Dancing in September
It's been a week. (Actually two! Sorry!) I've worked for four news organizations and one nonprofit, all of which I've unsuccessfully applied to for full-time jobs at some point. As grateful as I am for editors who value my freelance work, the dynamic can be absurd and the hours long. I'd like to thank my petsitting client Latke for all the love, licks and stress relief.
Saturday Latke and I stumbled upon the Falls Church Festival and met two extremely poised student dancers from Ballet Nova. Dancers + dog = Peak Ritzel Instagram content. But seriously, I loved chatting with Megan (above). First I asked for assurances that she was wearing "dead" pointe shoes and would never dance on them again after doing photo ops on asphalt. She assured me she would not. "You must know something about dance," Megan said, laughing. I admitted to being a dance journalist, and was thrilled to hear she spent the summer dancing at Pacific Northwest Ballet's summer intensive. When I asked if she got to dance for artistic director Peter Boal, her eyes lite up. "His classes were my favourite," she said. "I've interviewed him twice," I said. "Peter's great. And sometimes he hires tall dancers like you, as you probably know." (Megan is 5'7", she did know.)
For all my career frustrations, I still believe that artists deserve journalists who "know something" about their art forms. I left the festival re-invigorated, with free cold brew and with very cute pics.
What I'm Writing
See above. Enterprise stories galore, one each on theatre, dance and classical music, for three different outlets. And a review of The Comeuppance, the new Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
What I'm Seeing
Washington Ballet opened its '24 - '25 season with a quintessential summer experience in Washington: A performance at Wolf Trap, summer home to the National Symphony, Brandi Carlile tours and bands Gen Xers tend to love.
But the Thursday after Labor Day is not a popular night to schlepp to the far Washington suburbs, so I was pleasantly shocked by how many cars were already in the overflow lot an hour before curtain.
"Seems like a great crowd," I said, picking up tickets in the press trailer.
"It is," I was told. "They've outsold their 2018 and 2022 performances."
Wow. Good for them. But as I pointed out in a preview for City Paper, the Washington Ballet previously performed at Wolf Trap with a live orchestra. For 2024, we were stuck with canned Stravinsky.
I don't begrudge Washington Ballet the ticket sales and regional enthusiasm. Not in the least. But in some respect, the big turnout for Balanchine without the live music speaks to a shift in tastes and sophistication for dance audiences, especially when coupled with the rapturous response for the weakest work on the program: an untitled, unfinished piece by Jennifer Archibald. "That was Billy Forsythe meets Billboards, plus everything but the kitchen sink," remarked a disappointed retired dancer friend.
"Right," I said. "It's only good if you don't know what Forsythe did 30 years ago."
Reality check: The majority of folks at Wolf Trap probably had never heard of William Forsythe. (Or "Billy," as my friends who were running around Europe 30 years ago call him.) Works like In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated, were groundbreaking because they showed choreographers could make serious dances to non-classical music, using the skills of classical ballet but with an angularity of movement that evolved beyond Balanchine.
Archibald's work was presented as what the Washington Ballet called a "World Premiere Preview." The full-work will debut in February. I've seen workshops and previews before, but saying, "Here you go! It's not finished! Enjoy!" is a new one, and speaks to the absurdity of Archibald's schedule. "She's been on the road for four months," artistic director Edwaard Liang said at a pre-show toalk. "She's very much in-demand." He added Archibald has a premiere scheduled for National Ballet of Canada next year.
Last week, my colleague Rachel Howard wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that Archibald created a new work for Smuin Ballet in eight days.
Jesus. On the road for four months? Ballets in eight days? I'm tired from nine days with a cute dog and five freelance clients. What I saw of Archibald's Washington Ballet's new work is far inferior to what she presented at the Kennedy Center's Reframing the Narrative festival in June. Nothing in her choreography felt new or inventive, and the dancers were so woefully under-rehearsed; my friends and I worried someone would get hurt. (One usually reliable guy fell out of barrel turn and collapsed onstage. Thankfully, he seemed OK.)
But the music wasn't classical, and the costumes looked clubby. The audience loved it. When the work is finished in February, maybe I will too?
If I Could See Anything
Saturday night in a London car park, Maryland mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis sang the closing movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra. The event closed out the Bold Tendencies festival summer season. I suspect Mahler could never have envisioned this spectacle given that A) There were no cars when "The Resurrection" premiered in 1895, and B) Lewis is Black.
The daughter of a career Coast Guardsman who grew up in Severna Park, Md., Lewis was a winner at last year's Metropolitan Opera's Laffont Competition. I interviewed her for one of my final stories that ran in Capital Gazette in January. It's not a great piece, because—to recycle my criticism of Archibald's new ballet— this one was a bit rushed. While on staff at that newspaper, I rarely had the luxury of doing secondary interviews that I consider crucial to good arts journalism. But like meeting Megan at the Falls Church Festival, my goal in featuring the young mezzo was to spotlight a young artist who has already accomplished a lot and is going more places. I love being right.
Wishing Natalie many more Mahler 2s, including some in grand concert halls, rather than experiments in car parks.
