June 2, 2011

Blast of heat, four days or so now. I don’t mind so much, but there is no keeping the gardens sufficiently watered.

Madly rewriting and revising Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers.. I don’t know why I have such a feeling of urgency; it’s not like anybody is waiting for it with hands outstretched. I’m amazed at how skeletal the earlier version was, a framework upon which a story was barely hung. I’m glad I hadn’t sent it out.

Chris offered me a ticket to Angie’s Coppelia at the Wortham, so I went. Sarah was Swanhilda, and outstanding at it. Her long strong arms lift her performances. The evening was magical in many ways. The corps was entirely children, but I’m not enough of a connoisseur for that to have made a difference. Have been reading Apollo’s Angels, so the history of this ballet and ballet in general was in my head as I watched. There was far more peasant girls prancing around on market day than I have a stomach for, but when it actually got to the story, it was told with dispatch and power. What I noticed last night was that the acting was excellent. A narrative was in fact being delivered without words. Mime and pantomime have bad names in the theater, and I suppose in many ways they should, but my mind was full of the possibilities of telling a story with the body alone, or using the eloquence of the body far more than it is on the modern dramatic stage. Why couldn’t actors and dancers have the same training in acting? The training of actors (I mean stage actors now) today is dismal, competing schools that glorify themselves to the detriment of the art. Screaming and slow-talking and emoting and God knows what. Can pantomime (in the balletic, non-idiotic sense) get back into the mix? One saw that the story ended with the violation of the doll; the fact that there was a whole act after that has historical significance, in that when this dance was born people were more interested in the spectacle of all those pretty girls showing their legs on stage than they were in the story. Modern dance had–but seems to have dodged–the opportunity to tell the story with power and skip the endless wedding dances. It went somewhere else, forgot half the things it has the power to express. I think this is what Yeats was groping for when he turned to the No.

The Asheville audience was, as ever, infantile and ignorant. How can a “city of the arts” have such barbaric audiences? The blue gleam of smart phones never quite left the theater–I wish my life were so momentous that I could never be parted from it for a second–and there came the dreaded, inevitable standing ovation, which is awarded here as an ignorant reflex and not for any special achievement. The theater was full of children, which is good in so many ways, but also surrounded one with squirming and petitions to go to the bathroom. Ran into Lyle and Alison. Alison looked like a movie star.

Ran into Susan, who was with a woman whose kids were playing in the Pack Square fountain.

Kelly gave me lettuce from her garden. Russell gave me a copy of his CD. He has one of those pure, American, young male Sunday-school going voices that one listens to partially with the conviction that listening will make one a better person.