Sly Wit 2012

Happy New Year!

As always, I welcome the New Year with open arms and lots of plans and projects.

Barring any 2012 doomsday scenarios coming to fruition, here’s what you can expect to see at Sly Wit this year.

Books:

Clearly you all have opinions on these and I will be posting what I think of your favorites throughout the year as part of the 2012 Readers’ Choice Challenge. Encouragement as I tackle some of the longer ones is always appreciated!

I will also be trying to keep the book salon alive as many members move on to bigger and better things following the near dissolution of my former office by The Man. Appropriately enough, this month’s theme is “Go West, Young Man!” for which I chose to read The Grapes of Wrath.

Performing Arts:

Ballet 101 posts will probably dominate the spring as I enjoy a subscription to the San Francisco Ballet for the first time. Sadly, I don’t foresee the ballet of the Opéra de Paris in my future this year, but you never know what the fates may bring.

Opera won’t be completely absent, as I have tickets to The Lamplighters’ upcoming productions of The Gondoliers and The Pirates of Penzance singalong as well as Nixon in China at the San Francisco Opera in June. I’m also hoping to see Ensemble Parallèle’s The Great Gatsby in February.

Of course, assuming La Maratonista is willing, I’m planning to renew my subscription for the San Francisco Opera’s 2012-2013 season. To combat my opera withdrawal symptoms, I’ve been listening to a number of classic recordings and, before our next subscription starts, I’m hoping to write up some more systematic Opera 101 posts that go through the history of this art form, starting with the Baroque era and continuing to the present day.

Television and Film:

I’m still debating giving up cable, but I have to wait until at least the end of January since there is no way I am missing Season Two of Downtown Abbey on PBS. And, of course, The Voice will be starting up again soon. But there’s not much else I’m excited about going forward besides Season Two of Sherlock, which can’t come soon enough.

Aside from the Oscars, I don’t often talk about film here. (That in and of itself might not seem odd, unless you know that my training is as a historian of French culture with a specialization in the film industry and my doctoral dissertation was on the reception of American films in postwar France.) I’m hoping to rectify that with a new Film 101 series looking at various genres I want to explore again without having to view them through an academic lens. Right now, I’m thinking of three of my favorites: film noir, screwball comedies, and westerns; however, inspired by David Smay’s series at HiLobrow, I may also take on horror, a genre I don’t know at all.

But before I begin that project, I will spend the month of January rewatching my favorite director of all time, a man who incorporated all those genres into his work (okay, maybe not westerns), Alfred Hitchcock. A colleague recently asked for recommendations of his films and, having lately read John Buchan’s The 39 Steps and Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles (which became Young and Innocent), I decided he was due for a serious review.

I hope you join me for these and other random musings!

Ballet 101—Nutcracker

“Little girls dream of the party scene,

Older ones a chance to dance with the corps

Behind the Dew Drop Fairy,

Or perhaps be featured as an exotic candy

In the Land of Sweets.”

—Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe

I wish I had made The Nutcracker my first Ballet 101 post. After all, I did see it last year and it is the ballet to end all ballets: the one most aspiring ballerinas have been in and the one most people have seen. But for some reason, I didn’t have time to blog about it immediately afterwards and so, after a couple of days had passed, I decided not to. Now, after such a crazy fall, when I seemed barely able to post about anything but opera, a few days seem like nothing. Plus, in San Francisco, The Nutcracker marks the transition from opera season to ballet season at the War Memorial Opera House so it seems only right to mark that passage here.

I don’t necessarily see The Nutcracker every Christmas, but I do usually try to see at least one Christmas-related performance during the month of December and it often shows up in the rotation if I’m not into Messiah that year. La Belle Chantal loves it, so it’s always a great excuse for us to hit the town.

Plus, I have a thing for nutcrackers since a tree-trimming party years ago when my boyfriend at the time gave me two beautiful wooden nutcracker ornaments. Which eventually led to this madness:

Yes, there are 40+ nutcrackers on that tree.

Drosselmeyer nutcracker

The one that started it all

And, yes, I bought two more ornaments at the performance itself. I ask you, how could I not get the pink “Kingdom of the Sweets” one?

And that’s what I love about this ballet. Dolls, toys, and candy come alive? Being taken away to a magical snowy wonderland full of tasty treats where people perform just for you? Sign me up.

The San Francisco Ballet sets this particular production in San Francisco during the 1915 World’s Fair so there is a bit of local color as well. I don’t love everything about the production (notably that Clara is played by a young child and is transformed into another dancer for the pas de deux), but they set up the story well and there are a number of standout pieces, especially the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” (it is truly a spectacular feat that they are able to dance in the near-blizzard conditions on stage) and the coffee, tea, and trepak divertissement dances.

In this year’s production, two dancers stood out for me, Koto Ishihara, who played the mechanical doll in the party scene, and Frances Chung, who danced the “Grand Pas de Deux.” Of course, the casting changes from night to night, so going on a different night may mean a very different cast. However, I can’t imagine not enjoying this on any night, if only for all the little girls you will see in the audience, playing dress up and watching their dreams unfold before their very eyes.

Merry Christmas everyone and may all your dreams come true!

The Bestest Birthday Present Ever

Audition pubs today!

From my favorite writer on the side, the person who got me through all-nighters at college with her crazy ballet stories, and who shamelessly got me into blogging:

Congratulations, Stasia!

Ballet 101—Coppélia

What do you see

You people gazing at me

You see a doll on a music box

That’s wound by a key

How can you tell

I'm under a spell

I'm waiting for love's first kiss

You cannot see

How much I long to be free

Turning around on this music box

That’s wound by a key...

From the automatons of Daedalus in Greek mythology to Collodi’s Le avventure di Pinocchio to April in the “I Was Made to Love You” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, authors and artists have been fascinated with the idea of animating the inanimate. The story of Coppélia is one of the most popular incarnations of this idea. Based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816) with music by Léo Delibes, Coppélia is the story of a mysterious inventor, Coppélius, the life-like doll he creates, a young buck, Frantz, and the girl he loves, Swanilda. [Side note: What is with these ballet names? French being arguably one of the most beautiful languages in the world, second only to Italian and maybe Russian, you would think that classical ballet could come up with better names for its heroines than Swanilda, Giselle, and Odette, no?]

If you are a close follower of this blog, you may be thinking, didn’t she say she couldn’t attend this ballet when she was raving about Giselle? And you would be right. I was extremely disappointed that visiting my family in Paris would mean missing one of the few story ballets that the San Francisco Ballet produces each year. But then the gods decided to smile on me and it turned out that Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris was putting on the very same ballet at the same time.

Or, sort of.

While Coppélia is generally considered one of the most comic ballets, Patrice Bart’s take on the story is much darker than usual. He abandons much of the original choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon and changes the story radically, choosing instead to emphasize the role of Coppélius as seducer of Swanilda and rival of Frantz, which leads to some unique and interesting choreography for the inventor (danced splendidly by étoile Benjamin Pech) but leaves Swanilda (here played by première danseuse Mélanie Hurel) pretty much out in the cold. It seemed so deliberate (with all her best moves coming between obvious applause points) that I actually wondered what was going on at the École de Danse in 1996.

More importantly, Bart pretty much abandons the idea of the doll, Coppélia, that Frantz falls in love with (much to the dismay of Swanilda). So, while danced extremely well, and the orchestra was in fine form, I left a bit disappointed because I thought the doll was sort of the point of the whole thing.

Or maybe I just have too-fond memories of endless viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the “Doll in the Music Box” number...

Coming soon to a bookstore near you...

Unless that bookstore was Borders. Then I guess you're out of luck. But you can, and should, find it online come October. Think of it as a birthday present for both of us.

From my favorite writer on the side, the person who got me through all-nighters at college with her crazy ballet stories, and who shamelessly got me into blogging:

Congratulations, Stasia!

Ballet 101—Giselle

This weekend, I took a break from the endless process of setting up my new computer and watching Oscar hopefuls to attend the opening night of Giselle at the San Francisco Ballet. Although I have long appreciated the music, I had never seen the actual ballet live.

After being relatively disappointed with my last outing to the Nutcracker, I was glad to see the San Francisco Ballet kick it up a notch and deliver a stellar performance all around, particularly Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role. Apparently, the company is using multiple pairings throughout the run, so I’m glad we went to opening night and were able to see her. Giselle is such a demanding role, both technically (requiring exquisite balance and difficult footwork) and expressively (with the lead moving from naïve peasant girl, to someone driven mad by love, to a mature adult in the netherworld of the Wilis) that it is essential to have an experienced dancer.

One of the reasons I first sought out the ballet is that it was co-written by one of my favorite nineteenth-century authors, Théophile Gautier. Virtually unknown here in the States, Gautier is a jack-of-all-cultural-trades: painter, critic, poet, novelist, and dramatist. His most famous legacy is probably his espousal of the phrase “l’art pour l’art,” that is, art for art’s sake, or, as adapted for MGM’s Leo the Lion logo, Ars gratia artis. I love him for his supernatural short stories involving vampires, mummies, and all manner of ghostly appearances, which is probably why he was so attracted to the legend of the vengeful ghost-like Wilis.

The music helps enormously in telling the story, with a heavy use of leitmotif to heighten the drama. While not as overtly dramatic as something like Swan Lake, for me, Giselle is one of the strongest ballets in conveying the story through music. This may be because its composer, Adolphe Adam, was primarily a composer of operas. However, he did compose another ballet in the repertoire, Le Corsaire (ballet with pirates!), which I was lucky enough to see at Lincoln Center some years ago. Perhaps more familiar to readers, he was also the composer of the ultimate French Christmas carol, “Minuit, chrétiens” (“O Holy Night”). Léo Delibes, who composed Coppélia, the next story ballet in the San Francisco Ballet’s 2011 season, was his pupil. And, after this amazing performance, I’m very sad I won’t be able to see it.

It'll Turn into an Oscar Blitz

There’s little I love more than the Oscars. It’s the one dinner party I can be counted on to throw every year, complete with betting pool. Even while living in Paris, I continued the tradition through a variety of strategies—one year having my cousin hook up a cable descrambler and staying up all night to watch live, and another year hosting a party the following night while holding a news embargo throughout the day. One of the great fringe benefits about now living on the West Coast is being able to have people over without being up until all hours of the night.

I generally try to see all the nominations in the major categories, but, as time goes on and I go out to fewer and fewer movies, my annual Oscar blitz becomes more and more difficult, especially now that the ceremony is a month earlier than it used to be. This year, I saw more foreign films in the theaters than usual, but not much else, although I did manage to catch both Leonardo DiCaprio movies (I swear that was not intentional). While Shutter Island is unlikely to get any nominations, at the very least, Inception should garner nods in art direction and music.

So that means netflixing The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right, and Winter’s Bone, and getting out to see The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Blue Valentine, and eventually maybe Rabbit Hole. I’m boycotting 127 Hours on principle since I generally can’t watch any bodily incisions whatsoever, let alone one performed at the bottom of a canyon (which is why you’ll never hear me talk about any television shows set in hospitals, or those involving the initials C, S, or I).

This weekend I saw The Town and Black Swan. I enjoyed one a lot more than I thought I would and the other a lot less. The Town was a fun, if unexceptional, little film. I continue to be impressed by Jeremy Renner as well as Ben Affleck’s turn to directing—it will be interesting to see where he goes with it. Black Swan was a bit of a mess. The performances were great, but the story had more holes than the bodies in The Town. Of course, from the moment we were hit over the head with the “story” of the ballet, and that story was wrong, I knew it was going to be a difficult ride. And that was before all the self-mutilation. Not even Tchaikovsky can make up for that.

While I love Swan Lake as much as anyone, if you really want to watch a movie based around one of Tchaikovsky’s most technically demanding works to perform, I’d suggest instead the feel-good French film of the year (how often do I get to say that?), The Concert, based around the sublime Violin Concerto in D major and starring the equally sublime Mélanie Laurent, last seen on this side of the pond in Quentin Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds.

In the meantime, any Oscar contenders you recommend? What are you going to see between now and February 27th?