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Romney wants war with Iran.   Authoritatively confirming what we already know is ex-Mossod chief Efraim Halevy, whose interview with Al-Monitor is a must read.

Ballet goers and dancers, ask yourself what the consequence to the arts in this country will be of a protracted war with Iran and the resultant massive spike in oil prices globally?

Balanchine’s political views may have been a little, er, inconsistent, but he  certainly understood human folly, venality and blindness.    He had, after all, survived the apocalypses of WWI, the Russian Revolution and WWII.

This was brought back to me earlier this month when I watched at the Library for the  Performing Arts a film made of New York City Ballet performing La Valse a few months after its 1951 premiere.

The great Patricia Wilde was in town to attend Dancers Over 40’s Balanchine: Broadway and Beyond event.  We worked on our ongoing interview series, as well as going to the library together to watch some tapes she hadn’t seen.   Wilde and Frank Hobi originated the third waltz duet, and performed it as bachically, as Balanchine insisted.

Talk about dancing on the edge of a volcano: performed the way it was then La Valse looks like a towering work of great profundity.  You should see, you must see the way that Le Clercq responds to Moncion’s deathly summons in part 2 with an enormous, eerie backbend, telling us exactly the spell she has fallen under.  Go and be inspired!

Wilde and her colleagues, many of whom had grown up in the Ballet Russe, weren’t afraid to be expressive, theatrical.

Just the way Part and Bolle weren’t afraid on Saturday night.

Julie Kent and Veronika Part: two ABT ballerinas with different and indomitable talents and approaches.  When they share the stage, no quarter is given or expected.

Four years ago, Kent’s Hagar and Part’s Eldest Sister went at it in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire in a way I described in Ballet Review as almost ferocious.  During ABT’s just-concluded week at City Center, all was comparatively genteel in Limon’s Moor’s Pavane, as befitting a work in which tragedy is enveloped by the stately measures of Renaissance court dance.  They are meant to be friends here as well as mistress and servant.  Nevertheless the two ballerinas–Kent was Desdemona and Part Emilia–generated a particular theatrical tautness.  Neither one relaxes for a moment when they share the stage and that makes for first-rate kinetic theater.

I saw them Saturday night, after Part had already danced gloriously in Ratmansky’s  new Symphony No. 9.  Speaking of theatrical tautness, she and Roberto Bolle generated a heat together in this performance that eluded them when they did Swan Lake at the Met in 2009.  Although Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes were of couse good dancing the same roles at the ballet’s premiere Thursday night, I preferred the Part-Bolle approach.  Much more emotional and really quite gripping.

The idea that in this political and economic climate any single choreographer can save or even sustain ballet single-handedly is ludicrous.  But Ratmansky does get the best out of everyone who does his work, and the entire company was dancing brilliantly in his ballet.  Jared Matthews, for one, was freer than he often is as well as precise.  The company didn’t give a have-a-nice-day performance; it was the real thing.  It perhaps demonstrated their awareness that only by delivering peak performances can ballet continue to exist in this country.  Going along to sort of get along is no longer a possibility.

All the salient points have been made about Newsweek’s demise.  The bigger question is what exactly the field of print media is offering its ever-more-emphatically straying readers.  What we’re getting for the most part is shoddy as well as downright biased and corrupt political reporting and painfully meager, restricted, and generic cultural offerings.

It’s NOT just the new technologies–it’s the utter vacuity of product that print media is offering.

Managerial caprice and artistic excellence are, of course, two entirely different enchiladi.  To wit, the case of Dwayne Croft, one of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest artists, but of late given the back of Peter Gelb’s hand.

We will recall of course last years’s episode in which Croft was covering the role of the Don in the Met’s new Don Giovanni.  When the opening-night Don, Mariusz Kwiecien, became indisposed, Croft was not allowed to sing the premiere and instead Gelb substituted Peter Mattei, who was yanked out of his scheduled performances of Figaro in Barbiere.  You follow me ?

Privileging of celebrity over all else may be a sign of lack of knowledge, lack of discernment, or simply the crassest commerical calculation.  But it certainly didn’t improve this production, since Mattei, heavenly as his voice is, didn’t seem to entirely know what he supposed to do on stage.  Croft, on the other hand, had participated in the entire rehearsal process.

This season, the Met is being slightly less dismissive of Croft.  Earlier this month I heard him sing Ping in Turandot there.  He was in superb voice and perfectly eqipped to suggest the many facets of this particular ministerial fellow, who plies some caprices of his own.

Our drought-incinerated breadbasket brings ever-rising food prices, while neither presidential candidate nor the debate commission, nor most of the “mainstream”media dare breathe a word about global warming.

But 350 has set out on a tour to demand that reality be acknowledged.  Common dreams reports.

“I don’t support Obama,” Daniel Ellsberg explains on Reader Supported News. “I oppose the current Republican Party.”

The state of our politics and media is so alarming that I haven’t been able to blog about much else lately.  But yes, I have still been going to performances.

City Center’s Fall for Dance performance September 30 was an at-least-four star, four-item program of real choreographic substance:  Pam Tanowitz’s Fortune, Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, Peter Quanz’s Luminous and Graham’s Chronicle.

In Luminous, created for the Hong Kong Ballet in 2010 and well performed by them in New York, Quanz composed somewhat in the Antony Tudor manner of delineating relationships through classical vocabulary.  He even included a quote from Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading.  As coincidence would have it, Leaves is being revived this month by American Ballet Theatre after a four-year-absence from its rep.  This week during ABT’s City Center season I want to see both casts in it.

Bayou City Concert Musicals in Houston—those wonderful people who brought me down there a year ago July to regale them with tales of Tallulah Bankhead, my vaudevillian grandparents, et.al.—just scored another hit with their revival of Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus. 

I remember when I was a teenager reading Agnes de Mille’s, the show’s original choreographer, recollections of the original production in her memoir, And Promenade Home.  It sounded simply divine. 

Read the reviews for yourself:

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/artattack/2012/09/bayou_city_concert_musicals_hi.php#more

http://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/The-three-leads-of-Venus-generate-real-magic-3847724.php

http://houston.broadwayworld.com/article/BWW-Reviews-ONE-TOUCH-OF-VENUS-A-Fantastically-Fun-Forgotten-Show-20120907

http://blog.chron.com/criticscritic/2012/09/bccms-one-touch-of-venus-gets-brilliant-fantastic-premiere-production/

 By the so-called “journalists,”–and yes I have no hesitation placing those particular quotation marks–

 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Jim Naureckas details the way that:

“what journalists call ‘objectivity’ is really a radical post-modernism–a denial that anything can ever really be known about the world, that all we really can do is report various claims about the world”

They (and we get a particularly lamentable sampling of cop-outs by Time’s Michael Scherer and factcheck.org’s Brooks Jackson) have, in other words, completely shirked their primary and essential obligation to the body politic, and come up with mumbo-jumbo rationalizations for so doing.

We actually have, in today’s Times, a reporter—I can’t bring myself to put quotes around that job description, but I’m tempted–alluding to “forthrightness” on the part of Paul Ryan.