Ranting Details

Cropped

About a year ago I found myself standing in a theater with five other photographers.  We were all there for the same purpose: to shoot a dress rehearsal of one of the country’s leading modern dance companies.  Some were there for different publications, while others were company photographers who could probably document the pieces simply by listening to the music and hitting the shutter on the appropriate count.  

The standard sizing up process began during the equipment unloading, the period before a dress rehearsal where zippers open and each photographer looks around to inspect lens size and quality.  I, being new to the field in comparison to the others, hooked a single camera around my neck and stood there feeling as vulnerable as if I had instead undone my pants zipper in the middle of a crowded theater.  Out came the multiple cameras with zoom lenses capable of capturing seams on costumes.  On they went to tripods and monopods rooted into the theater’s floor amidst the folded auditorium chairs.

After a few moments rocking back and forth and stretching out my arms and fingers, I meandered over to another photographer and struck up a conversation.  His tripod was almost as tall as he was, but despite the impressive (and expensive) equipment, his ego was nowhere to be found, so I began to ask questions about his career and the specifics of his different camera bodies. 

Shortly into our conversation we both admitted our preference for shooting from backstage compared to being in the audience.  I mean, we’re all going to get the same thing from out here, he said.  The words bounced around my head and I began to ponder their truth as the lights went down to signal the beginning of the workday. 

Up the aisle.  Down the aisle.  Up the aisle.  Down the aisle.  Over the following two hours I bounded through that performance as though I was an understudy reviewing the piece in the audience. I got up close to the stage and chose to showcase minor details instead of focusing on the larger picture.  Meanwhile the other photographers stood still. 

(Amy Young)

That was the first time I’d worked as one of many people hired to shoot a performance, and it was on that day I realized how much my approach to photography is more like a ghost performer than someone who grew up standing behind a camera.  As I’ve accrued more and more employment in the field, my techniques have expanded, but my feeling about the idea that “we all get the same thing” if we shoot from the audience has not.  I approach each performance as something to actively engage in and I took that photographer’s words as a challenge to find my own style even if I was assigned to do exactly the same thing as everyone else. 

Since that day, I’ve entered into many discussions—some with employers and others with peers—and insisted that more can be said with a tighter shot than with a full stage shot that captures a performance exactly as the audience sees it. 

I liken this tighter style to the idea of writing from the inside out.  To zoom in and capture emotion on a face, tension in a hand, and the interaction of lighting on the bodies of subjects is to find the small character traits a writer creates in order to make a story something more than broad strokes of generic characterization. 

When a body explodes into the edges of the frame—to the point where limbs are at times chopped off by the framing—it stops being a static capture of a performance; the energy in the shot, which the live performance has now transformed into, can be more energetically akin to what an audience feels in the theater by employing techniques that aren’t about capturing the proscenium.  But I’ve been told this style is not always useful for publicity materials, despite my belief that a more engaging (not just “beautiful”) photograph will result in a greater curiosity about the work portrayed.  To me, the wide shot feels more like a book jacket than lush sentences. But there is, unquestionably, a place for such images.

All of this is not to say I feel like I’m doing something revolutionary by deciding to frame a tighter shot.  I’m hardly the first to do so. However, I find it to be much more possible to make a unique image—one that captures the energy of the performance as I see it—when I focus on what the camera allows me to see more completely than my naked eye does. 

In many ways that photographer’s words ignited me to never become complacent and to always search out the details of what I see before me.  Since then I’ve stood in the audience with many fellow photographers, curious as to whether we’ll all get the same shots.  One way I can ensure I won’t?  Just a few sprints up and down the aisle.  Don’t want to rely too heavily on that zoom lens to do all the work for me.  I want to be part of the action, and, in turn, make viewers of my photos feel the heat of the stage lights. 

(Annmaria Mazzini and Robert Kleinendorst)

ALL PHOTOS: PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

Crossroads (Not The Britney Spears Movie)

I hope you like photos.  Because for the past few months that seems to be the only consistent part of this website, a blog I started three years ago under the pretense that it’d be an easy way for me to keep family and friends informed about life in a professional ballet company. 

Anyone who’s been tuning in over the past several years knows that’s not the case anymore.  I underwent—am still undergoing, for that matter—a change of profession and self so immense that the boy who began this blog is all but unrecognizable to the guy who sits at the computer now.  For one thing, that guy had hair.  Lots of coiffed grey and black locks that he stuffed into an array of ballet headpieces when acting out tales as a peasant or syphilis-infected street urchin.

At that point I had no qualms with relaying basic information about my day-to-day activities backstage and on tour.  But when I became ill I did more than just buzz off my hair, I pushed through all barriers I had up and began sharing the most minute details of my battle to overcome physical debilitation and transform myself into a newer, better person.  Gone were the days of chronicling company life and in were the days of expressing every fear about letting go of that chapter of my existence; these digital pages became my only outlet for self-expression and opened my apartment windows in order to sort through a tidal wave of negative energy. 

Now, at what I feel is the other end of my years-long battle with Epstein Barr Virus (at least at the level of severity at which it once existed) I, through countless posts, believe I have sufficiently faced my demons and am left to start a new chapter.  But where to go?  Writing about day-to-day experiences now seems paltry in comparison to the type of writing I’ve done. 

However, I know there’s no way I could ever let go of this blog.  I’m contemplating several changes to the type of content that would be featured here, but first I’d love to hear what brings you, the readers, to Ranting Details on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis?  Are you interested in knowing more about the artists featured here in photographs?  Curious about details I’ve glossed over?  Tired of the monotony?  What do you want less of?  What do you want more of? 

The presence of said photography will only continue to expand as I step further and further into this field of work, but I refuse to let the writing fall by the wayside and want to know what you all are interested in hearing about.  Share your thoughts and ideas in the comment section and help me usher Ranting Details into a new era; it’s only fitting as the decade comes to an end that we press reboot.  Thanks, as always, for sticking with me and supporting my adventures.  It means more than you’ll ever know.  

Unleashed

They put me on a leash.  My parents put me on a fucking blue and yellow velcro leash.  I guess I can’t blame them for being overly cautious when we moved from Manhattan, a collection of cubicles masquerading as apartments, to Los Angeles, where the cubicles moved on highways, and, according to all the videos my teachers showed me in preschool, contained only lecherous men waiting to give me candy should I ever stray too far from our picket fence. 

The leashing was a one-off experiment during a trip to the mall, which resulted in the formation of my first memory and long debates with my father about the legitimacy of said memory in the following years.  Even though my parents quickly removed, and forever put away, the contraption, I realize that for much of my life I’ve kept myself tethered to an even more confining leash—afraid to trust my abilities and step away from the comfort of what’s known. 

It doesn’t help that I was, from a young age, immersed in the classical ballet world where the mentality is often like that of a dog; someone yanks your neck in order to get you to stay in line, or pulls your leg an inch higher while you nod and comply. (Not to mention the myriad of costumes I wore that may as well have been from the dog Halloween section at Target.) The ballet world, unlike many other dance forms, is perhaps the most mysterious of all leashes.  It wasn’t until after I stopped dancing, and began talking with a lot of other performers who, for whatever reason, had also parted ways with the profession, that I began to analyze the largely uncreative nature of the classical ballet world today.  Ballet parades itself as an art form, but over the past years, in my opinion, it has aligned itself more with a sport that allows for moments of artistic interpretation, largely among the upper ranks of companies.  It’s a world where self-expression is only allowed within the parameters of the owner’s rules and one where everyone’s waiting to get a pat on the head for sitting when commanded. This leash was welded around my brain and, as the past several years have proven, would take more than a quick pull of Velcro to remove.

When I began writing and taking photos, publishing them to my blog or on Facebook, I became aware of how stifled my creativity had been as a member of the corps de ballet.  Fortunately I had several platforms to let me test out my new interests in a relatively low-pressure forum where the people who lambasted my efforts were as anonymous as those who championed them; I didn’t have to put a face to the critique, and I could imagine the praise was coming from people like David Sedaris or David Lachapelle. 

But reality reminded me I wasn’t one of the David’s.  I am Matthew Murphy, and I have a new reputation to build.  At the beginning of my time as a writer and photographer I was able to parlay the clout of American Ballet Theatre into the worlds in which I was entering, but the goal was, and remains to be, that my work will stand alone without the prestige of ABT doing the talking for me.  That, however, meant that I would need to start speaking up. 

One afternoon, while sitting in a theater with a fellow photographer from The Times, she turned to me and insisted I remove my dancer leash.  I was waiting to be told what to do, she said; waiting for work to fall into my lap and for a ballet master to pull out a VHS tape and instruct me to execute the steps the way they had always been done.  She very plainly informed me this wasn’t going to happen.  I needed to take control. 

I felt the only way to break my mentality was to get a brain transplant; but with no income I realized this wasn’t a possibility.  For months I tried to wrap my head around the idea of owning myself.  I took the leash off, but the collar remained, waiting for someone to hook on a new leash and walk me down the block. 

It took another person, a man whose career I respect immensely and who has guided it every step of the way, to gently remove my collar once and for all about a month ago.  Shortly after, I went to Los Angeles for a vacation and began mapping out a plan for my career, one where I’m not waiting for someone to put food in my bowl, but searching it out on my own.  Driving around L.A. I was reminded of my time in the mall attached to my parents when I was three-years-old.  They were smart to remove the leash when they did, unfortunately it took me about twenty years to realize it wasn’t still attached.  Now I’m finally ready to run. 

Full Circle

It wasn’t until halfway through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy—one in which a patient comes for routine surgery and ends up convulsing on the table before a machine in the corner lets out a prolonged tone signaling his death—that I realized the program was, perhaps, a poor choice for diversion on the eve of my first-ever surgical procedure.  It had been a year since I discovered I had a hernia, and after multiple appointments to get the weakness in my abdominal wall fixed, attempts that tested my patience with the American health care system, I finally had a date; and I was certain I was going to die. 

This idea hadn’t crossed my mind until a few weeks before I went under the knife.  I was speaking to a friend and noted that I was getting the surgery at Lenox Hill, the same hospital at which I was born.  “Full circle,” he exclaimed.  My jaw went slack and my brow creased.  “Well,” I paused, contemplating what his words meant, “I certainly hope not.  Full circle means I’d have to die.” 

Now, watching a group of models-turned-interns, three hours into my pre-surgery fast, the words echoed in my head as loud as the sound of the patient flatlining on screen.  I wondered if my doctors would stare at each other for a breath, go to commercial break, and then react to my death the same way Meredith and McDreamy did—by getting in the elevator and consummating their failure with a quickie.  One can always hope for delicacy when putting your life in another’s hands. 

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My nerves hadn’t settled when I arrived at the hospital the following afternoon to find that not only were the doctors gargoyles compared to what my TV had prepared me for, but my surgeon wasn’t anywhere to be found.  On any other day I would have picked up an US Weekly and buried myself in the latest Brangelina adoption rumor, but at this point I hadn’t eaten in over twelve hours and couldn’t contemplate much other than chewing on the magazine my sister, Carson, had been so kind to bring me. 

I turned to the man sitting behind the reception desk. 

“Can I at least have a piece of gum,” I asked, as my body slumped further and further down on the green vinyl waiting room chair. 

“Nope,” he answered, not looking up from his computer. “The docs don’t want your stomach working at all.” 

I wondered where my doctor—an older Indian man whose writing was so indecipherable that I couldn’t tell if my pre-surgery instructions were to eat two pounds of horse meat or to drink two glasses of laxative—could be.  My surgery time was quickly approaching and I hadn’t even been moved into the prep lounge to answer a slew of questions for the nurses.  I noticed my eyes glazing over and a small string of drool escaped from my mouth; the situation was turning desperate. 

Just as my hunger and frustration began to breed, a delicate woman with a battered clipboard emerged from a door in the corner of the room and beckoned me to the beginning of the end. 

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My reflection scared me.  Standing naked in the dressing room behind a pair of flimsy wooden saloon doors as I prepared to don two baggy hospital robes—one that opened in the back and one that opened in the front—I laughed at my body, which I’d been required to shave from ribcage to mid-thigh the night before; it looked like a surgeon had covered Wolverine’s mid-section with Barbie’s skin.  Best to cover up until I was lying on the surgical slab…and later in the morgue. 

I shuffled in the supplied traction socks (with grips on both sides just in case I decided to crawl) to the next room, a line of recliners separated by thin teal curtains embellished with the Lenox Hill logo.  Soap operas boomed from the television, only occasionally giving way to ads for a variety of pills to induce bowel movements whose list of possible risks seemed as lengthy as those for my surgery.  I did my best to zone out all of the outside noise.  I reclined in my chair and wrapped a heated blanket around my body as Carson sat in the corner trading texts with our mother about the minute-by-minute updates, or lack thereof. 

Just as I began to doze off, a doctor—not mine, mind you, he was spouting surgical anecdotes with a collection of men in scrubs by the coffee machine—stepped into the curtain beside mine where a woman and her husband had previously been discussing a panicked phone call he had received from a student who had been molested.  Now, with their doctor around, at least the craziness would stop and I’d be able to relax. 
 
Then I heard the following words, each piercing through the thin curtain like bullets. 

“We want to give you a vaginal block,” the doctor said to the patient X.   

My eyes opened wide and I gazed over at Carson. 

“Shouldn’t this fall under the realm of doctor/patient confidentiality?” I asked.  

“Did he say vaginal block?” she mouthed, looking as though someone had just told her that her own vagina was being about to be invaded by Gremlins.

But before we were able to peel through the thick German accent on the other side of the “wall,” my own curtain opened to reveal a man, who introduced himself as my anesthesiologist. 

Pleasantries were exchanged.  He spoke in a near whisper (a technique that should have been employed next door) and rarely looked up for the floor. 

“Do you have any questions?” he asked after explaining nothing about what I was about to undergo. 

“Well, I’ve never been under general anesthesia, so I’m just wondering what exactly it is you’re going to be doing to me.” 

“It’s quite simple,” he said.  “You’ll lay on the table and I will insert an IV into your arm, which will filter Propanol into your bloodstream.” 

Propanol.  The word came out of his mouth and he looked to me as if I should understand, as if he’d just listed an item on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. 

“You know,” he said, still with no inflection, “the stuff they were giving Michael Jackson.” 

Terrific. 
_________________________________________________________________________

Before I’d had time to digest the kind man’s reassuring words, I was handed a shower cap and ushered into a hallway that looked like an airport hanger but felt like a meat locker.  There were tubes popping out from all the walls and fluorescent lights illuminating my shivering body, which in only moments would be revealed to a roomful of surgeons who, by this point, I half expected to use me as a drunken photo shoot prop while I was under.  I envisioned my parents in the middle of a malpractice suit while Dateline ran photos of me being posed like the body from Weekend at Bernie’s.  I hoped they’d at least have the decency to put in me a Hawaiian shirt and get me out of these awful robes if the world was going to be subjected to such photos after my tragic Propanol-induced death.  

I entered the surgical room and saw the table.  Where was the viewing gallery like on Grey’s? I wondered.  Wouldn’t the models be coming to learn during my surgery?  If I was going to be naked, I might as well get a date out of it, right?  Instead there were a handful of interns with clipboards surrounding my doctor, who invited me to lie down on the table, which in my starved state reminded me of a Gingerbread man. 

The anesthesiologist, sitting to my left and seemingly half-asleep, asked me to pump my fist and promptly inserted an IV into my forearm. 

I looked around, shivering and wishing my sister were able to be with me so we could at least crack a few jokes. 

“How are you feeling?” my doctor asked, bouncing up and down like he was preparing for a prizefight. 

“To be honest, I’m a bit nervous.”  

And without pausing, he looked me in the eyes and said, “Me, too!” 

Before I had time to panic, my eyelids began to droop and I was out. 
_________________________________________________________________________

When I came to, I thought for a second I was in heaven.  I’d been required to hand over my glasses before the procedure, therefore causing the nurses to appear in soft focus, gauze like and fluttering around as if angels equipped with Bic pens and a variety of painkillers. 

Then the snoring started and I was reminded that I was very much alive. I turned my head. The woman in the bed next to me was swaddled in piles of blankets and was intent on letting the rest of us in recovery know that she was fast asleep, while patients like me were forced to call out in an effort to get any help. 

“I just want my sister and my glasses,” I said to a woman standing at the edge of a nearby bed. 

She walked over and removed the oxygen tubes from nose before packing a bundle of ice on top of my recently opened abdomen.  “My glasses,” I said again.  And she walked away. 

It wasn’t long before the pain hit.  Perhaps they hadn’t posed me for photos, but my surgical team must have used me as a human piñata because my right side was screaming at me.  And all I could do was keep moaning for my glasses.  Every worker that passed told me they’d locate them; none of them came back. 

Then Christine, a young nurse sporting a side ponytail that appropriately matched her Punky Brewster meets Doogie Howser demeanor, appeared and it was Christmas morning.  Suddenly I had my sister, my glasses, and a morphine drip.  The drugs flushed through my veins, but it wasn’t long before the effect wore off and Christine reappeared. 

She frowned and nodded her head.  “In pain still, honey?  Let’s get you some ginger ale and a few percocet.”  Finally someone in the hospital was speaking a language that didn’t terrify me. 

After I’d swallowed the pills, the first nurse reemerged—seemingly unaware that she’d been responsible for my eyesight—and was now determined to exile me from the recovery room.  But the drugs started piling together and I had a difficult time lifting my head; I just wanted to join the lady next to me and form a snore choir.  From the look on the nurse’s face, I could tell my musical abilities were not desired. 

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I lasted the entire cab ride without needing to vomit.  Even the bumps on Fifth Avenue couldn’t rattle me or pull my balloon head down from six feet above my body.  But as soon as I stood, the feeling moved from my head, through my body and landed in my stomach, which, although late to the party, was now aware of the obscene amount of painkillers I had in my system.  My sister ran to get some soup while I stumbled into the building and stepped into the elevator.  This is it, I decided.  It’s not the surgery that’s going to kill me, it’s the painkillers; I’ll be my building’s Michael Jackson and I’ll collapse when I exit the elevator until someone finds the door opening and closing on my lifeless body. 

Elevators are always a pivotal part of Grey’s Anatomy story lines, so I’d clearly doomed myself with my previous night’s viewing.  Each floor seemed like it took a year to reach, until finally I hobbled through my apartment door. 

The chair in front of my TV appeared to be glowing, beckoning me to collapse in it and glaze over while watching my stories.  I suppressed the urge to vomit; there was no way my wound would handle the force of dry heaving and I wanted to stay alive, despite the multiple warnings throughout the day that my time had come. 

I reached for the remote.  Perhaps I hadn’t died at the hospital where I was born, but I could complete at least one full circle and end the day the same way I had started it: with an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.  It was bound to be a more pleasant hospital experience than the one I’d just endured. 


 

Glum

No time in recent memory have I seen a network push a television show as forcefully as Fox is pushing Glee, a story about a group of high school outcasts who band together to start the little show choir that could.  Ever since last spring, when the pilot debuted after the finale of American Idol (another huge sign that Fox is investing in its success), there have been countless billboards looming over subway entrances in which characters holds out their hands, making an “L” for loser hand gesture that creates the “L” in the show’s title.  Not to mention commercials all summer long on each of the major networks.  If market saturation was the goal, its success was evident; within days of the show’s spring premiere, its first “single,” a version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” that closed the pilot episode, shot to #1 on iTunes and the show seemed on its way to being the first critical hit of the fall television season. 

Then it had its fall premiere.  After watching two more episodes Ryan Murphy’s creation, it has become evident that the writers and producers are pushing as hard as the marketers.  And much like the basement theater productions I did as a child, their seems to be such a focus on marketing the show that the elements that will ensure prolonged success—like decent writing, for instance—have been all but overlooked. 

Now, from the abundance of Twitter and Facebook updates I can already tell you I’m in the minority.  People love this show.  And it’s hard not to when theater regulars like Spring Awakening’s Lea Michelle and Hairspray’s Matthew Morrison have the opportunity to grace us with their vocal prowess in lavish production numbers week after week.  But these renditions of pop tunes from the likes of Rihanna and Salt-N-Pepa only provide momentary spark before the viewer is confronted with scenes that not only find the actors directed like they are all starring in different shows, but have them spewing one-liners not grounded in any reality. 

Herein lies the key problem of the show: the only thing consistent is its inconsistency.  One moment you have the incomparable Jane Lynch, who plays a cheerleading coach hellbent on disbanding the Glee club—which, by the way, is pretty much the main plot point of the show—delivering dialogue with such dry humor that she seems like a lost character from Arrested Development.  Then you have flashbacks that aim to also be like that much superior show, but fail because they come so far out of left field that the leave you scratching your head instead of keeling over from unexpected laughter.  Is it supposed to be funny?  Serious?  Both?  Films like Election proved you could master that balance, but this show often seems confused about where the jokes, and the plot lines, are.   

Which leaves the focus mainly on characters that are hand crafted from the Juno dictionary of quirkiness.  One student has gay dads (which led to one of Lynch’s best lines: “Gay parents encourage rebellion.  There have been studies on this.”).  Another wants to have sex with his friends’ mothers.  Morrison’s character, the leader of the Glee club, has a shrewish wife, played by the miscast Jessalyn Gilsig, who’s faking a pregnancy and acting her way through scenes like she’s playing to the back of a stadium-sized theater.  At the end of each episode I find myself apathetic about the journey of everyone involved.  Perhaps this has to do with the show testing out different characters at this early stage to see who the focus will be on as the season progresses; but by focusing on so many people (secondary characters are introduced with Simpsons-like frequency, only we’re in Season One, not Season Twenty…best to keep the focus on a core group for now) the audience isn’t allowed to focus on anyone.  One student’s recent coming out should have packed an emotional wallop but I found myself focused more on his military jacket than the words coming out of his mouth. 

Perhaps most infuriating of all are the musical numbers.  Taken individually they are nothing short of thrilling, albeit over-produced, music videos often laced with precise, musical choreography.  The production values are incredibly clear.  What’s not clear is what reality these numbers are taking place in.  Some are presented as performances or rehearsals the Glee club is doing, and it is these performance-based numbers that make sense in the context of the world the writers have attempted to create.  But just as quickly you get a number like “Take a Bow” or last week’s “Bust Your Windows” in which the editing makes it look like the number is being performed both as a performance and then at times a narrative-driven musical theater number where the characters walk down the school hallways or hang out in the parking lot singing with a full chorus of dancers.  It is moments like this I wish the creators would opt to make Glee a network version of Moulin Rouge! where pop songs were used as narrative devices for characters.  Instead we are getting middle of the road.   

Now one can hope it will become better.  In an age where we’re as used to watching TV on DVD as we are to watching TV on TV, we have the luxury of breezing through a show’s often-inconsistent first episodes to get to the meatier story lines.  I want to be connected to this show.  If there’s ever a show I should love, it’s Glee, which plays into the theater geek that my childhood drawing of Bernadette Peters proves me to be.  But if it continues be a show that preaches fierce individualism while using stock characters who seem to exist for the purpose of iTunes sales and trendy advertisements it’s going to have a hard time sustaining my interest.  Come on, Glee!  Make me happy.  

What do you think, Ranters?!  Do you love Glee?

Creative Smelter

(It was "take a picture of your name" day on A Photo a Day for a Year...this billboard made it easy for me to flatter myself.)

It was during one of several road trips over the two months I was in Missoula that I passed through a small town known as Anaconda.  The town is nowhere near as exotic as its snake-shared name would suggest.  It’s basically a small stretch of road that sits beside a massive pile of soot, left behind by the town’s former claim to fame: a smelter.  The factory has long since closed, but the town’s inhabitants remain, literally living in the shadow of former glory days.

I wanted to know what it would be like to put myself in someone else’s mind for a day, or a week; more specifically the mind of someone who wasn’t anxious to create at all hours; the mind of someone who could be content living in a place where creativity appeared, to me, to be buried deep in the soot mountain on the outskirts of town.  But I can’t shut the creative part of my brain off, nor would I truly want to. The more I wandered around the streets the more I wondered if it was possible, as creative person, to live in such a place, or would I just run to the top of the hill in hopes I’d sink as if in quicksand?

I probably would have experienced a similar type of anxiety had I followed through on a plan I laid out around this time last year.  It was then that I toyed with the idea of moving back to Montana for the first time since I was thirteen.  After five years of living in New York City—some of that time full of artistic and personal growth…some full of oppressive situations…some a mix of all of the aforementioned—the pace of life in a place like Montana looked appealing, like an article of clothing that doesn’t quite fit but one you keep convincing yourself would make a welcome addition to your wardrobe.  I even went as far as applying to the University of Montana, only to opt out at the last minute when my first photo was published in The New York Times. 

It became clear that Montana was not the place for me to carve a reputation as a culture photographer.  For the most part the photographers either gear exclusively toward black bears in the wilderness or High School senior portraits on the swing in the backyard.  Yet, despite not catering to my specialty, each time I return for a visit I am invigorated.

I didn't write a lot during my most recent trip.  In fact, since I started writing on a regular basis about three years ago, this entire summer was perhaps the first period I had little inclination to document.  It was the first time I'd been back to Montana since I really made the transition to professional photographer, a designation I still have a hard time owning.  And it was also the first time I’d left New York City in nine months, which made the change of scenery feel so profound that I felt my eyes had been replaced with those you see dangling from springs on toy glasses; I was constantly inspired. 

This inspiration at every turn that can occasionally feel like a burden.  A person I spent much of my summer with, also a photographer, has decidedly left his camera on the shelf for much of the past two years, convinced that the constant framing of life as a picture deprives him from the experience of life as something to live.  This is a thought that runs through my head on occasion, and it usually results in my choosing to leave the camera at home.  But after I walk out the door it’s never more than a matter of steps until I see something I wish I could document. 

I wonder how much I’d be able to sustain that inspiration without outside stimulus in the form of the theater, dance, performers, visual art, and so on that New York has to offer in almost the same abundance as unwelcome smells on the street.  Upon my return to the City I’ve become curious as to whether my creativity is self-fueled or if it is always a reaction to my surroundings.  Despite my shifting views of the City—including the occasional ache for a change of pace—I don’t know if the creative side of me would be able to sustain anywhere else.  As visually striking as the enormous smelter was, would it entice me so much if it wasn’t just a visual on the side of the road; a contrast to the frenetic pace of NYC?

Mousing Around

Montana is known for abrupt seasonal shifts.  Summer brings temperatures that can climb up to triple digits in the afternoon only to drop down to the low fifties at night.  One minute there’s sunny, open sky and the next there’s an ice storm.  I know to prepare myself for these unexpected occurrences.  But one thing I have been unable to prepare myself for is the mid-summer arrival of winter’s most daunting component: The Nutcracker. 

For the past three weeks it seems that if I’m doing something work related, it involves the pesky children’s ballet that is about as well liked in the ballet community as ice-slick wood floors.  Any dancer will tell you that by the time you reach a professional career, Nutz (as it is lovingly referred to) is usually a way to make quick money through guesting engagements, most of which are thrown together days (or hours) before the white tights and tutus are hoisted up.  To begin preparing in November seems over zealous.  To begin preparing in August?  Unheard of. 

Perhaps I should explain the reasoning behind what I initially assumed would be a dull brand of torture.  This year marks the 25th anniversary of the organization with which I began my dance career at the age of nine—The Garden City Ballet.  This company, which puts on various annual productions, has been a Montana staple since long before my family rooted itself in the Missoula valley. But since my initial dabbling as a party child in the opening scene, my parents’ involvement has only grown.  

To commemorate the milestone year, there’s a large amount of restaging going on, so in addition to the Snow scene that I created three years ago, I have been enlisted to helm what is typically known as the Arabian dance in the second act. 

To my knowledge I have participated in over ten productions of this ballet.  And in all my years performing I have danced every role from Mouse King to Sugarplum Cavalier.  Every role expect for Arabian.  This has always been the one divertissement I was typecast out of since I’m neither a WWF wrestler capable of hoisting women over my head for minutes at a time, or the aforementioned woman whose abdominals resemble a washboard.  The closest I’ve come to performing it was when I played the music for a piano recital and nearly hyperventilated.  Which, coincidentally, has been my reaction almost every day I’ve been in the studio over the past two weeks.

Perhaps this has to do as much with the fact that it’s my first time choreographing in over two years as it has to do with my resistance toward having to create movement to anything played over loudspeakers in Sears.  I’m not quite sure.  I do, however, know that I have been remarkably capable of bitching and moaning my way through the hours spent walking back and forth from the center of the dance floor to the speaker system in the corner.

At first I struggled to divorce myself from all preconceived ideas.  Obviously the fact that I never performed the role doesn’t mean I haven’t watched countless belly dancing women run around the stage with coins dangling from their bodies.  That was something I knew I didn’t want in my version.   But, oh how easy it is to list off a million things a piece of work can’t be, and still struggle to find the handful of things it can be.

This is where my parents came in.  Since they are acting as artistic directors on the project, they had already discussed a direction for the work before I set foot in the studio.  It was decided early in the process that instead of a harem girl, the variation would center on a bird emerging from a cage and interacting with Clara.  We determined it needed to be less about a woman as an object and more about an exploration surrounding the sense of freedom one gets when all one knows is confinement.  In many ways this bird’s journey mirrors the same one Clara is experiencing in the ‘land of the sweets’ after living under the watchful eye of her family for her whole life. 

The struggle for me wasn’t hypothesizing on motivation for the dance, it was finding a way to translate all of this into movement that was not only beautiful, but something a young student would be capable of performing with confidence. 

Never have I struggled so much to generate phrases of choreography.  Whereas I used to listen to a piece of music and have to lasso the images erupting in my mind, I put on Tchaikovsky’s score and found only static.  And so I bitched about how this wasn’t something I wanted to do, and more importantly that after years away from dancing I didn’t think it was something I could do. 

I stepped away.  But what I found wasn’t a respite from the world of sugarplums; instead I went from choreographing for the Nutcracker to shooting publicity for it.  In an odd way I think these shoots were what made me capable of finishing the choreography.  Never before had I worked with such a large group of people in one frame.  And more than the sheer number of people was the fact that these people were all under the age of ten.  Suddenly I was challenging myself to direct a pack of mice that could bounce from being completely interested to being completely disinterested between triggers of the shutter.  

I found that this behavior was not exclusive to the ten year olds in front of my lens.  Wasn’t I doing the same thing from moment to moment with my choreography?  The minute things weren’t going my way I was doing the early-twenties version of walking away and throwing a temper tantrum to my mom.  (Note: the early-twenties version is the exact same thing.)  Watching most of the kids push through the bad moments and deliver for a shot made me intent on finishing up what I’d started in the studio. 

And so I returned with a new sense of capability and a dash more forgiveness with myself.  Sooner than I knew it I’d finished up the choreography, and, while not completely satisfied yet, feel as if I have a solid place to jump off from.  There’s still a profound sense of disorientation here.  The Nutcracker is supposed to stay in the winter and at moments I think dance is supposed to stay in my past.  While I’m not certain I’m comfortable with the mixing of seasons, perhaps it’s not a horrible thing to not be so sure. 

You're Not Splotchy

Since finishing my career as a professional ballet dancer over two years ago I have battled endlessly with the art form’s position in my life.  I have relegated my passion to the back burner for much of this transitional period—being the all or nothing person that I am—choosing instead to focus what energy I’ve had on the task at hand, be it writing, photography or concocting a Twitter update.  

This is not a popular choice.  I am reminded so every time I am met with the question for which I have no conclusive answer: do you think you’ll ever dance again?  It comes out of my parents’ mouths, my blog readers’ fingers as they type emails, and even strangers on the street who notice my face from all of the Ranting Details billboards currently populating the Times Square of my dreams.  By now I’ve become so accustomed to encountering this elephant of a question that I find myself reciting a stock answer with the same rote delivery as a telemarketer.  I don’t know, I say, cocking my head to the side and smiling through what has become an increasingly more comfortable conversation topic.

Though I’ve had moments recently where I’ve decided to take class on a whim or choreographed a solo for myself, I have never treated dance as something in which I can plainly dabble.  For when you immerse yourself so completely in something from the age of eleven it’s nearly impossible to take a step backwards and look at it differently.  Sometimes I feel dance is a family member I recently discovered isn’t a blood relative and I have to adjust to my altered perception. I just don't know how to interact with it anymore.   

Last week, this began to change.  I set foot in a classroom to teach a corral of young students at a workshop in Missoula, Montana—the first time I’d taught in nearly three years.  I’d known for months I would be standing at the front of a room wearing jazz sneakers and doing my best to keep my voice from rattling like the change in my pocket, but I was nervous nonetheless. 

For the week leading up to the workshop I spent an hour each day concocting a lesson plan and, more often than not, laughing at my reflection in the mirror.  Where has my arabesque gone?  I wondered.  And what about my ability to balance on one leg?  Even the names of steps I’d executed daily since my twelfth birthday seemed as difficult to remember as foreign dignitaries. 

But I trudged along.  I listened to the piano plodding a three-four time signature and moved my legs accordingly.  Within a matter of hours, collectively through the week, I had carried my body through a classical ballet technique class all the way from beginning to end.  True, I didn’t execute every move with full force.  But I was proud nonetheless.  

Then the soreness hit.  Anyone who has ever danced understands the sick masochism that displays itself on such occasions; muscle soreness means you’ve been active, which can only be good, right?  Anyone who has ever not danced for two years and then danced again understands the intense amount of pain that displays itself on such occasions; it’s like jumping out of a plane without a parachute, hitting the ground and not only living to tell about it, but having to teach the next day. 

Since I figured feigning a skydiving accident was out of the question I was left with no logical excuse for calling in sick to my first day of class.  So I lifted myself out of bed and made my way to the studio.  It felt strange having removed my ego from the situation.  I walked into the building and instead of lamenting the fact that the classroom was about a tenth of the size I was used to working in I felt as eager to tackle the task at hand as I had my first day as a professional dancer.  I began to realize there was a small chance I’d actually be able to invigorate these students in a different way than their daily teacher.  I also realized I might actually be able to teach myself a thing or two in the process.

We made our way through plies and tendues.  I clapped my hands to emphasize where the accents should hit in the music.  We made our way through turns and jumps.  And I began to smile.  With each combination I grew more confident barking out corrections and demanding something more from the dancers; and I slowly realized I could give myself permission to see this whole experience as something more for myself. 

Too often I hear professional dancers discuss the parameters of their careers as being limited to the company in which they dance.  Once one achieves the level of excellence present at somewhere like American Ballet Theatre can there be anything else?  I always used to chide people with this mentality, but as I looked around my class the other day I realized I had limited myself in similar ways.  The reality is that my body still is not ready to journey back to the level of intensity at which I was operating before dealing with Epstein Barr Virus.   Even if I get to a healthy enough place for that to be a possibility I may not want it in the same way anymore.  But that doesn’t mean dance has to die for me.  Maybe it just needed to flatline for a moment before I was aware enough to bring it back to life.  

Clown Faces and Kisses

I often wonder what happened to the girls who had to endure me at middle school dances.  It was, after all, the one night where I couldn’t create excuses in order to avoid contact with the female folk my friends were so eagerly pushing me toward during recess.  Normally I’d concoct a plan, scribbled on a yellow notepad, which I could defer to any time a girlfriend called the house.  My mom would yell up to my bedroom and I’d pause the copy of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers playing in my VCR, scramble to find the written monologue of choice for the night, then click onto the phone line and regale said female with stories about my commitment to creating a new spaghetti dish or catching a deer that evening. In actuality I’d be ripping Britney Spears photos out of Tiger Beat. 

However elaborate my notepad schemes became, I was never anti-social enough to bow out of a school dance.  Inevitably, they’d be pumping Spears’s latest hit through the loud speakers and there was always a chance I could execute a bit of her video choreography in the corner if the crowd was big enough and the lights dark enough.  It was during the other songs I’d be forced to interact with my peers.  They’d reside, scattered around the cafeteria in different packs, bucking on each other like the deer I’d used as a scapegoat.  I managed to abstain for the majority of middle school, but I almost didn’t make it out of our final 8th grade dance alive. 

Our lunchroom had been converted just for the occasion: each table, usually covered in a thin paste of fruit punch and crackers, had been shoved to the side, and the white linoleum floor had been polished as to become the perfect reflector for the rainbow lights the DJ had set up.  While the college student turned MC was never the same, I always had a moment when I’d try to place where I knew them from.  He looks just like that drug addict from the D.A.R.E. videos we watched in gym class, I’d think to myself.  Yes, I’m certain that’s the cokehead from the fourth scene.  I imagined his lighting rig must have been purchased in some drug-induced trip to Spencer Gifts at the mall and his only way to feed his habit and acquire a collection of lava lamps, was to play the latest Swedish pop songs for a gaggle of pre-teens.   Not that I was complaining.  My favorite songs to lip-synch to were usually cooked up by the Swedes. 

Unfortunately, none of my friends were impressed by the fact that I knew every syncopated beat to “Bye, Bye, Bye.”  But it was the syncopation that saved me.  Any number without a thudding base line was slow enough to draw boys to girls like my Montana friends were drawn to hunting rifles. As I was the “sensitive” type in boot-cut jeans and a turtleneck my mother and sister had convinced me was the “perfect look” during a Santa Monica vacation, girls tended to flock to me as soon as the lights dimmed.  This particular night was an endless barrage of requests, as everyone knew I was fleeing town to attend high school in another state.  All through the night I obliged, certain that three minutes couldn’t be that bad, while secretly hoping one of the teacher chaperones would patrol our area for the entirety of the song.  Please, Ms. Horton, ask her to take her hands off my ass, I’d think, testing my Jedi communication powers.  My friends, meanwhile, were receiving most of the attention from the teachers due to the fact that they were kneading their girlfriends’ asses double time and licking their necks with a ferocity I’d only experienced when faced with a Hostess treat. 

My dance partners would glance over at our friends and then rotate their gaze back to me.   Each girl had clearly raided her older sisters’ Caboodle makeup case for the occasion.  Where there were supposed to be cheeks there were instead streaks of red that looked like they’d scrapped their faces along the brick wall at the front of the building.  In place of eyes: mounds of colored shadow that made Ginger Spice look like the Virgin Mary. 

Despite my confusion about the female life forms in my arms, the druggie DJ apparently had my back.  The night progressed and just as things were beginning to get uncomfortable with each dance partner, he’d throw in a party staple to ease the tension.  ‘Cotteneye Joe’ is my favorite song, I’d explain with a shrug of my shoulders.  Please excuse me while I go gallop in a circle.  And off I’d go, certain this lie was my best, most convincing ever.

It was while taking a victory lap during this hoedown of a song that I spotted a group of all my female friends standing by the Coke machine, primping Lisa for her final attack.  The lassoing motion I was making with my arm began to wilt.  All through middle school Lisa had done her best to attract my attention; she’d practically molded my face out of clay during art class one day.   (Little did either of us know that the only thing she could have molded out of clay to attract my attention was a penis.)  She persisted, and through my assortment of girlfriends I never so much as awkwardly held her hand at a movie.

Yet there they were, all of the ladies who had felt the sweat on my palm, feeding advice to the only thing standing between high school freedom and me.   My victory lap quickly turned into a panicked search for an exit path.  There wasn’t one.  And just as the song stopped and the gentle strums of Savage Garden’s “Truly, Madly, Deeply” took over, I heard the DJ stutter an announcement that this song would be the last of the evening...the last of our middle school career.  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find Lisa and her teenage clown face staring at me. 

Do you wanna dance? she asked.  Bette Midler’s song started running through my head and I wished I were in my bedroom, waltzing in my socks.  Sure, I lied, not quite sure why I was so adamantly against what all of my other friends seemed intent on groping. 

She grabbed my hand and led me to the side of the room, near the table where the special-ed kids sat at lunch.  We did our best to move our feet, but I was only concerned with keeping to the prescribed meter-stick distance rule our teachers had reminded us about the day before. 

We rocked back and forth for a moment. 

I’m sad you’re leaving, she said.  It's weird that you won't be in high school with us. 

The best answer I could give was silence.  I would have been better served to continue speaking, because as soon as the words had left her lips, those lips were on mine. It was the first time I’d kissed someone since I pecked a girl on the jungle gym during recess in fourth grade and I wasn’t sure how to react.  We continued rocking back and forth as I felt beads of sweat forming on the upper lip I’d only recently begun shaving. 

The song ended and the fluorescent lights turned on, illuminating the girls’ make-up like felt posters underneath a black light.  I backed away slowly, and did my best to smile as Lisa ran back to the group of girls and giggled about the previous three minutes. 

After a quick set of goodbyes I made my way to the parking lot and the safety of my parents’ SUV, excited by the promise of a new world where middle school dances didn’t exist. 

Bacon For Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

 

Francis Bacon doesn’t terrify me.  In fact, I can’t remember a time when this Irish painter, whose centennial retrospective recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, prompted anything in me other than pure fascination and awe.  I find that this opinion, much like my love of abstract expressionist master Willem de Kooning, is not one that is widely held among the people of my generation, and when defending myself I’m often left contorting my mouth into positions that look reminiscent of Bacon’s own alien-like creatures.  He’s just depressing, the dissenters say, citing the screaming, almost unrecognizable men and women who populate his sparse portraits as reason enough to stay in the 18th Century wing of the museum.  Yet, to me, Bacon’s work is a mirror more capable of reflecting a human’s flawed, dizzying existence than almost any other painter I’ve come into contact with.  And for that reason above all others, this exhibit is a must see. 

Perhaps this comfort around undeniably uncomfortable imagery stems from the fact that I was all but brainwashed into being a Bacon fan.  Any night when I crept out of my childhood bedroom to get a sip of water, I was met by four large paintings: one naked man hanging Christ-like on a pole at our stairway landing, one bed-sized self portrait of my father hanging perpendicular to Christ, and a diptych of flesh colored dog-men floating, with little more than a wooden chair filling out the pink and orange panels.  It wasn’t a Bacon original, but the painting, which my father had created over many tenuous hours at his downtown studio, may as well have had a page torn from a Bacon book nestled in the corner; the inspiration was clear.  As was the fact that my inoculation to this particular brand of art was well underway.  (There were only so many times I could walk out of my room and be frightened before the images came to be as comfortable as the pillow from which I’d just lifted my head.)

Walking around the exhibit yesterday I was reminded of the overwhelming amount of energy that explodes from each of Bacon’s canvases; the same type of jolt that used to pop my eyes open as I shuffled around the corner outside my bedroom at three A.M. 

For a painter who has openly discussed his distaste for Abstract Expressionism, Bacon, to me, employs much of the same visceral brush technique—where solid lines suddenly fade into nothingness and the only thing identifying the head of a person may be an anatomically misplaced eye socket—as the painters who were parading around New York City’s Soho at the same time Bacon was holed up in London’s equivalent.  But Bacon is able to construct a hurricane of movement within the single frame of one of his paintings that is more placed in reality than paintings by his American contemporaries.  You get the feeling that when painting portraits of his friends, or his lover George Dyer—as is the case with many pieces in this particular exhibit—he is not just documenting what is sitting on a stool beneath a light bulb in his studio; he is painting the energy in the room; he is painting his overall perception of the person, and every moment of interaction he has had with them is amalgamated into one frenzied blur.   Yet for all of his emotional accuracy, there's nothing realistic looking in his photos.  Perhaps he summed it up best when he said that "9/10ths of everything is inessential.  What is called 'reality' can be summed up in so much less."

Personally, what makes this exploration so thrilling is its closeness to dance.  Though the subject matter and use of color may seem more unsettling than your typical day watching a fairy princess at the ballet, the way Bacon tries to both contain and unleash his imagery through the canvas reminds me a lot of how a dancer interacts with a stage.  The most exciting performances, just like Bacon’s most exciting paintings (which is to say…almost all of them), are those that manage to respect their boundaries while simultaneously obliterating them and pouring out over the audience.  These paintings reach across the orchestra pit and demand that you pay attention. 

If yesterday’s crowd was any indication, this exhibit, no matter how unsettling, is a high priority destination for art lovers.  And judging from the handful of younger patrons, maybe I’m not the only Bacon lover in my age bracket.  After all, a man who shares his name with breakfast’s most delicious meat must have some universal appeal, right? 

So, Ranters, do we have any Bacon lovers here?