Artsy Jul 26, 2010 at 8:14 pm

Comments

1
Hey Andrew - I'm glad to see someone has covered the Uprising performance. I think it is a pretty sweet event taking place in PDX. Dude, you're going to hate me for saying this but you might want to take a look at a couple typos in the first couple paragraphs. See "-the dancers feed of* that sort of energy" *off. And then "-Uprising wasn't stuffy. But it was* radical either" *wasn't? Sorry to be that guy. Still liked the post!
2
whoops. thanks. and fixed.
3
Hey, Andrew - I got to meet the Director of the OBT last fall, and he answered some of the questions in your bullet points. Have you ever seen someone in martial arts do kata? Like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdFUcUzcORw

Turns out ballet is a lot like that. There's a set of 'official' moves, and a 'correct' way to do each one. So if you're doing a high kick, it has to be one of the five 'official' kinds of high kicks, and the fingers on your left hand should be pointed like *this* while you do it, while your torso is twisted *this* much (but not *that* much!) and your leading foot flexed like *this* and so on...

Now set that to music, and choreograph it with a lot of other people, and you have ballet.

Hope someone with better knowledge pipes up, here, but I don't think there's much chance for chaos in ballet. You might fake chaos by having a lot of dancers moving really fast , but if they abandon the forms and starts doing whatever they feel like, it's no longer ballet and has devolved into mere interpretive dance.

Please wait...

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