Milonga Tango

            My only ever exposure to tango has been a select few glimpses of Dancing with the Stars, so I had little to nothing to compare this performance to. The dance, as a whole was fascinatingly complex, the dancers easily equal in skill to those we saw at the Hear the Dance: Russia performance. However, the dance itself was extremely different than anything else we’ve seen so far; where everything else has been fairly contemporary and fluid—almost delicate—predominantly ballet in basis, this tango group danced with sharp angles in their arms and legs in nearly all cases except that of the comical female dancer intentionally acting as though she were entirely unskillful. Whenever the dancers executed a lift, for example, the typical movement would involve a spin with well-timed kicks toward the audience or a sort of crooked snap of their leg matching his or her partner’s mirror movement, forming a sort of clapping motion with their calves.

Where slight lifts are occasionally used in ballet, here we had the chance to see a single dance that was essentially a single extensive lift, the woman’s feet barely touching the ground—if at all—for easily over a minute. Though this was a more contemporary portion of the event as a whole, there were distinct tango elements scattered throughout—perhaps merely to keep the continuity of the performance’s mood. However, the lifts executed in this portion of the dance were easily recognizable as of the more fluid, contemporary variety as she moved seamlessly around across his body over and over again, giving the appearance of the dance a lightweight quality. Yet, from my limited knowledge on dance, the final portion of this scene incorporated heavy tango influences as she spread her limbs out and then remained stiff as he spun her above him, with the rapid flare of a stereotypical tango.

The other drastic distortion of traditional tango we saw in the performance came when the female dancer was “running” humorously through the projected city and then joined in a near-slapstick routine with a very straightedge male dancer. They danced a tango but, when he—like any skillful tango dancer—would stop a move suddenly, allowing for those split moments of stillness between each step, she flopped around like a sort of doll. This humorous element gave the dance another form of extreme discipline, however, since faking bad dancing appeared to be equally—if not more—exhausting than dancing a traditional, articulate tango. Therefore, there were essentially three distinct dances over the course of the full performance: a traditional tango, a contemporary dance, and a floppy tango that served as somewhat of an homage to invertebrates.

Yet, even the stylistically traditional moments were uncharacteristic in their arrangement, often grouping three, or four or five, people together in a single hold or dismissing the expectations that a man and woman would dance together—allowing for a sort of brawl between three men or a mutualistic, but not at all intimate, routine with a pair of women. These holds appeared to be arranged to resemble the traditional hold between a man and a woman with slight adjustments. A trio of two women and a man, for example, was arranged with one woman between the other two people, facing the man, with each woman holding one of the man’s arms. In a scene featuring what appeared to a be a sort of gala with a mass amount of people, two groups of five dancers each dancing as dual masses, moving in a sort of united and noble manner; each person seemed primarily responsible for merely maintaining the rigid hold of a tango while they were guided around by the shoulders of the dancers on either side of them. And a dance of three men, featured directly after one of these gala scenes, resembled the tango perfectly yet only included momentary holds, favoring a more continuous, antagonistic action of dancing around each other with brief moments of interaction.

And, through all these alterations to the traditional dance style, the finishing lifts of most of the dances remained entirely indicative of tango: arched backs, rapid movements leading to a sudden halt, and a somewhat protruding, perfectly rigid hold. These moments were entirely what one expects from a tango, down to the stern expressions. And all the variance in the other dances allowed for a truly genuine multi-dimensional performance with a diversity of expressions.

Benefits and Conundrums(and the Netherland Dance Theater 2)

                Each day, I sit at one of the intern desks at Soho Press or at Folio Literary Agency and I realize that I’m exactly where I want to be right now. Wiping down tables to get my name on the radar of one of the successful literary agents around me. Sifting through poorly edited manuscripts and proposals for “the latest must-have book for CEOs.” On the ominous, thirteenth floor of an office building right on Union Square—though it’s labeled as the fourteenth—watching protests pass by far below on Broadway, and, when I’m not here, I’m relaxing in a world-class theater—feeling far richer than I actually am—or sitting in a four-star hotel with complimentary slippers and overnight shoe shines, breaking off 19-cent banana after 19-cent banana. Imagining the claustrophobic, unventilated apartment I’ll be in once this semester’s over… I’m living the life.

                Though those are some significant benefits—and conundrums—that come with New York City life and Coe’s semester-long program, the real takeaways will be the connections sucking up at Folio and struggling through manuscripts will get me; I’m witnessing world-class graphic art, dance, music, film, and drama events more regularly than I may ever be able to absorb later in life; and I’m getting the inspiration every writer needs to feel like they are, in fact, going to make it.

 

                This past weekend, I got to see two absolutely spectacular events: a production of the vampire-centric play, Let the Right One In, which was spectacularly set and casted—and truly gut-wrenching at points—with, albeit, a few clichés; and the Netherlands Dance Theater 2 troupe.

                At the Joyce Theater, the dance—described only as a “contemporary” dance performance—utilized, in comparison to all other dance forms I’d seen, more abstract and, at times, bizarre thematic decisions in order to produce dances like “I New Then” which featured a group continuously switching between rebellious and cohesive attitudes. It began with just two men dancing with one another, first in absolute unison then dancing complementary to one another and subsequently to their own independent dances; the first few minutes of the dance gave an impression of breaking apart, expanding, and rebellion against the restrained unison in the opening as a spotlight on the two men slowly expanded. One of the men broke off into a solitary, restrained, in-tempo pace down the center of the stage and back, taking steps small enough to barely indicate actual movement. He marked himself as a constant in the production—the one thing that, until the very end, never changed.

Meanwhile, several other dancers began joining the dance; men and women together for a moment, only to break off into other couples, same-gender more often than not, blurring together traditional images of heterosexual couples with images of two men or two women dancing equally intensely, though not necessarily romantically, with one another. Countless relationships distinguished themselves, some easily identifiable as romantic by their close holds and their focused expressions while some were clearly more friend-like and, still, others caught got up in interpretably reluctant relationships; two women, at one point, danced around each other, as if in a romantic relationship, but never touched. Yet, on top of all this, there were blatantly comedic moments such as when dancers continuously fell like a doll each time the the word “fall” occurred in the lyrics. The combination created a perfect mix of intrigue while presenting countless relationships to interpret, including the full cast’s unity which was continuously changing rather than a constant truth.

Reinvigorated

I’ll admit this: writing started to lose its priority spot for me a couple of months ago. Writing a short story, working on my screenplay—even reading!—started to be put comfortably on the back burner, and, though it frustrated me that I wasn’t producing material, I was enjoying other things. Yet, here I was, working at a literary agency and a publisher on real-life material that is being published; I discovered that I would be responsible for proposing book ideas myself as part of one of my internship programs. I don’t know what had changed so drastically, but I was losing the urge that I had previously had—every time I left home or interacted with other readers—to write.

Finally, that’s changed. I look back at the productions I’ve seen in these past three weeks and the opportunities I’ve had at my internships and realize that, collectively, it has all reminded me just how much I enjoy storytelling, whether in a cynical, people-hating zookeeper’s voice or that of a Progeria-diagnosed, seventeen-year-old-but-not-stereotypically-teenage boy. Among the five art forms we’re studying here—drama, graphic art, film, and dance—dance and music have somehow inspired me the most—though drama, of course, has reminded me of just how fantastic a well-written voice or well-constructed character can make me feel. But dance and music—two art forms that hardly use words at all—have given me real moods to delve into.

We saw a film, Girlchild Diaries, which was about the evolution of a strange, independent dance-centric production by Meredith Monk as it began in the 1970s and was later reproduced in 1993 and afterward. The production, while being a complete load of what the hell is going on…? at a few points, brought to mind questions like: Why is it that we become older? Wouldn’t it be just as natural-appearing for us to become younger as time goes on? And: What, if any correlation is there between mental and physical age?

The production, which I and everyone else has simply thought to be strange at first, spoke to me in huge ways a day, two days, four days later, and I realized that I don’t write for characters; I write to examine the world and delve into questions that I can’t answer with what I’ve been given in my own life; I use a character’s life to experiment and to inspire myself.

So now I’m back to writing a short story recently retitled to be “Zoonoses”—a story about a zookeeper who, from the start, has a real passion for animals and, as time goes on, lets this passion expand deeper into a real cynicism toward people and resultant lack of association with either humans or animals. And I’m back to challenging myself, this time with a description of the macaque life that is meant to be, at least in some way, “beautiful.” (If you don’t know macaques, look one up and you’ll understand why I phrase this as a “challenge.”)

Ballet, Opera, Portuguese...

I’ve been in New York City for just over two weeks now, and it seems like the city speed has gotten to me because I’ve adjusted even more quickly than I expected!

I’m willing to bet that anyone who has gone—or is currently—on New York Term, at one point, looked at the schedule of events or the list of art forms that they’d be studying and had a bit of eek reaction—or had some reservations—because of something they saw: “Ballet? I don’t think so.” “We’re going to an opera? Aren’t they a little outdated?” Or: “Wait. The whole thing’s not gonna be in Portuguese, is it? Is it?” However, in these first two weeks, our professors and our experiences at these performances have entirely obliterated these worries from any of our minds. Ballet can be creepy as all Hell, as we saw at the Koch Theater in the production of “The Cage”—a performance of over a dozen women presenting themselves as a colony of all-female insects along with two male “intruders,” one caught in dance with the colony’s newborn member and resultantly killed. Opera is more than exaggerated expressions and extensively drawn-out sentences in the form of song; La Boheme—among the most famous operas of all time—featured extraordinarily life-like sets, contemporary humor, and exceptional acting. And something in Portuguese—assuming some sort of subtitles or other interpretable context!—can be as powerful or even more powerful than something in English; language isn’t everything as we saw in the imported, Brazilian play O Jardim.

And all the while, I’ve settled into two internships, one at Folio Literary Management and another at Soho Press. Both places of given me experiences that I hadn’t anticipated having until after graduation and the start of my real career here in New York in publishing. Already, I’ve read manuscripts, evaluated them on behalf of both a literary agent and a group of publishers, edited a soon-to-be-published novel, assisted in the marketing of Soho’s published novels, and I’m in the middle of establishing a book proposal for Discovery Channel based on their new show Alaskan Bush People. In short, I’ve reestablished my passion for the arts and for a career and life here in NYC!

What comes next? More of the arts, delving deeper into the diversity the city has to offer, including more theater productions, more museums, and more jazz clubs as well as trips to Carnegie Hall and other premiere art establishments. And more 19-cent bananas and microwavable meals! Livin’ the city life. And ready to stick around a while.