Beauty and the Beast

First performed in its current production in Leeds, December 2011, and now on tour throughout the UK this October and November, Northern Ballet's Beauty and the Beast, choreographed by artistic director David Nixon.

In the course of the performance at Theatre Royale, Norwich, there was a giant hologram, full stage projections, on stage explosions, a judicious use of strobe lighting and bungee cords, seven different stage settings and seventeen scene changes in total. No mean achievement for a company which is currently suffering the effects of a draconian  25% funding cut.  

Artistic director David Nixon became interested in choreography when at the National Ballet School of Canada while still a dancer. His interest became more serious when he took over his first company, stating-

'I discovered that my work was pivotal in developing dancers’ potential and that I had an ability to tell stories through dance'. 

David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet since 2001. He's created new versions of Madame Butterfly, Swan Lake, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Peter Pan and The Three Musketeers. A highlight of his choreographic career is his innovative Dracula (1999). He received an OBE in the 2010 New Year Honours for his services to Ballet and his latest work, Cleopatra, was given it's world premiere in  Leeds in February 2011. 

The skeletal framework of Nixon's stylish interpretation of the archetypal story of the opposites, of outer beauty and inner moral worth, is the music of several French romantic composers. Setting the atmosphere firmly in the world of the daimonic and fairy-tale, the ballet opened with the Northern Ballet Sinfonia's lively rendering of Saint-Saen's Danse Macabre. 

Highlights of the evening included a tender pas de deux by the principal dancer's (Martha Leebolt and Giuliano Contadini) to the music of Debussy's Clair de Lune and a dream sequence pas de trois, in which Beauty and the Prince dance a rapturous love duet while the Beast despairingly gambols around them in torment. It was also nice to hear a zestful extract from Glazunov's The Seasons, a sprightly invitation to the dance matched by a riot of colour in costume change. 

Interspersed throughout the romantic fantasy there was humour, in particular from Beauty's two vain shopaholic sisters and most amusingly from the Beast's ape-like servants. The  prop link between a hand-held white rose and a giant-scale white rose in which Beauty slept as a guest of the Beast (photo above) was neat too.

Personally, I felt the last movement of Debussy's La Mer seemed a little too powerful and out of synch emotionally with the ballet's narrative, however, the love-story was well-served returning to the music of the composer opening the ballet; the celebrated pomp and grandeur of the final movement of Saint-Saens Organ Symphony was highly effective accompaniment to the climax and apotheosis of the fairy-tale ballet. The company of dancers received rapturous applause from an appreciative audience which seemed to enjoy the acrobatic talents of the Beast slightly more than Beauty's charms, for he received the louder applause at the curtain-call.

The story of Beauty and the Beast has inspired various artists since it's first recorded appearance in the 18th century. Earlier last century, the French multi-genre artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) made a film based upon what is, in essence, an utterly French tale of love, beauty and deception, La Bete et La Belle (1946). The American composer Philip Glass in turn, wrote an opera in 1994 based on Cocteau's film, which, closely following each scene, is effectively a new soundtrack for Cocteau's masterpiece.  

First performed in 1997, it's beginning to look as if Beauty and the Beast is establishing itself firmly in the ballet repertoire. I certainly hope so as David Nixon's stunning interpretation deserves preserving in the ephemeral world of modern dance.

Links - Northern Ballet

The Lovesick Man

Saturnine blues, this time in the form of an early work by the German artist George Grosz's The Lovesick Man (circa 1916),  a painting which reflects dominant themes in Grosz's art - human nature and individual weaknesses, themes which have lost little relevance today.

George Grosz (1893-1959) was born in Berlin and grew up during the prelude to World War I (1914-1818).  In protest against the nationalist fervour and rabid anti-British sentiment vocalized on Berlin’s streets in the build-up to war, Grosz and fellow artist Jon Herzefelde (1891-1968) provocatively changed their names to an Anglicized form of spelling and pronunciation. Incidentally, there's a stylistic affinity between the pioneering photo-montage developed by John Herzefelde for political propaganda, one or two examples of which I've discussed before and the surreal humour of Terry Gilliam (b. 1940) the creator of cut-out, animated montages which were an integral part of the British TV series Monty Python's flying Circus (1969-71). 

In his tense and unsettling portrait of a lovesick young man, George Grosz alludes to the Ursprung tragic hero of German romanticism, Werther, a character created by Johann Goethe in his Der Leidenschaft der Junge Werther (1774) known in English as The Sorrows of Young Werther. 

In Goethe's phenomenally popular novella of the day, the sensitive and romantic hero Werther is unable to come to terms with the fact that his sweetheart has married another and that his love can never be consummated. He borrows a pair of pistols, and after writing a confessional letter and drinking a bottle of port, shoots himself. Goethe’s semi-autobiographical tale of unrequited love was accused of  encouraging copycat acts throughout Germany, and of making a cult of suicide, accusations which the author strongly denied. 

It's been suggested that the spate of suicides which occurred in Germany following the publication of Goethe's Werther were in fact the result of an increased awareness of educated individuals of the inflexibility of bureaucratic institutions in Germany; this extreme frustration with the deeply-rooted conservatism of German society, effectively prevented the possibility of following  in France's revolutionary path.

Although differing in artistic objective Grosz's symbolism in The Lovesick Man differs little from that of the medieval tradition of Vanitas motifs. In Grosz's early painting not only can a near palpable red heart be seen, but also a revolver in the breast-pocket of the sitter. The empty room with a vacated table and chairs heightens the solitary sitter's loneliness. On his table there's the indulgences of a pipe and cigarettes along with a bottle, probably of alcohol. There's also paper and a pen on his table, suggestive that a confessional, or urgent communication is to be made. The anchor tattooed on his head hints of sinking or wallowing in unloved despair. The bones in the bottom right corner and fish bones symbolically allude to death. In the far background beside a blood-red sickle moon, the rib-cage of a skeleton can be seen. The theme of dissipation and death is developed further with a plant at the top corner which lacks either leaves or flowers. The gun placed next to the sitter's visible heart has strong symbolic associations, hinting that either suicide or a crime of passion is about to be committed.  

Wrapped up in self-absorbed gloom Grosz's anti-romantic hero is capable of senseless acts. The message of Grosz's Marxist morality art- lesson seems to be - self-centred individuals who care only for their own happiness condemn themselves to a solitary madness; they do so at the expense of the well-being of society in general.

George Grosz witnessed the return of the defeated nation's troops to civilian life, the near breakdown of moral order and the subsequent violent conflict between the extreme left and right-wing in street fighting in post-war Berlin. The trauma of hyper-inflation added fuel to the social problems of crime, prostitution, drugs and the black market, endemic on Berlin's streets following World War I.

In January 1919 he was arrested but escaped imprisonment by producing fake identification documents which he'd forged himself. He joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the same year; however, unlike the Russian communist revolution of 1917, the German communist revolution of 1919 failed, due to various factors too complex to discuss here, not least, the assassination of Communist party leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg in January 1919.

In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army and fined 300 German Marks. The court also ordered his satire on German society Gott mit uns (God with us) to be destroyed. Although Grosz left the KPD in 1922 he subsequently spent five months in Russia, meeting Lenin and Trotsky.

By 1924 economic and social stability in the newly established Weimar Republic allowed the opportunity for the creation of radical new art - Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927), Hermann Hesse’s novel of crisis and re-integration of identity, Steppenwolf (1927) the new music of Jazz and Kurt Weill spring to mind. The decadent, pleasure-loving years of the Weimar era and the rise of fascism are also the setting of Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) which was later was adapted as the film Cabaret (1972).

By 1920 George Grosz had mastered his artistic powers to make powerful statements on the social instability and chaos of post-war Berlin. His art gives a glimpse into a society sharply polarized between rich and poor, and of a Berlin resembling a Dante-like inferno where individuals of varying degrees of power and corruption enact Berlin's social maelstrom on the streets of the metropolis.

Grosz's low opinion of humanity is epitomised in the title of his 1946 autobiography A little Yes and a big No which he wrote once a naturalized American citizen. In a salutary lesson of how serious economic and social upheaval can affect the qualities of empathy with others and encourage selfish behaviour, the embryonic origins of fascism no less, he describes Berlin after World War I- 

"Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and the Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a weak thing, scarcely perceptible. … It was a completely negative world, topped with colourful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany before the onset of the new barbarism."  

Tragically, although in 1954 Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts he continued to be home-sick and returned to Berlin, where he died in 1959 in an alcohol-related accident.

Wiki-Link - George Grosz

Osvaldo Golijov

Earlier this year I was introduced, courtesy of a friend, to the music of Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960). The music of Golijov, who was born and grew up in Argentinia of East European and Judaic descent, draws upon a wide spectrum including experimental and electronic, Jazz and Pop, Klezmer music, the Tango and the folk traditions of World music. In addition to these varied musical influences Golijov has been well-qualified to absorbing world-wide music languages in his career. He moved from Argentina to Israel in 1983 to study music at the Rubin Academy at Jerusalem. In 1986  he relocated to America where he has taught music at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts since 1991.  

The music-making of the Latin-American world, the city of Jerusalem and medieval Spain are of special inspirational value to Golijov. Each of these locations were once seminal places at the crossroads of overlapping cultures, where Christian, Muslim and Jew once peacefully co-existed.

I was probably in a highly-charged emotional state last winter anyway when first hearing the electrifying incantation by singer Dawn Upshaw which opens Ayre (2004). Golijov's song-cycle was influenced by a creative urge to create a companion work to Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs (1964) which draws upon traditional melodies from America, Armenia, Sicily, Genoa, Sardinia, the Auvergne and Azerbaijan. Golijov’s song cycle is no less eclectic and diverse than Berio's. It features the music of southern Spain and the intermingling of Christian, Arab and Jewish cultures with texts from the Sephardic, Arabic, Hebrew and Sardinian languages.

The influence of Berio’s folk-song cycle is most evident in the gentle and traditional Sephardic song which follows the incandescent opening. The next song Tancas serradas a muru in stark contrast is defiant and aggressive, near punk and urban rap-like in style, comes as a complete shock to those who imagine the performing persona of classically-trained singer Dawn Upshaw to be confined to the demure. Her reciting of Be a string, water, to my guitar a calm, reflective, unaccompanied poem is insightful, while the song Yah , annah emtza’cha, aurally and vividly depicts the era of medieval Spain in which Muslim, Jewish and Christian cultures once lived harmoniously. Golijov explains why Medieval Spain and the era of peaceful inter-relationship of religious faiths is close to his heart when commenting upon his song-cycle-

'With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian. How connected these cultures are and how terrible it is when they don’t understand each. The grief that we are living in the world today has already happened for centuries but somehow harmony was possible between these civilizations’

The song-cycle Ayre is one of several Golijov compositions written specifically with the qualities and interpretative insight of the mezzo-soprano Dawn Upshaw and her gorgeous singing voice in mind. The subject of the strengths and weaknesses of composers writing with specific voices in mind may well re-surface in musical discussion next year when the centenary of the British composer Benjamin Britten (b.Lowestoft 1913) occurs. Britten wrote many song-cycles and opera parts specifically with the voice of his longtime partner the tenor Peter Pear in mind. Whether or not vocal works written for one specific voice in performance and interpretation can be completely replicated by another, remains an open question. 

Dawn Upshaw’s recording of the song-cycle Ayre concludes evoking Greek mythology with the tale of Ariadne in the labyrinth, a tense, mysterious and coiling musical theme which highlights the instrumental playing of the chamber ensemble, the Andalucian Dogs, as it slowly fades into silence.  Golijov’s final song in the cycle perfectly highlights the cross-fertilization of  musical cultures within the Mediterranean basin far better than words ever can. Golijov himself spoke of the creative motivation of composing his song-cycle-

The idea is to create a forest and for Dawn to walk in it. There is no real sense of ‘form’ –in the sense of Beethovian development – but rather lots of detours and discoveries’.

The title alone of the opera Ainadamar (Arabic: Fountain of Tears) appealed to me as the next work by Golijov work worth hearing. The opera’s title alludes to an ancient well near Granada in Spain where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by Spanish Fascists in August 1936. First performed at the Tanglewood Festival in August 2003 Ainadamar is primarily based upon traditional Spanish music, in particular the Flamenco style.  Once more the hypnotic voice of Dawn Upshaw is featured, this time performing as Margarita Xirgu,  a Catalan tragedian and Lorca's lover and muse, who collaborated with him on several of his plays. Without wanting to post spoilers there's a very startling moment in Golijov's opera about Garcia Lorca’s murder. In recent times the terror and trauma of the Spanish civil war is the backdrop for film-director Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) a harrowing account of an episode in the Spanish civil war interlinked with a fantasy world of magical realism.

Kepler and Sir Thomas Browne

There are a surprising number of hitherto undetected connections between the German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).

Kepler’s life, like Browne’s, spanned a watershed in scientific thought. Kepler not only advocated  rational inductive science and the astronomical discoveries of Galileo but also augmented his scientific enquiries with Neoplatonic and Pythagorean ideas. Kepler’s astronomical discoveries were as much structured upon precise mathematical calculation as deeply held theological beliefs and God-given revelation; his scientific perspective, not unlike Browne’s own scientific perspective a full half century later, were an admixture of Christian awe of the Creation, precise mathematical analysis and Platonic and Pythagorean concepts of the ancient Greek world.

Listed as once in Sir Thomas Browne’s library is an edition of Kepler’s first published book, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Prague 1596) [1]. Kepler's ‘Mysteries of the Cosmos’ is the direct result of a vision the young mathematician experienced in which he believed God’s geometrical plan of the universe had been revealed to him. In his mystical revelation Kepler discovered the geometric solids as first described by Plato, the tetrahedron (4 sided) cube (6 sided) octahedron (8 sided) dodecahedron (12 sided) and icosahedron (20 sided) could each be uniquely represented by spherical orbs; each solid nesting within and encased in a sphere, would in total produce six layers, corresponding to the six known planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. By ordering the Platonic solids in their correct numerical sequence Kepler also discovered  that the spheres could be placed at intervals which corresponded to his own calculations of the relative size of each planet’s path, as each planet circled the Sun.

                                                    

Kepler’s great patron was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552 -1612). During his long reign Rudolph II gathered at his relocated court at Prague, some of the most remarkable figures in the world of art and science. He was a generous patron to artists of the Mannerist school such as Archimboldo, Bartholomeus Spranger and Adrian de Vries, and to the astronomers Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Indeed, Rudolph II's pairing of the observational genius of the Dane Tycho Brahe to the mathematical gifts of Kepler has been considered his major contribution towards the advancement of astronomy.

Kepler’s residence at the court of the Holy Roman emperor from 1600 to 1612 resulted in his naming and dedicating his major work of scientific notation of planetary motion, the Rudulphine Tables, to Emperor Rudolph. Other visitors to the court of the melancholic, alchemy-loving Emperor and connoisseur of the arts include the Elizabethan mathematician and major figure of esotericism, John Dee (1527 -1608)  and the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston.  

The division between astrology and astronomy in Kepler’s day was quite blurred and not as sharply delineated as nowadays. Throughout his life Kepler supplemented his income by regularly publishing calendars which predicted future events from astrology. For the year 1595 he prophesied a particularly cold winter, an attack by the Turks from the south and a peasant uprising: all of which occurred.

Norwich 1912 Floods

The summer of 2012 in England has been a bit of a wash-out, not just the wettest ever April to June since records began in 1910,  but in fact the wettest summer for over one hundred years.  However, no  matter how dismal this summer's been, no loss of life has occurred from the weather, unlike events in Norwich a century ago. 

After 7 inches of rain fell over several days in late August 1912, the river Wensum which flows through the City finally burst its banks, resulting in floods radiating over a 40 mile area. It's estimated that the rain fell at the rate of one inch of water an hour and in total four people lost their lives. Those who remained in their homes had food and other supplies delivered to them by boat or horse and cart. The city's rail-links to the outside world were  temporarily blocked by flood-water, fallen trees and debris.

On August 31, Henry John Copeman, Lord Mayor of Norwich at the time, wrote to all the nation's leading newspapers - “Following a rainfall unprecedented in the records of the Meteorological Office, whole streets in the low-lying part of the city have been flooded, houses rendered desolate, the furniture and bedding destroyed, and their occupants homeless and resourceless".

But as ever, such a disaster united people and brought out the best in them. Members of the Royal Family donated £300 and the King and Queen of Norway gave £21, but the biggest donation came from the local industrial entrepreneur J. J Colman who donated £1,000,  an enormous amount of money a century ago. The total amount of money given to the people of Norwich came to £24,579 14s 7d. A report outlining how every penny was spent was duly published.

Nowadays we tend to attribute natural disasters to climate change, but in fact natural disasters, in particular flooding in this region, have occurred throughout history. The worst case being the 1953 North Sea floods, which, due to a fatal combination of winds, atmospheric pressure and high tides, affected not only East Anglia, but also Scotland and Holland, resulting in the loss of over 80 lives on the North-West Norfolk coast alone. The 1953 floods claimed over 2,500 lives, the low-lying Netherlands being by far the worst affected nation. 

Wiki-Link - 1953 floods