Ballet

Sometimes when I watch a ballet, something happens. 

Set, costume, character, and story begin to dissolve. In place of those things, something else begins to appear: a bodily flowing of syntax as such, a wordless gesturing of semantics as such.

It's like staring into a moving x-ray of embodied language. It's like staring into a mystical kaleidoscope of symbolic speaking.

That dissolving and appearing comes and goes, comes and goes. It's a fickle state of mind and won't stick. It's an episodic abstract delirium. 

And other times when I watch a ballet, I just watch the ballet.

I suppose this explains...

...why the Bolshoi Ballet is incomparable, why a natural and cultural commitment to the art of dance would lead to graceful perfection:

Russian ballet class during the war

"When Art Danced with Music"

An exhibition on the Ballets Russes at the National Gallery.

NY Times article

NPR article

Nijinsky

Prokofiev's THE STONE FLOWER

1960 excerpt

1946 film poster

The Bolshoi!

Swan Lake

The Rite of Spring

Here's Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Ballet:




I found this on a cool blog:  Jessica Duchen's Classical Music & Ballet Blog

Sufi Dance

Those Gurdjieff women back then were persuaded, strange, and intense.

THE NUTCRACKER (full-length)

BBC Royal Opera House

Ballet Adagio

Ballet Adagio by Norman McLaren, National Film Board of Canada

a colorful and delightful mazurka!

grace and beauty...

...and something else, in the speechless regions of the heart.

Tamara Karsavina -- Prima Ballerina

Natalia Osipova at 17, Esmeralda variation

Natalia Osipova

I don't know much about ballet. I know I like to watch it. I like to think I have an instinctive knack for recognizing quality when I see, hear, or read it. At least it makes me feel good to think that.

Although I'm ignorant about the technical things an expert would notice, Natalia Osipova strikes me as a phenomenal talent. To me, her dancing seems graceful, dynamic, expressive. Her physical strength is amazing.

The wonder of human presence is implicit for me in her performance of kinetic, gestural art.

I read where she is no longer with the Bolshoi Ballet. She is now with the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg.