Gotham Diary:
“This Just In”
31 March 2014
Last Saturday, not this past Saturday but the one on which 22 March fell, we spent the day at Lincoln Center, enjoying two Paul Taylor Dance Company programs. We saw six dances altogether, three of them familiar, three new to us, and one a première.* More than ever before, our pilgrimage served as the rite of spring.
We had originally intended to see much more than we did, but then, as the winter set in, with its aches and complications, it began to seem that we wouldn’t go at all. Aside from two plays in the fall and a jazz concert on Valentine’s Day, we didn’t go out this season, not even for dinner, and that was fine with me. I was as delighted by my evenings at home as I am not to need to own a car. Much as I wanted to see some Paul Taylor, I shrank from making decisions as to which, and the hassle of purchasing tickets put me off even more.
But I rallied, ten days before the performance, spurred by the enthusiasm of a friend with whom I had lunch. She was going that very evening to a Paul Taylor preview. A sudden horror hit me: what if Michael Trusnovec retired after this season? He has been the company’s senior dancer since we started going, six years ago, and he joined in 1996, which is pushing twenty years. I hate to call him the star of the company, because I’m mad about at least five of the other dancers, all of whom do things that Mr Trusnovec doesn’t (sometimes because they’re women), but there’s no getting round his Apollonian magnificence. Michael Trusnovec is the embodiment of strength stripped of all brutality. He appears to create both the air and the gravity in which he moves. If I were to miss his final New York season with the company, I should need a very good excuse.
Not having one, I bought the four Saturday tickets, quite painlessly, choosing precisely the seats that I wanted, online. Why didn’t I do this sooner? Let’s just say that buying tickets online hasn’t always been easy, and I still carry scars from the early days. (Or fancy I do.)
So, we went, and it was great. A favorite moment that still lingers was the pas de deux for two men, in Sunset, that Mr Trusnovec dances with Robert Kleinendorst, his Dionysian opposite in character but a dancer not a whit less in control. You can see some of it on this clip at YouTube. (Although the men wear the red berets that are part of the dance, the rehearsal is not in costume.) We were especially delighted by Funny Papers, a crowd-pleaser that we’ve somehow managed to miss.
***
And that’s all for now. From the very beginning, friends would say, “I love it when you review things. It’s almost as good as being in New York.” This always made me feel like Woody Allen’s character in Stardust Memories, whose fans tell him that they especially like his “earlier, funny” movies. I’m not going to say anything crude, such as “I hate writing reviews,” but I have to say that I have come to find reviews too problematic to write. There is something wrong about fitting the report of any “cultural event” into the mold of journalism.
And to tell you what it is, I’m going refer to last Thursday’s entry, in which I mentioned Cicero’s conception of the cultivated mind. Hannah Arendt writes (in the essay to which I alluded),
[Cicero] speaks of excolere animum, of cultivating the mind, and of cultura animi in the same sense in which we speak even today of a cultured mind, only that we are no longer aware of the full metaphorical content of this usage. For as far as Roman usage is concerned, the chief point always was the connection of culture with nature; culture originally meant agriculture, which was held in very high regard in Rome in opposition to the poetic and fabricating arts. … It was in the midst of a primarily agricultural people that the concept of culture first appeared, and the artistic connotations which might have been connected with this culture concerned the incomparably close relationship of the Latin people to nature, the creation of the famous Italian landscape. According to the Romans, art was supposed to rise as naturally as the countryside; it ought to be tended nature; and the spring of all poetry was seen in “the song which the leaves sing to themselves in the green solitude of the woods.” But though this may be an eminently poetic thought, it is not likely that great art would ever have sprung from it. It is hardly the mentality of gardeners which produces art.
I completely disagree with Arendt on the last point, but that’s no matter: it is not art that is under discussion but the cultivated mind. It is in the cultivated mind that culture begins, and it is from the discussions of cultured minds that culture emerges into the light. Actual cultural events take place in and among minds, not in theatres, concert halls, or museums. Culture lies not in works of art but in the seasoned responses of men and women to works of art. An empty museum is absolutely devoid of culture, and merely to write about what happened at a concert or what was displayed in a gallery is, very possibly, to avoid cultural significance altogether.
The journalistic review came into existence with the rise of the bourgeoisie, who had to be told, in those early days, what was what. In the absence of higher education or, more importantly, swell friends, the rising merchant or aspiring barrister needed a guide to the finer things in life, among which, of course, the fine arts figured most prominently; and newspaper critics were happy to help. The very premise of the journalistic review, unchanged to this day, is that the reader is him- or herself less fitted than the journalist, if not wholly unable, to judge a picture or a performance. But today this premise rests on the shakiest foundation: it is no longer the critic’s judgment that is special, but rather his access to events: he sees them, as a rule, before everybody else, or he sees everything of their kind. He is in an excellent position to deliver the latest news about art. But this news is not at all inherently cultural.
I’m not claiming that journalistic reviews are wholly devoid of cultural comment. On the contrary, it’s the odd bit of really substantive comment that sparks my awareness of its rarity. Alistair Macaulay stuffs his Times reviews with genuinely cultural insight, but the pieces themselves are stunted and constrained by the obligation to highlight the dances that the critic has just seen. Writing about Paul Taylor, moreover, Macaulay harps on how great Taylor used to be. This point gets much more coverage, as it were, than Macaulay’s frequent but fleeting references to the astonishing performances that his dancers deliver, and the choreographic characteristics that distinguish any Paul Taylor dance go almost unmentioned. Refreshment is a vital part of the cultivation of the mind — that is why it is so important to re-read great books — but the journalistic review tends not to refresh but to overwrite. Macaulay’s regrets about Paul Taylor’s apparent dotage (“Though he’s certainly a master, it’s been decades since he seemed any kind of pioneer“) betray a conviction that the latest instance of anything is also the most significant. That’s the déformation professionelle of a journalist. It has almost nothing to do with culture.
So we have to figure out another way to talk about art, one in which “news” values are subordinated to accord with their limited cultural importance. I hope to be closer to a solution by the time next year’s Paul Taylor at Lincoln Center season begins. One thing’s for sure: I’ll order my tickets online and early.
* Familiar: Cloven Kingdom, Sunset, and Gossamer Gallants; New to us: Funny Papers, Dante Variations; Première: Marathon Cadenzas.
Daily Blague news item: The Skills Gap