New York, New York
New York Diary: Artistic License
Gotham is home to some of the greatest performing arts in the world, and keeps them in check by also housing the worst. ROSECRANS BALDWIN takes in a contemporary dance piece, a symphony, and an opera – with an eye on his watch and a dream of everlasting intermission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- First Scary Movies (Of Recent Note)
- Beloved Children's Books (Of Recent Note)
- Superpowers, Revealed (Of Recent Note)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
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- Joan Didion Crosses the Street (November 18, 2009)
- Window Shopping (October 28, 2009)
- Goodbye to All Them (September 23, 2009)
Also in New York, New York
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We have decided to stay in New York City for a few more years. It’s a day-to-day decision, made with new Metrocards and magazine subscriptions. My wife has a great job, and she wants to see where it goes. I’m all for it. The city agrees with me, and anyway we have fun dreaming about a farmhouse in the country, lingering without pressure in the pause between ‘some’ and ‘day.’ Someday I’ll have a yard and a few bedrooms. Someday an office and a room just for listening to music. A part of the yard for my very own smokehouse, and maybe some animals to raise and kill. In the meantime, there are delis. And art.
This city has some of the world’s greatest art, and lots of the worst. We’ve decided to take action, specifically regarding art with tuxedos, or costumes, or leotards. I seek specially-clothed performers. There are hundreds of performances every night around New York, and I want a part of them. I want to take advantage.
We’ve begun a weekly program of buying the cheapest tickets to whatever sounds good: dance, theater, concerts, opera. We don’t have enough money to afford subscriptions, but if the ticket is less than $30, we’re there. Especially if the listing makes a case for my spiritual or intellectual betterment; I’m a real sucker for any shortcut up the culture ladder.
I’m also a sucker for any performance that demands by scenery or pretension to be called ‘contemporary.’ That it’s being conceived and enacted in the present moment is not enough; it must have parentheses in its title, or have been influenced by minimalism and dancehall. I love the cutting-edge, though I am not cutting-edge, since saying so is not being cutting-edge at all.
* * *
You don’t laugh at dance. This is doubly true for contemporary dance, especially if the piece references Greek tragedy, or has eggs for props. Do not laugh, not even if it feels right; there is no right way to interpret dance, but many ways are wrong. Normally the audience for contemporary dance is so small, there’s a good chance the woman behind you is the choreographer and will not like months of rehearsals reduced to a giggle. Impossibly, no one told her during that time, ‘You are making an enormous mistake,’ but it’s not up to you to say so now.
The Ellis Wood dance company is performing two pieces at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center. Thirty people show up. Some look to be dancers, the rest seem like dance groupies, who look just like dancers but don’t carry gym bags or travel in crews. The lights go down, music starts, a spotlight finds a young woman unfurling herself on the ground. The music falters and she freezes, seeming like it’s planned. A woman behind us hisses at a sound tech to fix things. The music restarts, and the dancer lifts up her skirt and pulls out a bunch of eggs.
For 20 minutes she pretends to be a chicken, in bewildering states of insanity, both maternal and sexual. Her version of laying eggs blends orgasm and defecation with a violent shaking of the jaw. No chicken was ever so strenuously Freudian. Halfway through, she ties on an apron and decides to make breakfast. Later she throws down her eggs, and, for the biggest letdown of the night, we learn they’re hard-boiled. What kind of chicken lays hard-boiled eggs? A conceptual chicken. The audience is silent the whole time, suggesting rapt confusion, or sleep. We’re barely able to stop laughing.
The second piece is good, but I was so thrown by the chicken-dance, I can only remember a few pretty gestures and a lot of obvious effort by the dancers to communicate something, and the audience trying hard to receive it.
Sometimes dance looks so natural it’s unreal, sometimes it tells stories, sometimes it transcends intellectual grasp and takes me past my reservations. Sometimes I’m thrilled. Sometimes I feel inadequate as a person who can barely touch his toes. But there are also the odd moments when I am thankful, that my children won’t someday pop out from my crotch wearing shells, that I’m not tempted to try and fit them in my mouth or pretend to fry them up for breakfast, or even crack their heads open and discover they aren’t children at all, they’re hard-boiled eggs. These moments are rare, and I treasure them.
* * *
My friend L. and I catch the San Francisco Symphony, led by poster boy Michael Tilson Thomas (is there a classical-music Tiger Beat that’s nicknamed him MTT yet?), at Carnegie Hall. My wife was supposed to come but she’s too sick. I promise not to enjoy the performance one bit, in solidarity.
An advantage of buying cheap is having your choice of seats: Rarely do the top rows fill up, so the ushers allow you to sit where you like—assuming you stay in the same ring or tier. This means my coat gets a chair and so does my bag. We choose the last seats jutting out from the balcony, with a great view of the orchestra.
First is Debussy’s En blanc et noir, rescored, snoringly, by Robin Holloway for an orchestra. Line up 100 people and ask them to tell you their life story in 10 seconds. Most responses will be similar to the others and fairly cliché, but a few will blow you away with something heartbreaking. It was like that, but not really. I spent most of the time watching from my bird’s eye view: the different sections flip their pages in unison; how the string sections moved their bows like piano keys, one player’s jarring up a micro-second after another’s; how a deep surge of passion would electrify the orchestra a moment after Thomas swung his arms. One bassoonist wiped his nose with his hand and stared at it.
Second came John Adams’s My Father Knew Charles Ives. The program did an excellent job explaining how Adams’s father did not know Charles Ives, but was less convincing with why the piece was named so anyway. The first movement was mostly a dull march, thankfully razed and replaced by some wonderful, emotionally perilous music—surprise chasms for the musicians and audience to fall into. There were meandering nature walks and foggy nights, with bombing raids by the trumpets and surgically-placed harps.
During intermission I bought a ham sandwich. During Berlioz’s Hungarian March from La Damnation de Faust I thought about the ham sandwich and wished I had bought two.
* * *
A week ago I was an opera fan who had never seen an opera. I’m not sure if anything’s changed.
There is no good reason to sing ‘It’s only a minor head wound’ as though your entire family was just wiped out by Nazis, unless you’re standing on a mammoth set in front of hundreds of people. Or maybe I’m a dunce. Like serious dance, opera is not to be laughed at, especially in a major restaging of Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra; my wife and I learn this when we realize we are the only people in the highest rows laughing.
Around us are a number of old men with bad haircuts holding programs. I fall asleep twice in the first 20 minutes and we decide it’s time to go. My wife suggests in a whisper that next time we see an opera in German or Italian, so at least we won’t know our favorite arias are actually grocery lists set to tragedy. We quietly leave our seats and find the door marked ‘EXIT.’
The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center is a massive complex. Indoors, when you’re lingering outside the rings, it looks like a Bauhaus disco prison. When you descend the exit stairwells it’s not so different, though there aren’t many notices to follow.
We go down one staircase for a long time, looking for exit signs, and go down another. The music recedes. The doors are all blank. We reach the bottom of the second well and find a row of exit doors, braced with alarms guaranteed to erupt if we try leaving. We didn’t like the opera, but see no reason to alert the police. Going back up a few flights, we open an unmarked door and go down a passage and descend even more stairs, lit by fluorescent trays. The music begins to get louder.
A bit panicked, I open another unmarked door, and, afraid it will lock behind us, I stay while my wife ducks down a hall. A moment later she runs back, hissing at me that a security guard is coming. We sprint a bit before realizing we haven’t done anything wrong. The security guard will tell us how to get out! We go back, but he’s gone.
Now the music is much louder; enough tragedy for everyone. We jog down a hall, passing shelves of props and big hanging lights. We turn a corner and try another corridor, past a sign marked ‘Backstage.’ There is duct tape everywhere, fabric clips and buckets of paint and tools I wouldn’t recognize again. A dressing room is open; I spot wigs inside on styrofoam heads. One door says ‘Orchestra Pit’; the music behind it is blazing.
Any moment we’re sure to appear onstage, a bit underdressed for a Civil War-period drama. As we try yet another door, with no idea what’s on the other side, a young guy comes out, putting on his coat. He stares at us, bemused. My wife explains we were only trying to leave, and he leads us past a security desk to the employees’ exit. The security guard gives us a slow look and goes back to her newspaper.
We run up into the cold night, onto the sidewalk outside Lincoln Center, just another couple hurrying home in overcoats. Finally it feels OK to laugh.
This city has some of the world’s greatest art, and lots of the worst. We’ve decided to take action, specifically regarding art with tuxedos, or costumes, or leotards. I seek specially-clothed performers. There are hundreds of performances every night around New York, and I want a part of them. I want to take advantage.
We’ve begun a weekly program of buying the cheapest tickets to whatever sounds good: dance, theater, concerts, opera. We don’t have enough money to afford subscriptions, but if the ticket is less than $30, we’re there. Especially if the listing makes a case for my spiritual or intellectual betterment; I’m a real sucker for any shortcut up the culture ladder.
I’m also a sucker for any performance that demands by scenery or pretension to be called ‘contemporary.’ That it’s being conceived and enacted in the present moment is not enough; it must have parentheses in its title, or have been influenced by minimalism and dancehall. I love the cutting-edge, though I am not cutting-edge, since saying so is not being cutting-edge at all.
You don’t laugh at dance. This is doubly true for contemporary dance, especially if the piece references Greek tragedy, or has eggs for props. Do not laugh, not even if it feels right; there is no right way to interpret dance, but many ways are wrong. Normally the audience for contemporary dance is so small, there’s a good chance the woman behind you is the choreographer and will not like months of rehearsals reduced to a giggle. Impossibly, no one told her during that time, ‘You are making an enormous mistake,’ but it’s not up to you to say so now.
The Ellis Wood dance company is performing two pieces at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center. Thirty people show up. Some look to be dancers, the rest seem like dance groupies, who look just like dancers but don’t carry gym bags or travel in crews. The lights go down, music starts, a spotlight finds a young woman unfurling herself on the ground. The music falters and she freezes, seeming like it’s planned. A woman behind us hisses at a sound tech to fix things. The music restarts, and the dancer lifts up her skirt and pulls out a bunch of eggs.
For 20 minutes she pretends to be a chicken, in bewildering states of insanity, both maternal and sexual. Her version of laying eggs blends orgasm and defecation with a violent shaking of the jaw. No chicken was ever so strenuously Freudian. Halfway through, she ties on an apron and decides to make breakfast. Later she throws down her eggs, and, for the biggest letdown of the night, we learn they’re hard-boiled. What kind of chicken lays hard-boiled eggs? A conceptual chicken. The audience is silent the whole time, suggesting rapt confusion, or sleep. We’re barely able to stop laughing.
The second piece is good, but I was so thrown by the chicken-dance, I can only remember a few pretty gestures and a lot of obvious effort by the dancers to communicate something, and the audience trying hard to receive it.
Sometimes dance looks so natural it’s unreal, sometimes it tells stories, sometimes it transcends intellectual grasp and takes me past my reservations. Sometimes I’m thrilled. Sometimes I feel inadequate as a person who can barely touch his toes. But there are also the odd moments when I am thankful, that my children won’t someday pop out from my crotch wearing shells, that I’m not tempted to try and fit them in my mouth or pretend to fry them up for breakfast, or even crack their heads open and discover they aren’t children at all, they’re hard-boiled eggs. These moments are rare, and I treasure them.
My friend L. and I catch the San Francisco Symphony, led by poster boy Michael Tilson Thomas (is there a classical-music Tiger Beat that’s nicknamed him MTT yet?), at Carnegie Hall. My wife was supposed to come but she’s too sick. I promise not to enjoy the performance one bit, in solidarity.
An advantage of buying cheap is having your choice of seats: Rarely do the top rows fill up, so the ushers allow you to sit where you like—assuming you stay in the same ring or tier. This means my coat gets a chair and so does my bag. We choose the last seats jutting out from the balcony, with a great view of the orchestra.
First is Debussy’s En blanc et noir, rescored, snoringly, by Robin Holloway for an orchestra. Line up 100 people and ask them to tell you their life story in 10 seconds. Most responses will be similar to the others and fairly cliché, but a few will blow you away with something heartbreaking. It was like that, but not really. I spent most of the time watching from my bird’s eye view: the different sections flip their pages in unison; how the string sections moved their bows like piano keys, one player’s jarring up a micro-second after another’s; how a deep surge of passion would electrify the orchestra a moment after Thomas swung his arms. One bassoonist wiped his nose with his hand and stared at it.
Second came John Adams’s My Father Knew Charles Ives. The program did an excellent job explaining how Adams’s father did not know Charles Ives, but was less convincing with why the piece was named so anyway. The first movement was mostly a dull march, thankfully razed and replaced by some wonderful, emotionally perilous music—surprise chasms for the musicians and audience to fall into. There were meandering nature walks and foggy nights, with bombing raids by the trumpets and surgically-placed harps.
During intermission I bought a ham sandwich. During Berlioz’s Hungarian March from La Damnation de Faust I thought about the ham sandwich and wished I had bought two.
A week ago I was an opera fan who had never seen an opera. I’m not sure if anything’s changed.
There is no good reason to sing ‘It’s only a minor head wound’ as though your entire family was just wiped out by Nazis, unless you’re standing on a mammoth set in front of hundreds of people. Or maybe I’m a dunce. Like serious dance, opera is not to be laughed at, especially in a major restaging of Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra; my wife and I learn this when we realize we are the only people in the highest rows laughing.
Around us are a number of old men with bad haircuts holding programs. I fall asleep twice in the first 20 minutes and we decide it’s time to go. My wife suggests in a whisper that next time we see an opera in German or Italian, so at least we won’t know our favorite arias are actually grocery lists set to tragedy. We quietly leave our seats and find the door marked ‘EXIT.’
The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center is a massive complex. Indoors, when you’re lingering outside the rings, it looks like a Bauhaus disco prison. When you descend the exit stairwells it’s not so different, though there aren’t many notices to follow.
We go down one staircase for a long time, looking for exit signs, and go down another. The music recedes. The doors are all blank. We reach the bottom of the second well and find a row of exit doors, braced with alarms guaranteed to erupt if we try leaving. We didn’t like the opera, but see no reason to alert the police. Going back up a few flights, we open an unmarked door and go down a passage and descend even more stairs, lit by fluorescent trays. The music begins to get louder.
A bit panicked, I open another unmarked door, and, afraid it will lock behind us, I stay while my wife ducks down a hall. A moment later she runs back, hissing at me that a security guard is coming. We sprint a bit before realizing we haven’t done anything wrong. The security guard will tell us how to get out! We go back, but he’s gone.
Now the music is much louder; enough tragedy for everyone. We jog down a hall, passing shelves of props and big hanging lights. We turn a corner and try another corridor, past a sign marked ‘Backstage.’ There is duct tape everywhere, fabric clips and buckets of paint and tools I wouldn’t recognize again. A dressing room is open; I spot wigs inside on styrofoam heads. One door says ‘Orchestra Pit’; the music behind it is blazing.
Any moment we’re sure to appear onstage, a bit underdressed for a Civil War-period drama. As we try yet another door, with no idea what’s on the other side, a young guy comes out, putting on his coat. He stares at us, bemused. My wife explains we were only trying to leave, and he leads us past a security desk to the employees’ exit. The security guard gives us a slow look and goes back to her newspaper.
We run up into the cold night, onto the sidewalk outside Lincoln Center, just another couple hurrying home in overcoats. Finally it feels OK to laugh.
—Published April 6, 2004
