, Bridge to Terabithia, Our Idiot Brother
borderline yes- The Good Life, The Go-Getter, (500) Days of Summer, New Girl
yes- Weeds, Gigantic, Yes Man
Transcript:
So I know that my vlog has been a bit free form up till now and for the most part I intend to keep it that way, but alongside my usual “whatever I feel like talking about whenever I feel like talking about it” videos I’m going to start a more structured project called Spelunking into Pixie Dream Girl Mania. In these videos I’m going to undertake an in depth exploration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope as it appears in Zooey Deschanel’s oevere.
Why Zooey Deschanel? Well there have been some blog posts within my radar range that have been talking about Zooey and issues related to the manic pixie dream girl trope in her career. In a lot of the conversations people seemed to be taking for granted that Zooey had appeared in “A LOT” of roles that are based on the trope. In a thread on Shakesville KT5000 (who is also responsible for the awesome project title by the way) asked “Has ZD really played a LOT of MPDG roles, in the sense that one could accuse her of disproportionally capitalizing on doing the same thing over and over?” This question sparked my interest and I set out to attempt to answer it with statistics. The statistics that I came up with are approximate, but I’m going to present them in this video as a starting point.
I went through Zooey’s filmography as listed on Wikipedia and using wikipedia plot summaries and articles from TVTropes attempted to categorize each of her roles. I excluded roles that I could not find sufficient information to make a determination on leaving me with 27 roles out of the 43 listed. For these 27 roles I answered the question “Is the character a manic pixie dream girl?” with one of four possible responses: yes, no, borderline yes, or borderline no. It is important to note that I was going off of my general sense of what constitutes a MPDG character and not judging against a prepared rubric of traits. This is a methodological flaw that I will be addressing in my follow up video. I came up with 3 solid and 4 borderline yes’s and 14 solid and 6 borderline no’s. This comes up to approximately 11-26% Manic Pixie Dream Girls roles and 52-74% non MPDG roles. For these percentages the higher is based on both the solid and borderline together while the lower is based on only the solid classifications. My classifications of her roles are listed by title in the video notes.
While these numbers provide a fairly rough and approximate picture of the frequency with which Zooey has played Manic Pixie Dream Girl characters, they do show that far fewer of her roles use the trope than might be expected given her reputation in pop culture. Still, this is only a rough statistical analysis based largely on summaries as I haven’t seen many of Zooey’s appearances myself. For a complete picture I plan to outline a methodology and then go through her filmography scoring each role for level of manic pixie dream girl-ishness. The next video in this series will outline my planned methodology. and be followed be individual reviews of her roles.
This is Dream, signing off.
My holiday vlog in which I critique the culture of gift giving in the United States when I intended to critique ballet.
And this is the tumblr post turned vlog that I mentioned in my introduction, now appearing in a tumblr post. Isn’t the circle of life beautiful?
