(Photo by Andrea Mohin for the NYTimes. Dancers: Marcelo Gomes and Veronika Part.)

Yulan is the title of the Nahat extravaganza;  from the photos of costumes, some rehearsal shots and conferences the production looks like full stop out!  If any one has seen the Nahat Blue Suede Shoes, Yulan apparently will enjoy even more theatrics.  Nahat writes ” We are in the last leg of rehearsal now..All is going well with the normal technical and staging problems that get solved each day …better and better each time.  The show looks wonderful and everyone who has been invited to see rehearsal is astounded at the versatility and beauty of the show.  I’m very proud of everyone.

“..Everyone is now very excited because they see what power they have in doing it right and that what I’ve asked for with each change and correction is meaningful…During the past three days it has been a revelation to all after I moved things around and corrected the entire stage set up and sound…. I said ‘The drawing is a drawing, not the stage.’  The show is terrific and is a knock out production. Everyone in the management of the Ministry of Culture from throughout the country is coming…shows are sold out. “  Earlier Dennis had written ” Some guests are flying in from as far away as Chicago, Hong Kong and Japan, including some very prominent, high profile people from the Bay Area Asian Community.”

“Press conference went well– I was told it has been on the news all around China.. Beijing has reported hearing on radio stations as has Shanghai…What they are saying the news already is ‘We have never seen such a diverse production using so many of the talents of China and the US in one show.  It is stunning from beginning to end.

“…Program took me three weeks to compile – learning Chinese characters isn’t easy!  But I have great assistant…”

Earlier Dennis had written that Paul Chihara was having his welcome in the POC.  “Paul will be in Bejing for four days before coming here,  Since our recording he has become a big hit with the Beijing University Music Department and is setting up classes and collaborations now with the University in Los Angeles.  We sent him on a lecture on “Music Composition in Hollywood” — he was sensational.

FROM SEQUENCE 2012
November 2012

For James and Jonah, on being called to participate
in a minyan or as citizens of these United States.

While I was never bar mitzvahed, I have learned that the Bar Mitzvah boy is given a passage of the Torah to study, and he, 13 years old, gives a speech at his family’s synagogue about the meaning of his Torah portion. (This usually involves claiming to have learned something about being a good person.) My text was given to me by PBS, but perhaps also by God in a certain sense, one evening during my fifty-ninth year. The text took the form of a documentary about the dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins.

One November Friday night, an evening before attending the Bar Mitzvah of a friend of my son’s, I was, for other reasons, quite tired, and I lay down on my couch a little after 8, clicker in hand. At 9 this documentary came on. Previously I knew very little about Robbins, and I have not been a particular fan of Broadway musicals or of the American Ballet Theatre. It is possible that, except for clips on TV and a remake of his first ballet, “Fancy Free,” I have never seen a Robbins production, and if I have now watched a two-hour documentary, . . . I am like a tourist who briefly visited a foreign city.

Two things struck me. One was how dedicated Robbins was to his chosen crafts: dance and choreography. For 60 years he just kept working and working, always trying to learn, always trying to get it right. This level and consistency of dedication is in and of itself extraordinary, a kind of genius independent of whatever creative and expressive talents he may also have had. Secondly, the major event of this man’s life occurred on quite another stage, when he agreed to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and during his testimony he “named names”: four people who, he said, had been communists, as he in his youth had been. In doing this he destroyed these four people’s careers for some period of years and turned them into pariahs. In the documentary one of the named says that for three months she and her husband did not receive a single phone call. Her friends were all afraid of themselves being caught, condemned, unable to get work.

One of the subtexts of this portion of the documentary was the anti-Semitism of the communist-hunting of the McCarthy period. I have subsequently read in Wikipedia that Senator McCarthy hired a Jew, Roy Cohn, as his chief counsel, choosing him over Robert Kennedy, “reportedly in part to avoid accusations of an anti-Semitic motivation” for his Senate subcommittee’s investigations. And it is not for nothing that McCarthy and his great supporter Joseph Kennedy were Irish Catholics, anxious to be fully accepted in a country in which Catholics were a minority and the Irish considered by many to be good for nothing but manual labor and police work. The “Red Scare” of the 1940s and ‘50s offered them an opportunity: Catholics could fit in by identifying Jews as the real outsiders.

Ostensibly McCarthy and the HUAC investigators who proceeded him were uncovering Americans who had, typically in their youth and during the Depression, been members of the American Communist Party. But, for example, HUAC’s focus was on the entertainment industry, a business dominated by Jews. The overt statement was that Americans who would join a Communist Party were not real Americans, and this both because the Communist Party had strong ties to the Soviet Union and because communism’s ideology (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”) challenged the presumably more American “every man for himself” approach. There was, however, another, less explicit statement: Jews were not Americans. This aspect of McCarthyism echoed the early days of Nazi rule during which Hitler’s government, backed and advised by leading German bankers and industrialists, whipped up anti-Semitic sentiments as a way of destroying the power of the labor unions and driving down wages. In the American case, xenophobia was whipped up and used to attack leftist Jews, not least those active in labor unions.

As I understand the history, there were a series of battles in the movie industry between the workers and the studio bosses, and some of the most significant of these battles were between a set of unions (the IATSE or IA) controlled by the mob in collusion with the studio bosses, and a more democratic body, the CSU. The fundamental issues were control over the unions and workers and keeping down or raising wages. However, the mob leaders and bosses came up with the idea of accusing their opponents of being communists—i.e. un-American, traitors. E.g., in 1941 a movie producer named Walt Disney took out an ad in Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine, declaring his conviction that “Communist agitation” was behind a cartoonists and animators’ strike going on at that time. Such tactics proved so successful that anti-labor and anti-Semitic politicians in Washington and elsewhere adopted them. Thus the sad irony: Americans thought the goal, right or wrong, was rooting out communists, but this was only a means for controlling workers and keeping down wages—the wages of the vast majority of Americans, however anti-communist they may have been. (Of course variations on this tactic have been used over and over again, and the vast majority of Americans continue to be fooled by it and to lose track of who is fighting for their interests and who against them.)

The documentary’s position was that the Jewish Robbins (née Rabinowitz) got caught during the McCarthy period because, like many a child of immigrants, he wanted nothing so much as to be accepted by his country, to fit in, to be liked not only for who he was but also because who he was— he hoped—was a real American. (Which would be to say as unscrupulous as Walt Disney, Roy Cohn and Joseph Kennedy?) Myself, I have always felt that I belonged, that I was completely American, whether I liked it or not, and notwithstanding—likely allowing—all my objections to American values, customs and politics. It is also the case that I am, as the Nazis would say, Mischling, a hybrid. (As most Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, French people and likely “Aryan” Germans as well are, though of course the elements of the mix vary from family to family.) In my particular case, when my mother, from a Jewish family, announced to her father that she wanted to marry a man named Sam, her father joked that this Sam couldn’t be Jewish because in those days no American Jews had Old Testament names. Boys from Jewish families were named Jack, Harold, Murray, Norman, Phillip, Jerome, etc., because, presumably, that helped them fit in, or at least made it clear to all, the boys included, that fitting in was the first priority. My mother belongs to a very particular linguistic grouping in the United States: Children who grew up in Brooklyn but during their adolescence unlearned their Brooklyn accents, a bit as Liza Doolittle was pushed to unlearn hers. As a result she has at times been mistaken for a foreigner, for someone who learned English very well but later in life. And it might be said that this approach to being an American was passed along to me. I learned French in adulthood and came to speak French with my wife and son in our home. As a result, sometimes when people hear me speak English—if I have recently been speaking a lot of French—they cannot figure out what foreign country I come from. In fact, I can tell them with a smile, one of my ancestors was Priscilla (Mullins) Alden, one of the famous lovers of the Mayflower. My namesake, William Eaton, was the first American general to lead an army abroad, in North Africa, against the Barbary pirates: “To the shores of Tripoli; . . . First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean,” as the “Marines’ Hymn” describes it.

Again, I take this to be not only my particular story, but also just one variation on the story of so many of us. A few days after the Bar Mitzvah I had dinner with a Brazilian-born friend who ended up outlining on the paper table-covering her family history. There was a Jewish grandmother whose family had come to Brazil to escape the Inquisition, but whose members were still, five centuries later, not considered real Brazilians, not even by some of the family members themselves. This concept of real Brazilian seemed reserved not for descendants of the people who occupied the land before it was conquered by Europeans, but for Europeans who were Catholics. Thus my friend also told me of a grandfather, the man who married her Jewish grandmother. He came from Germany in the 1920s and fit right in. He was, or claimed to be, Catholic. (A Catholic doctor no less, usurping a traditional role of Jews?) So many years later, growing up in suburban New Jersey, my friend’s American-born son had insisted that for Thanksgiving his mother make not Brazilian food but rather both turkey and ham, to help him prove to the world and to himself that he was both American and not Jewish.

Robbins faced a second problem when it came to fitting in. He was a homosexual, and long before the gay pride movement. He was a homosexual, and he was being hounded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who has since been thought to have been a homosexual and/or cross-dresser. According to the documentary, Hoover’s agent in all this was the TV personality Ed Sullivan who persisted in threatening Robbins that if he did not testify his homosexuality would be exposed. I now regret every minute my sisters and I spent watching Sullivan’s TV show when we were growing up. To not have the courage and autonomy to refuse to name names is one thing; to be forcing people to testify, and to be threatening to expose their sexual proclivities if they did not testify, this is both criminal and obscene. I am also sure that Sullivan’s viciousness can be found in his programs, and Robbins’s anxieties and egotism in his dances, and that Disney’s willingness to resort to slander as a way of making more money is there in his cartoons, and . . . . And I am sure that through these widely viewed cultural products these “values,” these ways of being, have been passed along to many Americans, “impressionable youths” included.

According to the documentary (Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About), Robbins was unwilling or unable to accept being “outed” as a homosexual because this would trash his immigrants’ child’s wish—to fit in. He may also have been afraid of not being able to get work. After being blacklisted, an up and coming Hollywood director named Abraham Polonsky directed only one more feature film in the remaining thirty years of his life. Robbins lived to work. To not have been able to work would have been torture. He went to Washington to testify and he named names. I have subsequently read, in a Joan Acocella piece in the New Yorker archives:

[O]ther homosexual artists, such as Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, stood firm . . . His [Robbins’s] testimony makes shameful reading. He fell over himself to name names. As one congressman remarked gratefully, his level of coöperation was “a bit unusual.”

The PBS documentary includes some commentary from a historian of the period. It is very difficult for those of us who were not living at that time and who were not in Robbins’s shoes to condemn what he did, the historian says, and then, justly, I believe, he completes the thought: But, still, what Robbins did was both despicable and wrong. And in the larger scheme of things—and in Robbins’s sensitive soul as well, the film suggested—this traitorous, cowardly action stayed in his mind longer than the pride he must also have felt given his extraordinary string of wildly popular dances and shows.

I pause to note one irony, or several. This homosexual Jerome Robbins-Rabinowitz whose patriotism the US Congress challenged—in one of its shameful moments, though far from its only one—this Jerome Robbins-Rabinowitz, so afraid of not being accepted given who he in fact was, . . . This one individual has been, and perhaps as much as any American of his generation, responsible for giving Americans a way—an odd way?—of feeling proud of themselves. (E.g., through West Side Story, The King and I, Peter Pan and Fiddler on the Roof, and through ballets like “Fancy Free” and “Dances at a Gathering”.) Sometime after his testimony the State Department paid for Robbins and a group of dancers to tour Europe to show the world the greatness of American/“Free World” choreography. We might say, among other things, that freedom was something Robbins knew only in the breach. Even in his work he was, as we say, driven.

So now we come to the Bar Mitzvah. Not having been raised Jewish, I have attended services in a synagogue perhaps 10 times in my whole life. Each time I attend a service, in addition to the beauty of the singing, I am struck by what my father (and my wife) might call the mumbo-jumbo (the clinging to ancient superstitions) of organized religion. These particular wordings were not used at my son’s friend James’s Bar Mitzvah; I am here copying from a Reform Siddar (prayerbook) I consulted subsequently:

Exalted and hallowed be God’s great name
in the world which God created, according to plan

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart
be acceptable to You, Adonai, my Rock and my Redeemer

As the fish gives himself to the sea
As the bird gives herself to the air
So may we give ourselves to You

While such prayers are being recited, I often find myself looking around the room at the other people, wondering if they really believe this stuff. At the Bar Mitzvah service for my son’s friend, I found myself wondering if the rabbi even believed in God, or in anything like the God being described in the prayers he was leading. (Going back to anti-Vietnam War days, my strongest religious connection has been to Quakerism, and above all to the power, often awful power, of Quaker meeting for worship. I taught “First Day School” when my son was little. I have read that 50 percent of Quakers do not believe in God. My own “God” is a kind of placeholder for the unknown and for the unknowable, and thus a reminder of the universe of human ignorance as well.)

Nevertheless, perhaps under the influence of the Robbins documentary I had watched the night before, or impressed by how proud James’s parents were to have him going through this rite of passage and in front of all their relatives and friends—I appreciated a different aspect of the Bar Mitzvah service. It was as if there was another subtext, as if the “believers” there assembled were saying:

We probably don’t really believe these words we are saying, but we are saying them because this is what our ancestors have been saying for thousands of years. We are reaffirming this historical connection, and the connection is felt more strongly because in order to reaffirm it we are saying words whose superficial content we don’t even bother thinking about. And we rejoice in saying these words, and we would say whatever is asked of us, because these are our people, this is our home.

As I sat in the synagogue I found myself thinking, too, of something I had read around the time of Yom Kippur, a few months earlier. In some German concentration camp a woman or group of women asked and were given permission to hold services. They had no rabbi and none of the ritual objects. They were starving and cold and disease-ridden and had seen so many die and expected to themselves die soon. They gathered together around a candle and sang the Kol Nidre, the haunting song of Yom Kippur. My thought, now, at this 2012 Bar Mitzvah in a well-to-do neighborhood of New York City, was that this, too, was why we say these time-worn prayers. Because over the course of thousands of years of human history, and in the future, periodically there have been and will be times when it will seem that all we have left to hold onto are our communal traditions, our imaginary Gods—and this even if we are also being made to suffer, being killed, for our beliefs or for our ethnic identification. (Or in the interests of capital.)

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, raised Jewish, is famous, inter alia, for not having converted to Catholicism although he found himself drawn to it. In his last will, prepared in 1937, he wrote:

Je me serais converti si je n’avais vu se préparer depuis des années . . . la formidable vague d’antisémitisme qui va déferler sur le monde. J’ai voulu rester parmi ceux qui seront demain des persécutés.

I would have converted [to Catholicism] had I not seen the tremendous wave of anti-Semitism building over many years and now soon to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.

This to me comes closest to expressing my own Judaism, and my own Puritanism as well. If people are going to persecute and be persecuted for their beliefs, I will be among the persecuted. I may or may not have a choice in this, but I know my role, where I belong, where I will feel most at home.

In coming back toward Robbins’s testimony to HUAC, I will pause for a moment on the Jewish rite of circumcision. Male individuals have a part of their anatomies, an intimate, sensitive part, taken away by their families and communities and before they are old enough to be consulted or say a word in their own defense. Personally I find this practice barbaric, and I refused to allow my son to be circumcised and notwithstanding the fact that current medical opinion (and insurance policies/payments?) now has most every American boy being circumcised, usually before he leaves his first hospital. My position is that if for religious or health reasons my Jonah wants to have a piece of his penis cut off when he is older, let that be his decision.

But of course penile circumcision is just one of the many forms of circumcision—or of invasions of privacy and autonomy—carried out by homo sapiens in the name of community. In parts of Spain, I believe, it is traditional during wedding ceremonies for the guests to cut off pieces of the groom’s tie. And there are traditions of bloody wedding night sheets being thrown out to the guests to confirm the taking or sacrifice of the bride’s virginity. In Russia and other cultures a new male colleague or visitor is not trusted until he gets drunk (very drunk) or otherwise inebriated with the established group. This is another tradition I, not a drinker, do not like, but I understand it. Once drunk one makes confessions and says and does stupid things. The community now has something to hold over you and so can trust you. (E.g., if you confess to being a homosexual or to having had some homosexual experiences, this can be used as and when necessary to force you to testify or to betray a labor movement.)

When Robbins agreed to sacrifice himself—his autonomy and his honor—before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was showing the Congress and Americans as a whole that he was one of them. He probably knew that one of the chief communist-hunters, Roy Cohn, was also a homosexual, and he may have understood that the people taking, recording and listening to his testimony in the HUAC hearing room had plenty of secrets of one kind or another in their closets, and had also at key moments in their lives agreed to sacrifice their own integrity and to do shameful things in order to fit in—be it to not be ostracized in high school, to get or keep a job, to marry “well,” become “partner” or get tenure or win election to Congress. This, we might say, is one of the ways in which communities are made, by demanding and overseeing the sacrifice of the autonomy—and with it some of the dignity—of the community members. (It is not for nothing that my son and his classmates put on ties—cords around their necks—to come to their friend James’s Bar Mitzvah service. And since Jonah as yet does not know how to make the noose, I first made it around my own neck and then slipped it off my head and on to his. And his mother, watching, complained for him about his having to button the top button of his shirt—restricting breathing and freedom of movement, it can seem. And I also saw some pride in Jonah’s eyes, to be wearing a button-down shirt and tie like his dad.)

The shameful things we do in order to fit in—and in marking others to be ostracized so that we ourselves might be accepted—haunt us throughout our lives. In 1963, a namer of names, actor Sterling Hayden, declared, “I was a rat, a stoolie, and the names I named of those close friends were blacklisted and deprived of their livelihood.” Scholars Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner have apparently stated that Hayden “was widely believed to have drunk himself into a near-suicidal depression decades before his 1986 death.” In the large organization where I earn my living, I daily work with people who behave in Haydenesque fashion, badmouthing their colleagues (or identifying them rightly or wrongly as Jewish or otherwise abnormal) whenever an opportunity presents itself. This is how these quite ordinary people try to fit in and get ahead. And, yes, sadly, some of these badmouthers and ostracizers are people who, on account of their sexuality or for other reasons (including alcoholism, lack of interest in their jobs or lack of ability), feel themselves vulnerable to themselves being ostracized and discriminated against.

Myself, I remember once, I must have been about 18 years old, I was travelling with three people: my best male friend, a girl I was romantically, sexually interested in, and a girl who was, as the saying goes, just a friend, and Jewish besides, as the other two people were not. We all ended up in one big bed, and I played some role, likely the lead role, in communicating to this girl, the Jewish girl, that she was not wanted there, she should go sleep by herself while the other three of us stayed together. In the course of coming of age (and throughout adulthood) one has hundreds if not thousands of opportunities to behave in this way, and I am sure that this was not the only time that I was an ostracizer, though this seems to be the incident that continues to prey on my conscience, and likely because the ostracized person was Jewish, and with a “Jewish nose,” like me.

What I want to stress, and by way of conclusion, is that acting shamefully and fitting in go hand in hand. And groups and communities are defined by boundaries, and in order for the boundaries to have meaning there have to be people on both sides, in and out, one of “us” and one of “them,” friends and enemies, Americans and Un-Americans. And like Jerome Robbins—“like little Jerome Robbins,” I find myself wanting to write—we carry the shame with us, casting its shadow on whatever we may be able to accomplish as a result of being part of the group.

I would hardly excuse Robbins for his naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. There were others, including people with less money and status, who refused to testify or refused to name names. Several ended up in prison, including the scriptwriters Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr., who in Danbury Prison joined the former HUAC Chairman, former US Representative J. Parnell Thomas, himself convicted for embezzling federal funds. Those who stood up to the Committee or to the wave of persecution include famous people such as Zero Mostel (later the star of Fiddler on the Roof), Lillian Hellman, Pete Seeger, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson. But more touching are the unfamiliar names on the various blacklists, people who may have lost more and had less to fall back on when they were ostracized. Selecting at random from a Wikipedia list of “Others first blacklisted after June 1950” I come to Anne Froelick, who

began her writing career while serving as secretary to Howard Koch, then a writer for Orson Welles’s The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Taylor assisted Koch on his adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds . . . Taylor was involved in causes such as fighting fascism and promoting unions and desegregation, which reportedly led her to join the Communist Party. In 1951, Taylor’s party membership caused her husband, Philip Taylor, to lose his job as a manufacturing planner at Lockheed. She continued to try to make a living as a writer using her married name. She wrote four plays that were produced locally, including Storm in the Sun. Along with that, she co-wrote a comic novel, Press on Regardless, . . .

This Wikipedia article on the Hollywood blacklist calls attention to John Henry Faulk, host of an afternoon comedy radio show and a leftist active in his union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. He was scrutinized by AWARE, one of the firms that during those years made money (paid for “nice homes”, for straightening kids’ teeth) by investigating other people’s possible communist sympathies or “disloyalty.” Marked as unfit, Faulk was fired by CBS Radio. In 1957, by filing a suit against AWARE, he became a leader of the fight to end the blacklist.

All this now set down, I would also note that, in my understanding of the Something to Dance About story, Jerome Robbins’s testimony before HUAC was his second circumcision, by which he became, in addition to Jewish, fully American. He wanted desperately to fit in, and he did. He fit in better than almost any American of his generation. (And I would like to think that he was able to use his millions and his status to help, in whatever way, the gay movement or individual homosexuals. What I have heard is that he gave a lot of money to the New York Public Library for some kind of dance archive.) What he would also seem to have learned along the way is that there is a price for fitting in. It can be a terrible price.


The image used here, of a boy being circumcised, appears on many, many websites. One site I came to offered this caption: “A little boy cries as a Turkish doctor injects him with a local anesthetic before circumcising him in Kabul, Afghanistan.” (N.B.: the boy is not Jewish, but Muslim.) The photo was there credited to Natalie Behring-Chisholm/Getty Images.



Excerpts from Robbins’s testimony to HUAC

From Thirty Years of Treason (see “Links” below)

Committee staff member Frank S. Tavenner: What was the inducement that led you into the Communist Party?

Robbins: The Communist Political Association had been presented to me as an organization which was very much for minorities and for advancing their causes. This interested me very much. I had had, prior to my joining, several instances of very painful moments because of minority prejudice. This was naturally an appeal for me.

Tavenner: Will you give us the names of other persons who were in this group whom you can identify?

Robbins offered six names, after which Committee member Representative Bernard W. Kearney thanked him for his “very frank and unusual testimony,” and Committee member Representative Clyde Doyle said, “I want to join in heartily complimenting you on doing what you have done.” Doyle told Robbins that some of the people who had been asked to testified had referred to those who named names as “stool pigeons and informers. You realize, no doubt, that when you volunteered the names of other Communists whom you knew to be Communists that you would, by those people at least, be put in that class. . . . What is it in your conscience, or what was it in your experience, that makes you . . . willing to come here, in spite of the fact that you knew some other people . . . would put you down as a stool pigeon, and voluntarily testify as you have today?”

Robbins: I’ve examined myself. I think I made a great mistake before in entering the Communist Party, and I feel that I am doing the right thing as an American.

Links

Joan Acocella, “American Dancer: Broadway, ballet, and Jerome Robbins,” New Yorker, May 28, 2001.

Henri Bergson, extrait du « testament » écrit le 8 février 1937, cité par Floris Delattre dans son article « Les dernières années de Bergson », Presses universitaires de France, 1943.

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See also their Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies (The New Press, 2003).

The Hollywood Blacklist: Wikipedia article (accessed November 2012).

The Reform Siddar quoted here: The New Reform Prayerbook, Mishkan T’filah.

Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About – The Definitive Biography of an American Dance Master: DVD of the documentary, directed by Judy Kinberg, written by Amanda Vaill, Kultur video, 2009. )

The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman (Nation Books, 2012). Chapter 6, “Red Dawn on Sunset Strip,” provides information about the battles in the movie industry between the workers, studio bosses and the red-baiting Mob.

Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968, selected and edited by Eric Bentley (Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 1971, 2002). Has transcript of Robbins’s testimony.

Do you know any stories like Michaela’s? What are other cases and other artists who inspire you? Email artsassocialchange@gmail.com to contribute!

Alex Kramer photographed by Jade Young

Nine days ago, Ballet San Jose gave the South Bay a one-night-only preview of our 2013 Repertory Season with an amazing Inaugural Gala performance at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. The rep earned some very complimentary reviews from publications around the Bay Area and we couldn’t be more thrilled! Every person who took the CPA stage on November 3 — from critically acclaimed concert violinist Rachel Lee to the company dancers of Ballet San Jose, both familiar and new — gave an awe-inspiring performance. We think the gala gave Bay Area audiences a really inspiring look at the new pieces in the coming season!

Now, we’ve begun to look ahead to Ballet SJ’s new production of The Nutcracker, which will make its world premiere on December 8. As we gear up for this run of Nutcracker, we pick up where we left off with our Artist Spotlight blog series. Meet another new face in the corps de ballet: Alex Kramer, an alumnus of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre (ABT) and former member of ABT Studio Company. Before the gala, we talked to Alex about what inspired him to become a dancer in Grand Junction, CO, his mentor at ABT, and his thoughts about leaving New York City.

What was your dance background before you came to Ballet San Jose?

I started ballet when I was seven in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I danced there until I was fifteen. Then I moved to New York City to dance with the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre for two years, and then I joined their Studio Company for a year as a sort of transition between training and dancing with a professional company. And now I’m here!

What inspired you to become a dancer in Colorado?

When I was a kid – probably six or seven – I had a babysitter who was a dancer. She was more of a jazz dancer, but she was the one who got me into it. I started taking some jazz classes around that time, but I found out that I didn’t really like it. I performed in a production of The Nutcracker when I was about six and I really liked it. I started taking ballet classes after that.

Name one dancer who has inspired you in your career so far.

David Hallberg, who was my mentor at American Ballet Theatre. He had set up a scholarship program and I was the first dancer to get that scholarship. I learned a lot and continue to learn a lot from him.

Use three words to describe yourself.

That’s really hard! I’d probably say dedicated and hard working. That’s three words, right?

What movies or events did you enjoy over the summer?

I’m trying to remember what I did this summer. I went to Las Vegas with my family, which was fun! I don’t really get to spend time with my family that often so I enjoyed that time. But I spent most of the summer in New York City – my last hurrah!

Do you think you’ll ever move back to New York?

I don’t know. I’ll definitely go back to visit as soon as possible, but I was there for three years and it was time for a change.

What non-dancing hobbies and activities do you pursue in your time off?

Not a whole lot! I usually just try to take my time off as it comes. I’m kind of into photography. I really like taking pictures.

What works from the new season are you most looking forward to?

I’m really looking forward to Jessica Lang’s piece. I like working with her – she’s awesome. And Stars and Stripes [for Ballet San Jose’s Inaugural Gala on November 3] has been fun. I haven’t worked with Jorma Elo at all, so I’m all really interested in Glow-Stop as well. I’m excited to see what happens.

Say something to Ballet San Jose’s fans and supporters!

I hope you enjoy our dancing and continue to support the company!

Join Alex and the rest of the company at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts December 8 – 23 for Ballet SJ’s brand new production of The Nutcracker, featuring world premiere choreography by Karen Gabay and performed to live music by Symphony Silicon Valley. Buy tickets online at http://www.balletsj.org, or call the Box Office at (408) 288-2800. And if you attended Ballet SJ’s Inaugural Gala and want to see more of our 2013 Season, subscribe today! As a season subscriber, you’ll receive free parking, best available seating, additional discounts on single tickets, and other awesome perks.

We are so excited to share this new Nutcracker and exciting repertory season with you! See you at the CPA next month!

Thanks to stuff.co.nz, I won a double pass to go see RNZB’s production of the classical ballet Giselle. The TeltstraClear Season travels across New Zealand over the next month, but of course I was lucky to see it at the home of the Royal NZ Ballet, the St. James Theatre in Wellington. Giselle is a two act ballet, set in the Rhineland Forest of the Middle Ages. Originally choreographed and composed in Paris, this contemporary production bases itself on Marius Petipa’s revival for the Imperial Russian Ballet in the late 19th century. The Wellington performances were superbly complimented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra, and the use of a live conducted score did add a thrill. Auckland and Dunedin shows will also be accompanied by a live orchestra.

Act I:

Set in a small harvesting village, a nobleman disguised as a peasant vies for the attention of a young peasant girl. A gamekeeper Hilarion, warns to stay away from the disguised nobleman, but she ignores his plea and falls in love with Albrecht. When Hilarion reveals the peasant’s true identity and his engagement to another, Giselle dies of a broken heart.

Act II:

Giselle’s grave lies in a forest glade haunted by Wilis- spirits of females jilted by their lovers before their wedding day who rise from the grave and seek revenge on men at night. Hilarion mourns at Giselle’s grave but is frightened away by the Wilis. Giselle is summoned by the Wilis, and when Albrecht searches the forest for her grave, her spirit appears before him. Giselle forgives a begging Albrecht, but the Wilis appear and sentence him to death. Giselle protects him and her ability to forgive frees her spirit from the command of the Wilis and she returns to her grave in peace.

Co-choreographed and produced by RNZB Creative Director Ethan Stiefel, the retired world renowned Principal Dancer of the American Ballet Theatre and Johan Kobborg, Principal Dancer of London’s Royal Ballet, audiences can expect quite the show. The part of Giselle is danced by Gillian Murphy, partner of Ethan Stiefel, while Qi Huan take the principal male role as Albrecht. The set design contrasted quite beautifully between the two acts. The first is a bright and cheerful village in Spring at the height of harvest, the young villagers dressed in simple attire. The majority of the drama is revealed in the first act, so there was a lot of theatrical movement and expressions, as well as dance. A lot of the group scenes have a folk-dancing feel to it, and I began to look forward to the solos and beautiful group pieces which I knew would feature heavily in the second Act.

We return with a second Act to a dark and spooky forest glade at night, a crooked grave lies to the left side of stage. Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis (danced by Abigail Boyle) appears and performs a summoning dance. The Wilis appear, and their dancing is made even more beautiful by the light illuminating their dresses and sheer shrouds, providing a dark and haunting contrast to the first Act.

Photo: Dominion Post Online.

Giselle and Albrecht perform stunning solo and partnered scenes, the dancing emoting a strong sense of the love the two characters have for one another, and the tragedy that they cannot be together. As the Wilis sentence Albrecht, and attempt to dance him to death, Huan gives an incredible performance, showcasing his strength and ability.

Royal NZ Ballet’s production of Giselle shows the real talent of the company and how lucky the dancers and audiences are to be able to work with and see world- renowned ballerinas such as Gillian Murphy. RNZB is also lucky to have a pool of very capable dancers to draw upon, and it is great to watch as the members of the company grow and develop. Of course, the behind the scenes crew such as set and costume departments have put together a world class touring production that is well worth heading along to.

Also, forget the programme booklet as the single souvenir of the show. For those who will miss out on seeing Giselle, RNZB has announced a collaboration with NZ Film Commission to produce a film on the production and performance, capturing the rehearsals, and of course the big nights. What a fantastic way to deliver Giselle and ballet to a much wider audience in a lasting way. In a time when the classical arts are feeling threatened to maintain audience numbers and economic development RNZB is really taking strides to remain contemporary and relevant, thanks to it’s successful behind the scenes reality series The Secret Lives of Dancers and now a companion film. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Tickets for performances across the remaining six city centres can be booked from the RNZB website here.

A Gala is designed to whip up interest for the later season, displaying the company roster to  advantage after a fund-minded dinner and before a congratulatory post-performance event. Entering the Frank Lloyd Wright auditorium, characterized everywhere without a center aisle, the front orchestra rows, some eight or so, were vacant, clearly meant for the audience paying $1000 for the privilege, $800 of which was to support a Ballet San Jose community-related activity.

Seated center orchestra, mid-way up, I found myself behind a massive head of white hair; after switching for the final work, a tall head inclined to move to the music, hazards of the no aisle seating arrangement.  The program itself featured an obviously staged photo by Quinn Wharton, dominated by a brunette in a short strapless dress, one knee up on a black backed chair.Its purpose seemed to convey patroness in front of the dancers, two men and a dancer in tutu in broad fourth position, one man on the left stripped to the waist, apparently warming up using scenery for his  barre and the street clothed male to the right, leaping while holding on to a stick.

However, The Nutcracker’s Waltz of the Flowers opened the program featuring eight couples, the women’s knee-length costumes in shades of peach and with paniers, the men sporting green tights with grey vests, flowers and their stems.  This was the first view of Karen Gabay’s take on the holiday staple which will be premiered fully in December.  While the Waltz lacked the focus of a central couple, Gabay’s use of symmetry, varying groups of four to eight and several grand circles, both as couples and men versus women, proved easy on the eyes and agreeable to the mood.  Rita Felciano remarked, “After all, the waltz has always been a couple dance.”

Sir Frederick Ashton’s creation to Jules Massenet’s “Meditation from Thais,” followed with its quasi-oriental garment design by Sir Anthony Dowell,  original male partner to Dame Antoinette Sibley’s Thais.  Subsequent performers have had a hard time matching their supple classicism or conveying that the courtesan Thais is a projection of the Monk’s imagination.  It’s a hard business being very physical, a priest, in his imagination lusting for  the courtesan while pretending she should lead a celibate life in the desert.

This tricky pas de deux, staged by Bruce Sansom, former Royal Ballet principal, was interpreted by Rudy Candia and Alexsandra Meijer with Rachel Lee as violinist.  Meijer’s elegant legs,  displayed to advantage,  were given support by Candia, but ease was missing, Meijer  more austere than evanescent.

From late nineteenth century romanticism Edward Stierle’s athletic, heavily emotional solo from the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Requiem was an explosive contrast.  Created by Stierle as he was dying from AIDS, Lacrymosa challenged Joshua Seibel to start and end with shoulder stands, legs stretched towards the ceiling.  In between, turns, tumbles and other gymnastic skills were required.  I had seen Brooklyn Mack dance it to recorded music at the Jackson Competition in 2010 in tribute to Stierle, but here both sides of the stage apron were filled with The Golden Gate Boys Choir Master Singers dressed in white middies with red ties and skirts who supported soprano Kristin Clayton.  It’s great to employ the community but the contrast jarred.

To see Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun make her Ballet San Jose debut dancing to Bach in Stanton Welch’s ballet Clear was sheer pleasure. With  Jeremy Kovitch, the two echoed the adagio in this work highly influenced by 9/11.  Pipit-Suksun’s musical line, thorough has an unforced finish.  Her emotional presence within the strict demands of this Western classical form flows beyond its boundaries.  In this elegiac pas de deux Pipit-Suksun delivered quiet consolation; later she was pert ensemble  accent  in  Stars and Stripes.  I’m glad  she is still dancing  to Bay Area audiences.

Junna Ige and Maykel Solas danced in white for the Act III pas de deux from Don Quixote. Had they been backed by a set, the costumes would have been fine; as stand alone bravura it needs more flash in the attire.  They are a nicely matched, charming  pair.  In well-schooled Japanese style,  Ige eschews  accent to her finishes. Demure,  a little emphasis is in order, along with consistency in the working foot in fouettes; they tended to become flaccid after the initial thrust.  Solas was, as always, consistent.

Dalia Rawson arranged a complicated mixture of the Ballet San Jose students to Tchaikovsky’s polonaise finale,  a visual announcement of enrollment and instruction,  the new school direction and training based on the American Ballet Theatre curriculum. There was definitely a lot to be seen from tots to teenagers, beginners to apprentice-worthy adolescents.  She used lines, circles, entrances and exits to accomplish the presentation. The audience just loved it, cheering as it did through most of the evening.

Balanchine’s Fifth Campaign from Stars and Stripes brought the full company on stage, if giving Ramon Moreno, Maria Jacobs-Yu and Karen Gabay cameo appearances.  Usually an evening’s ending work, it still was infectious.

The late Clark Tippet’s Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 provided the evening’s finale, allowing four couples solo variations with eight couples as support  Tippet attempted to differentiate the various themes, a little puckish and flirtation by Mirai Noda and Ramon Moreno, sparkle by Junna Ige and Maykel Solas.  Strong assertion by Amy Marie Briones and Maximo Califano demonstrated that Briones’ attack and flair is definite stimulus to Califano.  Alexsandra Meijer and Jeremy Kovitch were paired for the adagio. Meijer’s admirable line got blocked somewhere in  shoulder and head, individual interpretation at  odds with Rachel Lee’s violin passage.

For a first Gala, Ballet San Jose displayed competence;  it remains committed to pleasing an audience.  One awaits Karen Gabay’s Nutcracker and  2013 to assess  its new trajectory.

i love dance.  notice i stated “i love dance” and not “i love to dance.”  the thing is, i appreciate and admire the art form of dance above all others, but i also recognize my very limited ability to actually dance.

one halloween, my mother made me the best costume imaginable: pink leotard, white tights, and a homemade pink tutu.  now, at ten-years old and 5’8” tall, i’m sure i looked ridiculous in this getup, but on october 31, 1992, i was surely destined for the new york city ballet.  unfortunately, i’ve never taken a dance class in my life and have not one ounce of natural talent; therefore, my dreams of becoming a professional dancer didn’t last long.  however, i never let go of my fascination with not just ballet, but tap, jazz, african, and modern dance.

before you ask, no, this isn’t a story about shattered childhood dreams.  i’ll save that narrative for a therapist.  instead, i recognize that my love for the arts wasn’t nurtured for reasons beyond my control.  there were extremely limited opportunities for black girls to study dance in polk county, florida in the 80s and early 90s.  in fact, there was only one black student at the dance studio in my small town, largely because working-class black girls like myself couldn’t afford the fees. also, the curriculum lacked any type of cultural relevance.

so what about little black girls who want to be ballerinas in 2012? ballet remains a notoriously lily white and racially prejudicial art form.  groundbreaking black ballerina misty copeland (shown above) speaks about the racism she’s experienced as the first black woman to serve as soloist for the american ballet theatre.  i watched her videos with tears in my eyes.

austin’s china smith and her dance studio ballet afrique are opening ballet to a wider demographic.  her studio mixes ballet and traditional african dance, working to demolish the presiding belief that only white girls from the well-to-do side of town deserve to train as classical dancers.  ballet afrique could very well be training the next tiger woods or venus and serena williams of dance.    check out the video of the adult company’s tribute to four women by nina simone.  bravo to brown skin, natural hair, and thick silhouettes.

Image: the Australian Ballet.

With grace and poise, The Australian Ballet  leaps into its 50th year. To celebrate the anniversary with equally as much style, they threw a birthday gala on Saturday 3rd November, featuring international guests including the American Ballet Theatre, Stuttgart Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, National Ballet of China and the Tokyo Ballet. From classical pieces such as Giselle, Swan Lake and the wedding pas de deux from Don Quixote to 39 year old English choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, this gala showcases ballet at its best. Embedded in our history, ballet will continue to delight Australian’s for generations to come.

The gala performance on Saturday 3rd November will be streamed live by ABC TV to various sites around the country.

Images: Vogue Australia, November 2012 issue. Photographs by Will Davidson.

For the Australian Ballet’s 2013 Season click here.

Lei xx

Solange accessorized with Lorraine Schwartz gold diamond rosecut drop earrings, gold diamond bracelets and gold diamond rosecut ring, three OFIRA gold diamond ball bands, and a black Diane von Furstenberg clutch. She finished the look with a pair of Dolce & Gabbana Embellished brocade Mary Jane pumps encrusted with crystals, faux pearls and gilded leaf details.

I am so glad that she decided to go with a modified version of the dress and get rid of the puffy sleeves. The sleeves made the dress look too much like a costume. She made the shoes come to life because I would have never thought twice about buying those shoes because I don’t like the shape of them. They look better on her feet. Lovin’ the smoky grey/blue eyeshadow, red lip, and sleek hairdo. This look is modified perfection.

Images via: Zimbio

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Here a link to my review for DanceTabs:

And here’s an excerpt:

“Wisely, Ratmansky hasn’t given Cornejo a partner, the better to show off the musicality of his dancing, the stretch of his legs in the air, the way his body reveals the shifts in dynamics and the melodic line. In the final movement Ratmansky pushes him even further: Cornejo seems to be moving faster than is humanly possible. If it doesn’t kill him, it will place him on the Mount Olympus of male bravura.”

Moiseyev Dance Company in “Suite of Moldavian Dances.” Photograph by E.Masalkov

The Fall For Dance festival, an annual fixture at New York City Center since 2004, is one of the staples of the city’s arts calendar. This year’s iteration was expanded from 10 evenings to 12, and featured an incredibly varied lineup of companies from around the world in five distinct programs. Fare ranged from the crowd-pleasing to the avant-garde: there was ballet, tap, hula, and flamenco, performed by both soloists and ensembles numbering in the dozens. Ticket prices this year climbed from $12 to $15, but for the frugal dance enthusiast, the festival remains the best deal in town.

One of the great thrills of Fall for Dance is that the performances I enjoy always come as a surprise. Last year, most of my favorite pieces happened to be choreographed by American or British artists. This year I was mostly drawn to pieces by women. Most of my favorites also had the luxury of live musical accompaniment. Below — listed in the order they were performed — are my five favorite performances of Fall for Dance 2012.

Juilliard Dance in Pam Tanowitz’s Fortune

Students of the Juiliard School in “Fortune.” Photograph by Rosalie O’Connor

The dance students of the Juilliard School have proven time and again that they are as talented as any professional company, but they looked even stronger than usual in Pam Tanowitz’s Fortune, which opened Program 2. The technically demanding piece was choreographed on 21 students — all in their fourth year at Juilliard — last autumn; it explodes with surprises. Dressed in sherbet-colored costumes, the dancers struck classical poses and held difficult one-legged balances that recalled the choreography of Merce Cunningham, while four Juilliard musicians played a challenging, mysterious score by Charles Wuorinen. Balletic movements broke suddenly into ape-like knuckle-dragging or boxing poses. Some partnering was abstract, while other passages resembled ballroom dancing. Duets and solos took place concurrently in different parts of the stage and unfolded at different speeds, warping one’s sense of time. It was a visual feast, and one that was impossible to digest after just one viewing. I immediately wanted to see it again.

American Ballet Theatre in Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite

American Ballet Theatre’s Luciana Paris and Herman Cornejo in “Sinatra Suite.” Photograph by Rosalie O’Connor.

While I far prefer Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs to her Sinatra Suite, there’s still plenty to enjoy in the condensed version, which was beautifully danced in Program 2 by Herman Cornejo and Luciana Paris of American Ballet Theatre. The work’s four clever duets, all set to well-known songs by Frank Sinatra, show a couple in various states: ecstasy, intimacy, and inebriation. Dramatic back bends and abrupt changes of direction abound. My favorite passage is usually the tumultuous “That’s Life” pas de deux, in which the pair take turns shoving each other angrily and the man, chewing gum nonchalantly, drags his partner unceremoniously across the floor.  In this performance, however, the highlight was Cornejo’s tender solo to “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” It’s not often that Cornejo, who is often cast in spitfire roles, has an opportunity to show his romantic side. Watching his elegant phrasing and light touch, I wondered why.

Moiseyev Dance Company, Moiseyev’s Classics

Moiseyev Dance Company in “Tatarochka.” Photograph by E.Masalkov

Fall for Dance hit its peak when the Moiseyev Dance Company capped Program 3 with a suite of four short character dances, all of which were superb and rightfully brought down the house. The Russian folk ensemble was founded in 1937 by Igor Moiseyev and has more recently enjoyed great success touring the West, but their last Manhattan season was 12 years ago. May they return much sooner next time.  The company’s first piece was “Dance of Malmyk,” a charming all-male trio in which Ramil Mekhdiev twitched like a wind-up toy while Roman Ivashchenko and Yury Chernyshkov boldly stomped, skipped, and strutted around him in large symmetrical patterns. In the Tartar dance “Tatarotchka,” Olga Volina warmed up the stage with gleeful kicks and forward and backward sprints before Oleg Chernasov and Evgeny Masalkov charged in to make a flirtatious trio. Impeccable precision and fiery attack were on full display in “Suite of Moldavian Dances,” the rollicking finale for the entire company.  When the dancers waved farewell as the curtain came down, I had to wipe the tears from my eyes, overwhelmed by such joyful dancing.

Shantala Shivalingappa, Shiva Ganga

Shantala Shivalingappa. Photograph by C.P.Satyajit

The other superb performance from abroad was the celebrated Kuchipudi dancer Shantala Shivalingappa’s Shiva Ganga, which opened Program 4. The solo depicted both Shiva (the Hindu god of destruction) and Ganga (the goddess who personifies the river Ganges). While four seated musicians played and sang at stage right, Shivalingappa — channeling Shiva’s masculine energy — held an assortment of statuesque poses and knelt deeply on the floor, throwing her torso back and forth dramatically. In the second half, as the feminine Ganga, she created a mesmerizing illusion of water, allowing movement to begin in her wrists and ripple up the arm and down to the fingertips, and finished the solo by circling the stage twice in rapid-fire, low-to-the-ground turns. This final tour de force elicited gasps from the audience, but in general Shiva Ganga was one of the festival’s more subtle performances, revealing Shivalingappa’s greatest gifts to be her complete clarity of movement and physical control.

Jodi Melnick, Solo, Re(Deluxe) Version

Jodi Melnick in “Solo, Deluxe Version.” Photograph by Alex Escalante

Jodi Melnick’s performance in Program 4 was, like Shivalingappa’s on the same evening, accompanied by four live musicians, but here they comprised a rock group. The musicians — Steven Reker and People Get Ready — often crawled over each other on their makeshift bandstand to trade instruments and move electrical cords. Meanwhile, Melnick, wearing a reflective silver hooded sweatshirt, introduced her piece with a solo passage that was both mechanical and relaxed, walking and kicking, throwing her arms straight up and out, as if following an exercise routine, pausing occasionally to run a hand through her red hair. When three other dancers materialized, they established a movement vocabulary that was casually pedestrian, with hints of classicism: an arm was held curved overhead but the body slouched while doing it. One occasionally felt like a voyeur watching the performers dance, particularly when the two women stared forward intensely as though facing a mirror. The piece was too long and uneven, at times boring, but at its heart utterly mesmerizing.

Did you attend Fall for Dance 2012? Do you agree or disagree with my selections? Share your thoughts by commenting.

 ”What I admire about New York City Ballet dancers is their rhythmic complexity. You can see all shades of rhythm in their bodies. With Russians, what you see is a melodic thread in their dancing, an upper-body expressiveness that brings out another side of the work. In ABT, the dancers have a bit of both. It’s good. I can play with that. - Alexei Ratmansky

Alexei Ratmansky with Diana Vishneva                                             © Gene Schiavone

“O que eu admiro nos bailarinos do New York City Ballet é a complexidade rítmica deles. Você pode ver todos os tons de ritmo em seus corpos. Com os russos, o que se vê é uma linha melódica em suas danças, uma expressividade da parte superior do corpo que traz o outro lado do trabalho. No ABT, os balarinos têm um pouco dos dois. Isso é bom. Posso brincar”. - Alexei Ratmansky

© Gene Schiavone