All Final GNews work–

– can be found in the Final Work category section.

 Thanks!

Jackie

Side Note on Dunning’s Article (see below): Passing Down Dance

On another note regarding Dunning’s piece “Twisting and Chatting the Alvin Ailey Way,” Dunning is completely right when she writes that dances are handed down from older to younger performers.  I was really drawn to this idea when I first heard it– I like its traditional element, the concept of the hours logged in passing along an exact choreography, and the sort of old-world apprentice-sense of it.  One of my subjects Karin Baker, an older-generation tapper and a strong-minded traditionalist, has so far handed down some of her earliest tap routines– Ernest Carlos routines– to a young protege named Kathy Callahan.  

In fact, Karin’s last performance (which she refers to as her “Swan Song”) is a dance interpretation of this hand-me-down tradition.  In this performance, Karin dances with Kathy.  Karin performs a set of steps and Kathy imitates her.  The sets get more and more complicated, and overlap each other more and more, until Kathy and Karin are doing the routine together, their taps completely in unison.  The choroegraphy is great, and so is the sound of it. 

Karin was kind enough to loan me a DVD of this performance, and I’m working on ways to get it up on this blog.  So, hopefully, accompanying video to come.

Soundless Slideshow

Put together, mostly for practice, a silent (video) slideshow composed of photos of Karin Baker in movement. I’d like to play around a bit more with pacing– I wanted the movement to speed up to the end, but I couldn’t get the clips to play for less than one second each. Also in compressing the movie file for YouTube, the picture quality degraded quite a bit, which is unfortunate– though I don’t see any way to remedy that problem without money.

And of course once I have an audio complement, it will be easier to convey a clear narrative. See slideshow below …

Audio Snag

In composing my photo slideshow, have landed on an audio problem: sound quality.  Sound quality is a big, big issue.  I didn’t fully accept that concept when we were working with video, in which medium there are moving images to focus on and (in theory) a greater theme at play.  But when sound is isolated with only still image, poor quality is even more evident, and, in the case of my recorded interviews with Karin Baker, pretty unbearable.  I had clumsily tried to transfer audio from a digital recorder to a mini-DV by rigging a connection between recorder and camera, and that only aggravated the lousy sound and created an additional constant buzz in the foreground.  So next week’s interview– remiked and reworked– will be especially important for contextualizing Karin’s images; I really want to do them justice.

 In the meantime, two of my favorite images are below: the first, Karin (left) and her sister in the studio Karin created in the family’s basement when she was ten years old (she gave dance lessons there into her teenaged years); the second, a later news clipping of Karin (left again) with a few of her younger pupils.

Picture Story

Recently met again with Karin Baker, former dancer and one subject of my in-progress feature piece.  Unlike many of the dancers I’ve been in touch with over the course of the semester, Karin has a vast and beautiful collection of photos to document her dance career, thanks to her fastidious and attentive mother.  Which is lucky, because her career was pretty amazing.  There are pictures of Karin in her teenage years, giving ballet lessons to students her own age in the basement of her childhood home in Cinncinnati (Karin turned the basement into a dance studio when she was 10).  There are pictures of Karin on stage performing in a USO tour, her hands and legs blurred by movement and her face over-the-top animate.  There are even pictures of her performing on The Carol Burnett show; her mom snapped close-shots of the TV screen to get those.  (The quality isn’t so bad, considering.)  And above is a picture of Karin in a Capezio ad which ran, she says, for nearly a year.  She doesn’t remember how, or when exactly, she landed that job.  It’s a cool addition to her albums nonetheless.

I’m interested in the idea of portraying dance through still image.  If a photo slideshow were well-done it could call attention to intricacy of movement, to the lines of the body, those things more difficult to notice when a dancer is in motion.  I worry a bit about minimalizing the true extent of story, though; in Karin’s case, for example, it would be easy to show Cute Dancing-Karin Age 10 next to Beautiful Dancing-Karin Age 25 next to Wise Teaching-Karin Age 40.  But that doesn’t really reveal anything significant about Karin’s career or self.  In arranging photos I’m working with transcripts from my original interviews with Karin as the accompanying audio, but I wonder whether it might be better to follow up with a photo-based interview– if that doesn’t push any ethical lines– and ask Karin to talk specifically about each image’s context, her mindset within that context.  On its own the images are pretty and interesting and generally nice to look at, but I’d very much like if I could compose the slideshow so that it says and means something more. 

Advanced Beginner’s Ballet at the 92nd Street Y

Last weekend I observed Gregory Nuber’s Advanced Beginner’s Ballet Class at the YMCA on Lexington at 92nd St.  Gregory was a dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group; he was with the Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre prior to that.  He is my “teaching source”– the only dancer I’ve yet interviewed who is passionate about teaching the dance he performed: ballet.  This January he’ll return to Arizona State University, his Alma mater, to complete an MFA in dance so that he can teach at the university level.But for the past months he’s been coaching an eclectic group of students at the 92nd Street Y.  On the Sunday morning that I sat in there were eight students in attendance, all women.  The youngest was likely in her early twenties; the oldest was just as likely topping 70. 

Bringing Dance to School

I recently chatted with Renee Pena, former dancer/dance student, current dance teacher, and recurrent CTFD client.  Renee is maybe the first dancer-activist I’ve spoken with this semester.  She started dance at a community center in Queens when she was 5, trained in ballet and modern through high school, and was accepted on a dance scholarship to Bard College in upstate New York.  In her senior year, in the week before performing her senior project– an end-of-major requirement in the performance arts at Bard– Renee tore a ligament in her right shoulder during rehearsal.  She went through with the performance.  And that, she said, was the infamous “it.”  She was 21 at the time of her injury; she’s now 24.

Renee’s story is an interesting one not because it typifies The Sad Dancer Plot, but rather because pursuing dance wasn’t easy for her, and because she’s now dedicated to making it easier for city kids and teens of similar backgrounds.  Dance lessons are expensive.  Insurance is expensive.  Physical therapy without insurance is even more expensive.  (“Money!” said Renee on Wednesday, putting up her hands, like, okay, I give; “everything’s so much money.”)  Travel is both expensive and inconvenient.  She was born out in Queens and she wasn’t of money– that made dance something of a luxury.  This is something she hopes to change.

A Vignette: Karin Baker

When Karin Baker was ten years old (“sometime in the mid-1950s,” she says vaguely, but really it was 1953) she wrote letters to New York, to renowned tapper and tap teacher Ernest Carlos, requesting tap routines.  Tap was out of favor in Cincinnati where Karin grew up.  She had started to tap when she was five years old, under the tutelage of a vaudevillian who played the xylophone while he danced.             

 “I had learned a lot of great, old-fashioned buck-and-wing steps,” says Karin, “but I was teaching tap in our basement by the time I was ten.”  At that age Karin already knew that she wanted to dance professionally, and that meant moving on to ballet, a more profitable form.  But still she wrote to Carlos to request a routine that would challenge her.  He obliged, sending combinations written out, long-hand, in choreographer’s notation.           

CTFD Coverage in the Times

This weekend the NY Times came out with an article about CTFD, its mission, its clients– Tentative Steps Into A Life After Dance.  The article lands on the concept that for former dancers there is little chance of finding a future in anything as fulfilling as dance.  I think that for many dancers this is true; but, I’m finding that for as many others, it’s not quite the case. 

My impression after talking with the counselors and administrators at CTFD was that transition is an unequivocal crisis in any dancer’s life.  It is inevitable and nonetheless dreaded, and invariably difficult.  But my meetings with transitioned dancers– both of recent and not-so-recent transitions– has uncovered another school of thought about the transition process.

CTFD Video Library

At the center of the CTFD office is its resource library, a well-organized collection of career guidebooks, informational career pamphlets, college brochures, training program booklets, an impressive number of subscription papers and magazines, and, maybe most often overlooked, a fairly extensive collection of VHS tapes.

Nevermind that almost no one owns a VCR anymore.  Alongside the orderly collection of tapes is a tiny black Sony TV/VCR combo, its bubble screen a neat 10″ x 10″.  

The TV/VCR is there so that visitors to the library can watch the archived workshops, seminars and lectures that CTFD faithfully continues to videorecord.  The tapes are neatly stacked (and evidently rarely touched); they are labeled with titles and dates.  The earliest tape-date I came across was June, 1998.  Titles included: “Embracing the Fear;” “Juggling Your Life and Your Career Part II” (I couldn’t find Part I);  ”Take Charge of Money;” and, “Help! I Need a Non-Performance Resume.”  In all my visits to CTFD, I’ve never seen anyone seated at the VHS counter.