The French Journal

Weekend with the NYT: Sarko & the Holocaust, Orpheus and Eurydice, Rivette, and the Old Boys Club, French division

Nothing like a long weekend to give you the opportunity to read stories from The New York Times:

• A Sarkozy Holocaust education strategy. M. le Président offered a plan whereby ten-year-olds at French schools will be assigned the name of a young Holocaust victim for them to learn about, an attempt to make sure the horrible event is never forgotten. The reaction has been negative, with critics saying that the tactic is too traumatic for this age group or that the president's action injects (once again) uncomfortable religious overtones into policy. Sarkozy has Jewish ancestry, although he is Catholic himself (which, with two divorces and three marriages, is an interesting place to be).
• A dance masterpiece at the Paris Opera Ballet. There's an ecstatic review of a production of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice at the Paris Opera Ballet, choreographed by Pina Bausch. The dance is performed with a dual cast of dancers and singers: "...the dancers look amazingly at home with (Bausch's) angular physical vocabulary and austere emotional terrain. With the magnificent musicians, they offer complete submission to their material, and to us, the sublime."
• The French Business elite. A long, fascinating story looks at the leaders of French business and their closed ranks.
• A profile of Jacques Rivette.  The release of a new film, Ne touchez pas la hache (literally, "Don't Touch the Axe," but in the U.S. it's called The Duchess of Langeais) offers a reason to profile New Wave legend Jacques Rivette.

"His films, like Céline and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and Va Savoir, traffic in the spectral and the ineffable. Their plots overflow with paranoid conspiracies and secret codes. The Paris of his movies is a life-size board game, a labyrinth of signs. Everything is connected, or, perhaps more alarming, nothing is. His pet themes can seem dauntingly abstract: the allure of the theater, the line between acting and being, the enigmatic process of artistic creation, the curious means by which fictions take their shapes or take on lives of their own."

Tecktonik

Over at The Christian Science Monitor, of all places, there's a story about Tecktonik, the dance style that started in the streets of Paris and is now sweeping across Europe (to use a hackneyed phrase). "At first glance it looks tribal or even charismatic – arms flail, legs juke." All to the beat of electronic music. To be honest, I am reminded of some of my old disco moves, although I couldn't attempt them now without putting my doctor on alert. What makes this all seem different is that you can view the best practitioners on YouTube in videos like the one that heads this post. For lots more, including music playlists, go over to Teck-Addict.

The NYT dances in Paris

The New York Times sent its dance critic, Alexander Macauley, to Paris last week, and he went crazy, supplying four stories about la danse.

• The Nutcracker. Parisians are suceptible to this seasonal affliction as much as anyone. Macauley compares the Paris Opera's production, based on choreography by Rudolf Nureyev, with one in London. Not a fan of Nureyev's interpretation, he states that, "His Paris dances look less like choreography than like workouts, seeming to tell dancers, 'Do these so that you too can keep up with dancers more youthful and gifted than you.'"
• Promising students. Macauley also attended an exhibition put on by the students being trained at the Opera, the most revered ballet school in France. His verdict: "The male dancers, doing double air turns to both right and left as few professionals are seen to do, looked especially full of talent...But it is in the female style, especially in the second division taught by Francesca Zumbo, where you most sense an irreducibly French style of dance: crisp, focused, fragrant."
• Paquita. The Opera's revival of this Romantic ballet about a gypsy's love for a dashing French officer sounds like it would be fun, if not for dancers who are perfect technically but lacking in emotion. "The Parisians, going through the motions without ever demonstrating how perfection turns into real dancing, show just how."
• Cunningham. Americans to the rescue? Here Macauley explains that the Merce Cunningham dance troupe from America is more popular in Paris than elsewhere, and his impression of the revivals of three pieces is that the French judgment is spot on.

NYT: Dancing Americans in Paris (plus the original)

Here are two stories of la danse from today's New York Times:

• Artist Anselm Kiefer, recently in the news because he painted a gallery in the Louvre, has also been named guest curator at that museum, in a gig similar to one that Toni Morrison had last year. For one of his offerings, Kiefer asked American choreographer Bill T. Jones to create a dance work in a Louvre exhibition hall that is bracketed by "Winged Victory" and "The Dying Slave," a Michaelangelo sculpture.  The danse, called "Walking the Line," probably became the hottest ticket in town; seating was limited to 150 people for each of its three performances.
• Another American, Brooke Desnoës, has made an impact on dance in France by starting a very successful ballet school in Paris. Unlike traditional French dance schools, Desnoës's "American Academy of Dance" accepts everyone and uses a less severe approach to instruction. The school has over 540 students, some of whom have been placed in major companies in Chicago, Britain, and elsewhere.

It's unfair that we can't participate in any dance in Paris or view one, so let's have a vicarious thrill instead. Here's a clip from An American in Paris, the movie starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. In this scene, they glide alongside the Seine -- or a facsimile thereof -- to my favorite song, "Love is Here to Stay," by the Gershwins.

Maurice Bejart: Death of a dance genius

One of the French pioneers of modern dance, Maurice Béjart, died yesterday. An obituary from Bloomberg offers a good summation of the importance of his choreographic style: his innovative approach of matching dance to music and not text, the eroticism of his work, his choice of non-traditional scores, his sense of showmanship.

Leading this post is a video clip of Béjart's Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps/Rite of Spring, striking and intense.

French dance halls: the guinguettes

Before television, a popular pastime in France was going to the guinguettes -- more or less French dance halls. The Times of London reports that a mini-resurgence of the tradition is taking place, perhaps fueled by an older generation who remembers the good times of lazy Sunday afternoons, leisurely consumption of food and wine, accordion music, and spins on the floor. James Preston, the reporter who left the city for a few hours and checked out some guiguettes, ends the article with "I've rarely been happier in Paris."

There is a 17 second amateur video clip which offers a taste.

Trucs: Travelling across France; A NYC Dancer in Paris; A Truffle Record

Pieces of this and that:

• A staff writer for The Santa Cruz Journal shares memories of a month long trip across France with her son. It's a love letter to the country, even if there are a few "California is just as good" moments in the text.
• Benjamin Millepied, a Frenchman who stars with the New York City Ballet, has choreographed a new dance, Amoveo, for the Ballet Opera de Paris, his first assignment with this troupe. The piece features the music of Philip Glass and costumes by Marc Jacobs. (If you read French, here's more information.)
• It's truffle season. A writer in The London Free Press notes, "They smell awful, look like deer droppings and can cost hundreds of dollars for a modest bagful." Despite these factors, a Hong Kong businessman recently paid $160K for one of the tubers at a charity auction in Paris, possibly a world record.

The New York Times and Francophilia

It is not my intention on this blog to simply regurgitate articles from the New York Times. Still, it's important to note that in the last four days, the paper has had stories or features on Romain Duris, Mathieu Amalric, Gaspard Ulliel, Charles Aznavour, Arielle Dombasle, Michel Gondry, the book Bad Faith about Vichy collaboration, the sixth arrondissement, the exhibit "Cezanne to Picasso" at the Metropolitan Museum, a dance festival in Lyon, and the film Army of Shadows by Michel Deville. It's all a boy can do to keep up!

Some of these items I'll sample in upcoming posts. As always, you may need to register for access. Here's a grab bag of a few that'll stand on their own.