Author: Julia Agee

Art and Science

While art sometimes unites an audience and its creator in a basic emotion, its trademark seems to be the vast spectrum of reactions along which it sweeps people, rather than a fixed, specific thought to which it targets them. If art simply reflected reality, if it did not depend upon the idiosyncrasies of each artist, no one should attempt to paint another oak tree. It’s been done before; that bark, those leaves can certainly mean no more today than yesterday, if the view is all the same. But it is not. Staggering infinite possibilities of human perspective inform and produce art. More than art helps us to see the oak tree – how green a leaf may be, how its color changes with the season, how its shadow falls and ripples on a lake – art helps us see each other and ourselves – how we fear, embrace change, death, loss, the unknown, growth, stability, peace, shelter, beauty. But if successful, it rarely tells us how to see, but rather asks. It proposes something our minds may nibble and gnaw at for moments, months, lives.

Science permits us another strain of understanding. It gives us problems and questions as well, but unites us in answers and facts upon which we may stand, speak, search, from which we may climb together to continue and progress. It gives us relations and regularities upon which to depend, ways we may all see things the same. We choose science as our main method of understanding the world because it is more reliable than art, and because it affects the physical nature of our existence in such drastic ways. No one gets the leisure time to create much culture or art if no one’s figured out how to cultivate plants or cure and prevent some basic illnesses. But beyond these practical considerations, science also often gives us the very basis we require for art. We must all understand the concept of oak tree and shadow and perspective before we can add human meaning to the tree’s representation or distortion in art.

Philharmonic Rehearsal

On Thursday, November 19, the New York Philharmonic held an open rehearsal for their performance occurring the next week, on Tuesday the 24th. The high attendance, even of its practice session, speaks to the well-earned renown of the orchestra. The works, played in fragments, repeated and corrected and repeated, were beautifully played to the ear of a student with no musical education. For several hours, the orchestra performed slices of Liszt’s Les Préludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3, Elgar’s In the South, and selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the rehearsal, particularly to the untrained ear, was the ability of the members to change so quickly. It was plenty surprising to watch them simply follow the music, as it rose and as it plunged with the seemingly capricious moods of three quite dead composers tugging the musicians bows and sending their fingers flying along their instruments. Working off each other, the relentless conductor, and the music, the musicians could rapidly alter their pace, from creeping to galloping through the notes, the volume, from whisper to great booming noise that bounded through the hall and against hundreds of ear drums, the mood, from melancholy, timid, sweet, to dark, foreboding, passionate, triumphant. In one moment, their instruments could evoke peace and nature, in another, violent uproar.

Almost as impressive as their collective path through the music was the way these many individuals, so human-seeming in their pedestrian dress, could pull together faster than iron filings on a magnet. Some older men wore tweed suits, brown shoes, wire-rimmed eyeglasses. One women on the right wore purple mary janes; a matching sweater was draped carelessly over her chair, from which it gradually slid to a puddle on the floor by intermission. Some hair was neat, some messy, pushed up, to the side. Make-up was undone, and the colors of everyday life splashed across the stage. Before the conductor arrived, the stage emitted so many different noises of instruments tuning and adjusting that the sound of all the papers rustling and chairs adjusting and greetings slipping between breaths were barely audible. But upon the raise of the conductor’s energetic hand, instruments were poised, hands steady and the entire stage near still. So quickly, these disparate elements of humanity, at first glance no different the average person on the subway, created awe-inspiring sound. The first moments of In the South seemed to lift a person’s heart, entrance their mind with some great and captivating landscape of sound. And the slightly chilling opening of Romeo at Juliet’s grave, before the thunderous landing of doom, seems to absorb the oxygen out of the air, leaving even the musically ignorant breathless.

The Beast

Herbert Spencer was not alone in his evaluation of George Eliot’s appearance. Henry James once reported that Eliot was “magnificently ugly – deliciously hideous.” His conclusion differed. He wrote, “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.” While looks indubitably matter for humans, and rarely go unnoticed, the standards of beauty are far from our sole measurement for judging other people or art. As James suggests, the very contradiction of beauty may occasionally fascinate, even entice us as much as beauty itself, though in a divergent fashion.

Often mixed with the concept of desirability, beauty can represent the apparent primary factor in choosing mates. In some ways, the more normal a person looks, the more beautiful they are considered. Features are not too large or small, or far apart or near together, or tilted up or down. People who look too different may seem as though they have more genetic divergence from the healthy population.  Symmetry, in particular, is considered an attractive feature, most likely because some genetic malformations and parasites contracted as a child may lead to asymmetrical appearance that broadcasts the poor health of an individual. Other attributes recognized as beautiful, such as lustrous hair, may indicate good nutrition, and a malnourished person is less likely to have a healthy child. Our innate goal is to reproduce our genes, and instinct demands that we seek the best possible chances for our offspring’s survival. By choosing to reproduce with a more symmetrical or beautiful person, we may increase these chances. Evolutionarily, beauty has a place.

Even on the purely physical, biological level, however, beauty is not the only indicator of good health and fitness for reproduction. Strength, agility, resistance to disease, and, in women, ratios of hip to waist size that suggest an ability to survive childbirth are also factors.

Beyond the biology, beauty has a place in society not only as a marker of evolutionary fitness, but also as a status symbol, characterized by different traits according to the community and culture. Further, these traits are sometimes distorted from or irrelevant to what most benefits our biological imperative to reproduce. Ornamentation, coloring of hair or skin, body modification (such as foot binding, neck stretching, piercing, or tattooing), and particular body weight, whether high or low, to indicate wealth. The focus on extremely thin, narrow-hipped women in our society is especially surprising because it so rarely indicates a body prepared for childbirth. This seeming contradiction exemplifies how our societies may fight our natures, and why the standards of beauty are various and imperfect measures. The fact that surgeries, cosmetics, and clothing may be used to make a person appear closer to his or her culture’s ideal lessens even more the usefulness of physical appearances as a measure of a person. Industries revolve our desperate attempt to alter or improve our appearances, and sink constantly changing standards into our minds about the way we should and should not look.

Although rooted in biology, our ideas of beauty are flawed, and our use of them more so. In modern society, many traits lessen the value of beauty in our judgments of others. Although some suggest that employers as well as peers like supposedly attractive people more, numerous qualities overcome beauty. Even in mates, humans must seek not only good physical qualities, but also emotional and mental strengths. Emotional attraction is not against our biological drive. We must expect mates to be capable of caring and providing for young, especially considering the extraordinary span of time humans spend raising offspring. Our species requires over a decade of care before reaching even the biological minimum of independence, which is reproductive age. In our society, the education required to survive and earn a living has children legally dependent on their parents until eighteen years of age, and, according to most professional and graduate schools, financially dependent for more than a decade after that. The persistence, intelligence, and loyalty necessary in a mate to support children become increasingly important as the time of dependence lengthens.

In professional relationships, the non-physical characteristics of a person are valued even more. The work ethic, intellect, and skill of a person are highly esteemed in complex, interdependent societies with specialized duties. Models may be expected to be thin and beautiful, but if someone has an amazing voice, artistic talent, or scientific knowledge and ingenuity, their appearances become nearly irrelevant in our evaluations. While something about George Eliot’s “deliciously hideous” face may have left Henry James “impressed, interested, and pleased,” he was most likely largely captivated with her as a writer. He reviewed many of her works, and considered her a literary genius, though, as all are, imperfect.

Eliot’s language was beautiful, often brilliant. But it was not, and did not portray all in a symmetrical, immediately appealing fashion. Like all good writers, Eliot utilized breaks with balance to make a point to her audience. In art, while the classically symmetrical and euphonious appeals to us, it is not all we seek. The ability to revolt an audience is perhaps as important as the ability to charm it. The asymmetrical composition of a photograph or painting may be used to throw the viewer off. The subject may be horrible or hideous – a remnant of war or disaster, and still inspire an audience. The apparently ugly is often as necessary for a work as the beautiful. In art, as in people, we are ever aware of beauty and its absence, but also of its inability to sustain us alone. When we forget the insufficiency of Beauty, she leaves us in the lurch. Without the dark, the painful, the ugly, our art is empty. Without a better, morally or intellectually based standard for others, our societies and lives wither. Without respect for ourselves as human beings, irrespective of subjective beauty, our energy and possibilities waste away.

In Pursuit of Truth

Art lies. Inspect this human, face contorting, robe rippling, hand rising. The human is stone, not flesh nor life nor gentle give that is the truth of man. Glance down this street, mark the sun creeping over the water between buildings on the left, about half as far as one can see. There is no street, only a lines of pigment and oil brushed on canvas. That house so far away remains four feet from where one stands to look, and that house so near does too. The far house in truth is larger than the near, yet perhaps an inch by two, while the other dominates a foot by half. Listen to the sorrow and the torment of this music. But the instruments and players are without distress. Follow the rise of this leader in his time two thousand fifty eight years before last Wednesday, and watch his fall by night. But this young man is no leader, this dilapidated stage no ancient kingdom, and this fall no longer than a day before another rise. Even when art has truth – a man did rule a kingdom, a soul once suffered loss, a street did stretch into the distance, a sun did rise, a face did cringe – it only lies the better. Mixed with its tricks of perspective and tone, these small truths  merely render the lie more convincing, like a half-truth told to calm an anxious parent. Even now I lie, when I say art, abstract idea it is, may lie or have or do.

Yet art is no half-truth to calm, it is a bold-faced lie to drudge up some part of the soul that hears or sees. It riles and worries and inspires. Great art lies to tell great truth. When a child lies to a mother, he hides something, but when an artist lies, she reveals something. A fraction of the rage, the peace, the pain, the loss humanity has faced in infinite ways, arranged in an elegant composite of one face or phrase, while directly untrue, divulges to the viewer something deeply true about himself.

Dance as Language

Fundamentally, language allows communication between people. It uses shared and accepted representations of both concrete and abstract ideas to give people ideas of others’ experience, thought, or knowledge. Among all cultures, even those in which language has evolved for thousands of years independent of other influences, language is recognized by its grammar, context, and meaning. The word “language” commonly represents spoken and written words that, although learned, seem to originate in common human capacity for reason. In several respects, however, dance is also a human language.

Dance, as a form of language, communicates ideas. It uses an accepted vocabulary of movements to express ideas of things and thoughts. Emotions especially can be almost universally conveyed through movement. As people from different cultures can understand the emotions in unfamiliar music, so too can they in dance. Dance, like language, can have grammar. Phrases of a series of movements, such as a series of jubilant leaps, or timid, tiny steps, may convey one idea or tell one part of a story. These phrases are punctuated by pauses, like the commas of language, and stops, like periods. When a choreographer defies accepted grammar, especially in a formal dance such as ballet, they use the very lack of grammar to make a point. The change in center of balance that Mr. Adela spoke of serves such a purpose. Like language, dance can be further abstracted from obvious representations, so that the ideas conveyed are less clear. Poems with gibberish words violate the expectations of the reader, and in doing so prompt thought in a manner similar to modern dance. Modern turns traditional dance vocabulary and grammar on its head, or heel, or knee.

Unlike language, however, dance generally conveys ideas more generally. Rather than a phrase as specific as, “I am in love,” dance conveys the joy and experience of love through the force and rhythm of its motions. It is also used less often to communicate the ideas of individuals than the ideas of communities, as Alvin Ailey’s Revelations tells the shared stories of many people with the movements of a few, or as Native American tribal dances once represented an entire community’s attempt to communicate with a God. Dance, in its general ideas and common group mentality, in fact represents a more universal method of communication than words do, or can.

Fall for Dance Review

As its title hints, the Fall for Dance Festival intends to engender excitement about dance across a spectrum of techniques and periods. It aims to yank the audience by the collars of their souls onto the stage. On October 3, 2009 the performers at New York City Center accomplished this to various degrees. Some tugged, some seized the viewers.
If they did not overwhelm the crowd, the first three pieces, Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose and Dying Swan and Sang Jijia’s Snow, did show off talent and tension.
Spectre not only highlighted the control and strength of the male dancer, but also reminded the audience of Spectre’s role in the history of ballet – it was among the first to feature the male dancer as the centerpiece. Yet Spectre also moved forward the art with another unusual trait – it placed the female character in the position of power as the dreamer, and the male as the object of the dream. The dancer Saturday night was romantic as a rose, but seemed to flow through the movements with too sweet and innocent a posture, even, and perhaps especially, for the dream of a young woman back from her first ball.
An extremely brief performance, Dying Swan pairs well opposite Spectre as an example of agonizing death expressed in ballet with as much elegance as youthful romance. The solo was performed poignantly with the broken, harsh movements of arms as wings above the small, controlled movement of the legs. As a swan nestling to sleep, the ballerina’s positioning of her body so recalled the image in nature that the movement spoke as clearly as the title.
Snow, the other solo, approached the stage with a much grander use of space, time, and movement. A more modern piece, Snow sets the dance on a large, empty black stage with artificial snow falling from beginning to end, accompanied by fairly repetitive music. Jijia wore simple, all black clothing and utilized the entire stage, including back corners quite invisible to some students on the far left and right of the theater. His movements were often circular, sweeping, and abruptly broken, and built to frantic tension as the snow began to fall more heavily. His control of himself, and his ability to move limbs as though he wished they wouldn’t, seemed to give a plausible view of some universal human struggle. The lack of landmarks of forward movement may have detracted from Snow’s ability to connect with the audience, but the dance still pried a few jaws gently open in wonder as it concluded, the only sound left the snow falling on the stage.
The titan of the evening, Alvin Ailey’s classic Revelations took stage last. It ground out all the man and music power necessary to trip the audience into pure awe at dance. A staple of the company’s work for about four decades, Revelations still translates with fresh potency on stage. Its many dancers do not neglect it with the disrespect sometimes rusted onto repeated classics. Its movements, sounds, colors, meanings transcend time and race at the same time that they address them quite specifically. Parts of “Wade in the Water” and earlier, “I’ve Been Buked” seem to echo the wing-like stretching and faltering of Dying Swan, but rise with the burden of slavery, and of all mankind, weighting the arms, such that the audience cannot help wonder at such strength. The duet in “Fix Me Jesus” has less romance but vastly more trust than Spectre’s pair. The pastor’s heavenward raising of his partner, and their mutual control and balance, touches the viewer with more force than the leap of impersonal idealized love in Spectre. The jumps and crouches and broken sweeps of the trio of men in “Sinner Man” also reflect some movements of Snow, but in their couple minutes on stage bring more frustration and struggle than all the chaos Jijia leaves in the snow.
By the end of the night, the audience’s soul had certainly fallen for dance, crashed again and again with the rhythm of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.”

Marriage of Figaro Review

An audience member with no knowledge of music can evaluate an opera only by the effect it produces within him. Performed at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday September 22, Le Nozze de Figaro made such a lay opinion easy to form. The music engendered the sensations of mirth, suspicion, melancholy, mischief, and humor in listeners at precisely the moment called for by the dialogue. As it was an Italian libretto written from a French play, with a score produced by a German composer in 1786, translated into English, German, and Spanish for Met viewers in 2009, the music’s correspondence with the story clearly transcends both language and time. Further, the music’s compelling beauty and the plot’s eternally familiar theme of adultery and mockery of the upper crust appeal to the innate passions of humans now as they did when first performed. Figaro still makes people laugh.

In addition to the execution of Mozart’s score, the set of Figaro contributed a great deal to the nuances of Tuesday’s performance. For a student arriving at Lincoln center – with a head congested with numbered carbons, feet resentful of Figaro for dress shoe blisters, and gut expecting over three hours of high-pitched, absurdly costumed women in moody settings – the first scene was a stunning surprise. As the curtains rose, morning spilled into the theater. Soft white artificial sunlight like the illumination of an eastward facing window in open country just after sunrise flooded the stage from the left. The light brown wood of the high shelves, ladders and knickknacks filling the back wall created an invitingly rustic and elegant morning as Susanna and Figaro, clad in light and cheerful tones, fussed over marriage veils and beds on opposite ends of the stage. The pale and simple background well represented the lighthearted joy and hope of the young couple, and the lighting emphasized the initial clarity of the characters’ minds. The dark red robe of the count, the playfully light blue outfit of the young Cherubino, and the muted muddy colors of the scheming adults complicate the scene visually in reflection of the intrusion of a tightly interwoven society into the plot, agendas hidden behind false politesse.

The setting of the second act – the bedroom of the countess – stands out in the opera as a sharp collection of Figaro’s themes and its portrayal of the preoccupations of the aristocracy. To the left, a vanity emphasizes fixation with appearances. Center in the back is a bed, symbolic of sexual desire and marriage; it is built into the back wall as it is into the background of the characters’ lives. The screen to the right, acting as a shield for a variety of hidden characters, conveys the incessant concealment of oneself and one’s motives. The light, having fallen some with the day’s progress contributes to the declining coherence among the jumble of persons and lies.

Finally, after the third act takes place in a sort of hall or study, the set morphs with the transition to the fourth and final act with the most impressive staging drama of the night. The entire set rotates until a courtyard area is revealed, with the whole surface of the prior act tilted at a striking angle. The madness of the day, with the various plots to catch betrayal and mistrust in partners comes to its climax here. The lighting has greatly diminished to evening darkness, and it is not until the countess appears in sparkling white at the end that light again reappears strongly on stage, as clarity and again emerge.

Even for those without musical knowledge, Le Nozze de Figaro, as performed and staged at the Met this Tuesday, was an impressive experience.

The Rococo Art Movement

          While the heavy and dramatic Baroque movement faded across Europe in the early eighteenth century, the Rococo artistic style was developing in France under the reign of Louis XV. It lasted through the beginning of Louis XVI’s rule in France, waxing and waning slightly later throughout the rest of Europe as Neoclassicism took hold. Although Rococo shells, scrolls and arabesques appeared first in the palaces of French royalty,the decline of absolutism that held the royalty together inspired artistic developments in the Rococo period. The unsettling ideas of John Locke and his ilk had begun to challenge the certainty and order of absolutism; this fidgeting of the intellectual community helped engender new artistic ideas as well. Lightness distinct from the Baroque period, an emphasis on natural curves, patterns, asymmetric design, a playful attitude, the theme of the return to nature, and an abundance of abstract foliage all characterize the Rococo style. Contemporaries called it “modern style” to contrast with Baroque (Pignatti 10). For all these traits, however, it maintained the habit of excess in the upper classes of France and the many countries that sought to emulate its court.

          As art scholar Terisio Pignatti notes, although the term Rococo cannot encompass all the results of the “intense creativity both in spiritual and in practical matters” throughout Europe during the first half of the 18th century, it does include a vast development of “similar imaginations… in similar directions” in art in that period on the continent (Pignatti 7 – 8). In architecture, interior design, and paintings these elements appeared first in France, especially at Versailles and other royal chateaux that were built, renovated, decorated, and furnished at the time. French painters Antoine Watteau, known for his depictions of pastoral scenes, and François Boucher, a favorite of the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, were especially known for their work in the Rococo style. Giovanni Pellegrini and Giovanni Tiepolo of Venice were renowned for their paintings and frescos, as well.

          Boucher’s Diana Resting exemplifies many aspects of Rococo art, with its lightness and asymmetry. For a more complete idea of Rococo art, however, a look at the architecture is extremely important. You can check http://www.pitt.edu/~tokerism/0040/rococo.html for a few examples. 

Diana Resting, 1742

 

Work Cited:

Pignatti, Terisio. The Age of Rococo. London: Hamlyn, 1969. Print.

Work Consulted:

 Kimball, Fiske. The Creation of the Rococo. New York: W.W. Norton, 1964. Print.