Dances of Anachronism

Give me the past elegance of satin boned corsets and fishnetted legs in long black boots...ah, wait. That's not accurate. That's just our weird, modern history fetish for bits and pieces of antiquated costumery, poverty fetishizing, and WWI eroticization, all pulled together with masking tape into some jumble of pure, inauthentic fantasia.
A stunning german woman just linked me to a NY-based group that organizes afterday parties of dance and entertainment, plucking the plumpest fruits from various eras of history and mélanging them together into something which, if inauthentic fantasia, I'm sure is divine. (Stunning german women will do that to you.)

Check out Dances of Vice: They bring the avant-guard and the rococo too, they list Art, Music, and Spectacle (with capital letters) on their C.V., and with all the Walter Benjamin I've been reading lately I do appreciate a good, commodified, fetishized Spectacle.

Next up is "Visions of Weimar" in Brooklyn tomorrow night: German cabaret songs, Anita Berber toying-withs, a fellow from The Dresden Dolls, and (inexplicably) burlesque dancers from San-Francisco. And shadow puppets! Charleston and swing dance lessons. A musical saw.

For $20? My devil (on the left shoulder) tells me I ought to go, but my angel (wearing a cardigan) reminds me that I have to write 25 pages in three days.

My devil also wants to point out that I recently completed a writing/directing project on the German Kabarett, authentic songs and all, which I fought tooth and nail to pull back from the brink of sexy modern anachronism. So take my good-natured mockery with a pinch of salt. I'm sure it will be excellent.

Go, little kiddies, go! And come back and tell Auntie Starving Artist all about it.

Ballet Class En Masse

It's my great, great fortune that the kind and clever Zvi Gotheiner happens to be teaching our University course this fall. Over break, I've finally ventured into his lauded, crowded midtown NYC ballet classes. I'd like to serve up a demi-tasse of a review, because over the past week I've found this quite a special experience.

FOOD FOR THE DANCER
He starts with a gentle plié and tendu combination that stays consistent every day, letting your brain warm into the class. His combinations always have something to challenge the brain: maybe an unusual port-des-bras, or a rhythm that counts two against three. My body best appreciates how Zvi has us repeat each combination twice. I find his floor tendu combination an enormous mental challenge. The adagio is three-dimensional, turning corners and using all facings of the room. Likewise with his long floor phrase. He makes you move; the steps connect with the fluidity of contemporary choreography and send you back and forth rapidly in the space. Turns come mixed throughout and lumped together at the end of this phrase. He does a very brief jump warmup, and then combines petite and grande allegro into one complex mid-length combination. Actually, there isn't any real grande allegro, which I do miss. Throughout Zvi never stops to correct, but he will sometimes adjust a dancer with his hands mid-combination.

FOOD FOR THE CURIOUS OBSERVER
This is a healthy, challenging, beautiful class. The atmosphere is relaxed: people laugh. It's been crowded with upwards of thirty dancers every day that I've been there, ranging from true ballerinas to ex-dancers just looking to feel the ritual of morning warmup. The barres get so crowded that people stand with one hand on the wall. It reminds me of the profi classes in Berlin more than anything else, and it gets my limbs flowing, to be surrounded by so many other moving bodies.

Downsides? The City Center studio has no windows, and with the masses of people, much of the second half of class is spent waiting for the rare chance to go across the floor. Other than that?...

The photos are of Zvi's company, performing his choreography. Enjoy some video clips and more information on his company, ZviDance...

City Center, back entrance. $15 a class, cash.
Monday - Friday, 10 AM - 12 PM, but it seems to start around 10:15 every day.
Saturday, 11 AM - 1 PM.

The Starving Artist's Cookbook

video project 1986-1991 by Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf

Food is most replicable and arguably most consumable in its video form. What good thinking that these fine folk got down to it back in the late '80s, and documented the nitty-gritty fats-soluble basics of eating on a genius budget.

Thanks to Lamarre and Wolf, we can watch artists from John Cage to John Sex cooking for themselves in their natural, East Village environments...and savor the historical, political, and of course aesthetic implications of these meals. Here's a better-worded excerpt from their own summary...

"The intent of The STARVING ARTISTS' COOKBOOK and VIDEO SERIES was to capture the end of an era—the artist's lifestyle as exemplified by what he/she cooked and ate. It was clear to us that there was a breakdown of the art community in New York with the privatization of the art world and the birth of the "art star"—we wanted to catch on tape the other side of this story. As artists ourselves we were in direct contact with a diverse group of artists which had connections going back to the fifties—that golden era of the New York art world...While expounding on the artists' relationship between art and life, THE STARVING ARTISTS' COOKBOOK is also a portrait series on the artist in society; and a video documentation of the socialeconomic condition of the arts community in downtown New York and internationally."

It has been my privileged to bear witness to the tail end of Manhattan gentrification and the collapse of NY's artistic community while growing up in the city. I walked alone quite late along E. 6th Street two nights ago, from the Bowery to Avenue C...the only sense of menace came from cabs and overpriced vegan bakeries. I know the artistic community here has found districts for itself in the far north tip of Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx...but the locus of the city has become the playground of the rich. A splintering of a group is a loss. Transportation becomes difficult, and even classic-to-the-point-of-staid New York artists like choreographer Paul Taylor and his company have been ousted from old Manhattan real-estate, and set adrift.

I know this Cookbook dishes on an economic art-world shift of a slightly different nature, but it falls very close to my personal grudge.

And Art being what it is nowadays, I can't even afford the book record of this project, which I'd dearly love to own: FOOD SEX ART: STARVING ARTISTS COOKBOOK, available for a paltry $272.94 used from Amazon.

Well. I'll just have to go off and make some FOOD SEX ART of my own.

Begin at the Beginning

Manifestos certainly used to be popular. The blogs of yesteryear? So, not to tread too un-carefully upon already well-trod territory, I'll just open this book at random...and here we've got it: "Second Manifesto of Surrealism."

"Surrealism, although a special part of its function is to examine with a critical eye the notions of reality and unreality, reason and irrationality, reflection and impulse, knowledge and "fatal" ignorance, usefulness and uselessness, is analogous at least in one respect with historical materialism in that it too tends to take as its point of departure the "colossal abortion" of the Hegelian system."

That should do it. I'm sure that anything I might have said, have begun to say, considered saying and then stopped shortly, or wrote and deleted before posting, must somehow be contained in that impressive sentence of André Breton's.

In fact, why write anything further?

It's so clearly all been said. And done. And regretted in the morning.

No reason. Personal practice. Speaking of which, tonight I was surprised on Houston Street (along with five or six hundred other innocent New Yorkers) by a parade of Chabad vans, blinking menorahs strapped to roofs, running red lights across Broadway and blasting music out their windows. Must have been the annual Channukah road race.