Decades ago I went to the first and only ballet I would ever see. The highlight was when the Cavalier ( I think) dumped the Sugar Plum Fairy on her ass as he was attempting a lift. That will never be topped,
I’m a professional flutist in an ICSOM orchestra. Basically the major leagues of orchestras. Tho we are a small franchise here in Alabama compared to Chicago or lyric or … thank you for your support of opera. There was so much wrong with what timothee said. But the entitled I get to choose what’s relevant or not attitude was so maddening. The day we said it we played young audiences concerts and the kids were transported. There is nothing like live music of anytime and I especially believe kids seeing 70+ people on a stage making it is magic. We are playing in the pit for sleeping beauty ballet this weekend and I’m in awe of the dancers. Most of us professionals in the arts feel a calling from a very young age and devote hours and hours and years to achieving our level or expertise and then maintaining it. We are the athletes of the fine motor muscles in music. Whether people go on as I did to make a career in the arts (which is hard. So much competition for so few jobs that do not pay much. You have to find your joy from something besides money. Which I do and which timothee clearly has no clue about ) or just become lifelong patrons and listeners - classic la major and ballet and and and have an important place in our world
I grew up dancing - I started when I was three - and would have happily made it my career if I had not been descended from square people and sadly realized that my road would be extra hard because I didn't fit the modern expectation that tall and slender bodies are best for dance. But I never lost my love for the art, never lost the itch in my feet when I hear some music, never lost the the amazement at the ephemeral beauty of movement and the wonder that ballet always inspired in me.
A friend of mine, a ballet critic, used to share his tickets with me from time to time, and I've seen some incredible works. I remember going to see Dance Theater of Harlem with him and one of the pieces they performed, a revival of Dougla by Geoffrey Holder, got right into my soul and, like the rest of the audience, I found myself on my feet, roaring and stomping, compelled to move in communion with the dancers on the stage. He also took me to see what I referred to as the default or ur-Nutcracker at New York City Ballet. I was nearly 60 and had seen and danced that familiar ballet any number of times through the years, but I lost myself in that performance in exactly the way I did when I was 10.
I know ballet to be a vital, growing, flexible, and comprehensive performing art. I've danced modern pieces and classical pieces with equal joy, losing myself in the movement regardless of the form.
Ballet is not some stagnant historical artifact - it is a celebration of movement, of wordless storytelling, of glorious lines and breathtaking physicality, and of the magnificent ability of the human body to create and express beauty.
Preach it, Robyn. My sister is a Lyric addict (we've all aged out of "Young" anything) who's seen everything, twice and thrice. Opera's not my personal hangout, but if poetry lives forever then Aida should too.
It should not surprise anyone that a 30-year-old has bad takes. I'm 51 and still have them sometimes, but when I was in my 20's they were constant and I didn't really get too decent until my mid-30s.
Throw in being rich (he absolutely is) and having access to basically whatever entertainment he wants at any given time (celebrities get to go places) and that's a recipe for even worse takes.
I wrote a beautiful comment in tribute to this beautiful post this morning, but my computer decided that I had hit some key that ultimately ate my comment. So I stewed about it all day and decided that I couldn't reproduce it, but I still needed to say at least some of what's in it.
The last two weekends of this month are performance weekends for the North Cambridge Family Opera (www.familyopera.org), an organization that I've been hanging around for about twenty years. Let me quote part of the webpage about what opera is:
"Many people, when they hear the word 'opera,' immediately think of overweight singers in Viking costumes belting out arias in German. With such a Wagnerian prototype, many see themselves as turned off to operas because they believe them all to be long, pretentious, based on uninteresting stories, and sung in a foreign language by people with loud voices and too much vibrato. Some operas are all these things, but an opera need not be any of them. Jesus Christ, Superstar and Les Miserables are also operas. Opera is simply the art of conveying a story though singing, acting and dancing, without any significant spoken dialog or narration. It is the absence of spoken book scenes that distinguishes operas from operettas and musicals, and while it may seem like a minor distinction, it dramatically changes the audience experience. In part, this is because the flow of the music is more continuous, but also because singing takes much longer than spoken drama, and so the story unfolds in slow motion, pulling you to the edge of your seat for the duration of the show."
An opera dad who takes tons of photos and helps run the makeup crew made a video that just happens to feature the last time we performed this year's opera, "Weedpatch", that shows some of the process of putting it all together (https://vimeo.com/286631648). "Weedpatch" is the story of immigrants from the Dust Bowl to the government camp featured in "The Grapes of Wrath", known officially as the Arvin Federal Migrant Camp but called Weedpatch by the locals. In parallels to today, they are looked down on, excluded, bullied, treated as less than human, etc. by the good(?) people of Bakersfield and Kern County, but nonetheless create a school and lives for themselves. You can see full videos of performances from 2018 here--https://www.familyopera.org/drupal/Weedpatch_2018 (scroll down to the videos at the bottom). If you're close enough to attend a performance, please come and say hi to me at the ticket table. Bring kids (there are gym mats between the front row and the stage for people who find chairs too confining), family and friends. Heck, grab a stranger who wants to see a good show.
I mean if you want to talk about a dying art form that brings together communities then let's talk about the decline of organized religion! Don't worry tho, I'm personally trying to do something about that. Don't call me a cult leader tho, that's offensive!
Religion is art, right? A bunch of stories people made up? Can we agree on that?
So how about making up stories relevant to today? Christianity was successful because people really cared about being filthy unwashed masses, and Jesus was like, 'hey that's what makes you special, fam!' He didn't stop you being a degenerate, he just forgave it. Which was a big deal because he was the son of God (allegedly). Also it's kinda not your fault because Satan.
Nowadays tho I think people feel more personally responsible for being a degenerate and are less inclined to think of their flaws as the result of some supernatural curse. No cares about being a "sinner" and just want to be happy.
It's not that people stopped believing in make-believe as reality, it's that "the greatest story ever told" doesn't speak to them anymore—at least not as many as it used to.
So what I'm getting at is we should use humanity's boundless creativity to create a new story that taps into all the things we love: community, ritual, and myth-making to address these age old problems of feeling inadequate & alone with a fresh perspective.
They turned STAR WARS into a religion. They turned SPAGHETTI into a religion—seriously—they turned something made up to make fun of religion into a religion. So you can't escape it and it will never die until the last human does. Might as well lean into it.
And I wouldn't worry about people believing in fairy tales, a lot of people thought Hillary was a good candidate; talk about delusional!
How was Salome? My wife and I desperately wanted to go (we drove to Des Moines from Ohio a couple of summers ago just to see it) but couldn’t make it work. Cincinnati is presenting it this summer; my wife got me tix for my birthday (she got me Don Giovanni tickets last year). If you decide to come down, we’ll stand you a drink.
Many influences here. Me mom was obsessed with The Nutcracker and very often put the Suite on the turntable. Then, for some as yet unknown reason, The 6th, 7th, and 8th grades of Saint Joseph's was invited to sing in the Chorus of Carmen; I think at the Opera House, but it might have been The Garden. Needless to say I was hooked. Classical music blends perfectly into my quite eclectic playlists.
i agree with you in ever fiber of my being about the importance of the arts and their criticality to humanity and the advancement of society (in fact, i belong to TWO Chicago theaters and just got voted Chicago Reader best actor 2025 so i'm really not joking...).
that said. i feel like this particular controversy is ill timed in today's america and i find myself rather baffled.
(also everyone should please come see my FREE OUTDOOR SHAKESPEARE show this summer)
I saw Anna Bolena last year, at a church in La Canada Flintridge. I am sure it cost under $30 because if it was more than that, I would not have been able to go.
The guy playing Henry VIII was really scary! He looked kind of like James Earl Jones, really scary and evil!
I had to use the bathroom very early on, before Henry VIII had made an appearance. When I went back, he was on stage and singing in a sinister manner, with such a look on his face, and I felt like he was staring at me! I felt like he was going to yell at the guards and have them grab me and cut my head off!
Later on, I had to go to the bathroom again. I waited until Henry VIII wasn’t on stage.
That night, I had a dream where the devil was coming to get me, and he looked like Henry VIII from Anna Bolena!
Decades ago I went to the first and only ballet I would ever see. The highlight was when the Cavalier ( I think) dumped the Sugar Plum Fairy on her ass as he was attempting a lift. That will never be topped,
I’m a professional flutist in an ICSOM orchestra. Basically the major leagues of orchestras. Tho we are a small franchise here in Alabama compared to Chicago or lyric or … thank you for your support of opera. There was so much wrong with what timothee said. But the entitled I get to choose what’s relevant or not attitude was so maddening. The day we said it we played young audiences concerts and the kids were transported. There is nothing like live music of anytime and I especially believe kids seeing 70+ people on a stage making it is magic. We are playing in the pit for sleeping beauty ballet this weekend and I’m in awe of the dancers. Most of us professionals in the arts feel a calling from a very young age and devote hours and hours and years to achieving our level or expertise and then maintaining it. We are the athletes of the fine motor muscles in music. Whether people go on as I did to make a career in the arts (which is hard. So much competition for so few jobs that do not pay much. You have to find your joy from something besides money. Which I do and which timothee clearly has no clue about ) or just become lifelong patrons and listeners - classic la major and ballet and and and have an important place in our world
I grew up dancing - I started when I was three - and would have happily made it my career if I had not been descended from square people and sadly realized that my road would be extra hard because I didn't fit the modern expectation that tall and slender bodies are best for dance. But I never lost my love for the art, never lost the itch in my feet when I hear some music, never lost the the amazement at the ephemeral beauty of movement and the wonder that ballet always inspired in me.
A friend of mine, a ballet critic, used to share his tickets with me from time to time, and I've seen some incredible works. I remember going to see Dance Theater of Harlem with him and one of the pieces they performed, a revival of Dougla by Geoffrey Holder, got right into my soul and, like the rest of the audience, I found myself on my feet, roaring and stomping, compelled to move in communion with the dancers on the stage. He also took me to see what I referred to as the default or ur-Nutcracker at New York City Ballet. I was nearly 60 and had seen and danced that familiar ballet any number of times through the years, but I lost myself in that performance in exactly the way I did when I was 10.
I know ballet to be a vital, growing, flexible, and comprehensive performing art. I've danced modern pieces and classical pieces with equal joy, losing myself in the movement regardless of the form.
Ballet is not some stagnant historical artifact - it is a celebration of movement, of wordless storytelling, of glorious lines and breathtaking physicality, and of the magnificent ability of the human body to create and express beauty.
This kid is just wrong.
Preach it, Robyn. My sister is a Lyric addict (we've all aged out of "Young" anything) who's seen everything, twice and thrice. Opera's not my personal hangout, but if poetry lives forever then Aida should too.
This post really needs a large audience. Beautifully stated, Robyn!
It should not surprise anyone that a 30-year-old has bad takes. I'm 51 and still have them sometimes, but when I was in my 20's they were constant and I didn't really get too decent until my mid-30s.
Throw in being rich (he absolutely is) and having access to basically whatever entertainment he wants at any given time (celebrities get to go places) and that's a recipe for even worse takes.
Isn't it Cosi fan Tutti? must have been auto-correct
Art for the sake of art.
HA.
(meme)
IRAN TROLLS US & ISRAEL WRITING IN "MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF EPSTEIN ISLAND" ON MISSILES
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/edd8bba59cdb00e5c18865e08f21d5b18e5ba34116183e4c6624c895a2eabb3f.png
Let's all ENDEAVOUR to enjoy Opera!
I wrote a beautiful comment in tribute to this beautiful post this morning, but my computer decided that I had hit some key that ultimately ate my comment. So I stewed about it all day and decided that I couldn't reproduce it, but I still needed to say at least some of what's in it.
The last two weekends of this month are performance weekends for the North Cambridge Family Opera (www.familyopera.org), an organization that I've been hanging around for about twenty years. Let me quote part of the webpage about what opera is:
"Many people, when they hear the word 'opera,' immediately think of overweight singers in Viking costumes belting out arias in German. With such a Wagnerian prototype, many see themselves as turned off to operas because they believe them all to be long, pretentious, based on uninteresting stories, and sung in a foreign language by people with loud voices and too much vibrato. Some operas are all these things, but an opera need not be any of them. Jesus Christ, Superstar and Les Miserables are also operas. Opera is simply the art of conveying a story though singing, acting and dancing, without any significant spoken dialog or narration. It is the absence of spoken book scenes that distinguishes operas from operettas and musicals, and while it may seem like a minor distinction, it dramatically changes the audience experience. In part, this is because the flow of the music is more continuous, but also because singing takes much longer than spoken drama, and so the story unfolds in slow motion, pulling you to the edge of your seat for the duration of the show."
An opera dad who takes tons of photos and helps run the makeup crew made a video that just happens to feature the last time we performed this year's opera, "Weedpatch", that shows some of the process of putting it all together (https://vimeo.com/286631648). "Weedpatch" is the story of immigrants from the Dust Bowl to the government camp featured in "The Grapes of Wrath", known officially as the Arvin Federal Migrant Camp but called Weedpatch by the locals. In parallels to today, they are looked down on, excluded, bullied, treated as less than human, etc. by the good(?) people of Bakersfield and Kern County, but nonetheless create a school and lives for themselves. You can see full videos of performances from 2018 here--https://www.familyopera.org/drupal/Weedpatch_2018 (scroll down to the videos at the bottom). If you're close enough to attend a performance, please come and say hi to me at the ticket table. Bring kids (there are gym mats between the front row and the stage for people who find chairs too confining), family and friends. Heck, grab a stranger who wants to see a good show.
I mean if you want to talk about a dying art form that brings together communities then let's talk about the decline of organized religion! Don't worry tho, I'm personally trying to do something about that. Don't call me a cult leader tho, that's offensive!
It can't die fast enough.
So hardcore! So serious! Where's The sense of humor? The imagination to create something new?
What are you talking about? Tho?
Alright it's been a while since I explained this…
Religion is art, right? A bunch of stories people made up? Can we agree on that?
So how about making up stories relevant to today? Christianity was successful because people really cared about being filthy unwashed masses, and Jesus was like, 'hey that's what makes you special, fam!' He didn't stop you being a degenerate, he just forgave it. Which was a big deal because he was the son of God (allegedly). Also it's kinda not your fault because Satan.
Nowadays tho I think people feel more personally responsible for being a degenerate and are less inclined to think of their flaws as the result of some supernatural curse. No cares about being a "sinner" and just want to be happy.
It's not that people stopped believing in make-believe as reality, it's that "the greatest story ever told" doesn't speak to them anymore—at least not as many as it used to.
So what I'm getting at is we should use humanity's boundless creativity to create a new story that taps into all the things we love: community, ritual, and myth-making to address these age old problems of feeling inadequate & alone with a fresh perspective.
They turned STAR WARS into a religion. They turned SPAGHETTI into a religion—seriously—they turned something made up to make fun of religion into a religion. So you can't escape it and it will never die until the last human does. Might as well lean into it.
And I wouldn't worry about people believing in fairy tales, a lot of people thought Hillary was a good candidate; talk about delusional!
Pretty sure you're the only one who might care about whatever point you think you're making here. You might want to get your meds adjusted, tho.
I would like to know what exactly I said that made you think I need to be medicated
Are you making fun of mental illness?
How was Salome? My wife and I desperately wanted to go (we drove to Des Moines from Ohio a couple of summers ago just to see it) but couldn’t make it work. Cincinnati is presenting it this summer; my wife got me tix for my birthday (she got me Don Giovanni tickets last year). If you decide to come down, we’ll stand you a drink.
Many influences here. Me mom was obsessed with The Nutcracker and very often put the Suite on the turntable. Then, for some as yet unknown reason, The 6th, 7th, and 8th grades of Saint Joseph's was invited to sing in the Chorus of Carmen; I think at the Opera House, but it might have been The Garden. Needless to say I was hooked. Classical music blends perfectly into my quite eclectic playlists.
i agree with you in ever fiber of my being about the importance of the arts and their criticality to humanity and the advancement of society (in fact, i belong to TWO Chicago theaters and just got voted Chicago Reader best actor 2025 so i'm really not joking...).
that said. i feel like this particular controversy is ill timed in today's america and i find myself rather baffled.
(also everyone should please come see my FREE OUTDOOR SHAKESPEARE show this summer)
I saw Anna Bolena last year, at a church in La Canada Flintridge. I am sure it cost under $30 because if it was more than that, I would not have been able to go.
The guy playing Henry VIII was really scary! He looked kind of like James Earl Jones, really scary and evil!
I had to use the bathroom very early on, before Henry VIII had made an appearance. When I went back, he was on stage and singing in a sinister manner, with such a look on his face, and I felt like he was staring at me! I felt like he was going to yell at the guards and have them grab me and cut my head off!
Later on, I had to go to the bathroom again. I waited until Henry VIII wasn’t on stage.
That night, I had a dream where the devil was coming to get me, and he looked like Henry VIII from Anna Bolena!