dang it. argentina scored one.

"To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking." -Agnes De Mille

i had the weirdest dream last night - i was seriously taking ballet class with david hallberg and marcelo gomes. we were all in a row together about to do center work, the last row in the class, and i was so intimidated and kept on wanting to switch rooms to attend another class. but marcelo was so nice and kept on saying it was ok, i should stay. what a weird dream, wonder what the heck that one means??

maybe my dream inspired me, but i went to ballet class for the first time in a long time. it was really nice, after work i was tired and achy and almost decided not to go but i made myself go. and even tho it was about 110 degrees inside the studio (an added greenhouse effect + sweaty bodies) but what an emotional release and a nice break from every day life. kicking up into attitudes after a day of sitting in a chair all day was liberating. i talked to the teacher afterwards too after running into her in the hall, and she told me i have the feet to be in ballet. sigh. so much regret! of what could have been...

the dance theatre of harlem at the white house was on pbs tonight. arthur mitchell, the found of DTH, is not a very good choreographer (ten finger pirouettes in a row does not make a dance) but amazing what he faced when he danced at NYCB - he was the first african-american in a major ballet company. audience members yelling racial slurs, murmurs of surprise every time he was on stage. amazing. another amazing thing was to see rasta thomas dance very briefly - his split jump was absolutely breathtaking, very powerful.


david hallberg and gillian murphy

world cup intrigue

i'm definitely not in the state of world cup fever, but more interested now that i entered our lab pool for betting on the wins of the quarter finals, which again, i know nothing about. i picked teams based on how hot the teams seemed, hehe (they "seemed", because again, i don't know anything about them or what they look like). so my picks are germany, italy, brazil, and england.

representing england: david beckham

a beautiful summer wedding

in the hills of berkeley, what a nice wedding! congrats to bernette and sam! every detail was so well thought out, it was so personal and lovely. bernette made a beautiful bride.

 

need to relax this weekend! going to do regular house stuff, and try to fit in some exercise by ice skating and escape this 110 degree heat that heats up my room like a sauna. 

© Gregory Jbara

a happy birthday greeting from the broadway stage! hehe he cracks me up~ anyways, had the perfect birthday - a laid back dinner with friends, exactly what i wanted. i guess if i had to change one thing would be to add my family as well...

it was a good day! i hope this year holds good things for me as well. hopefully some data, surrounded by love, a lot of laughter, and quiet moments of fulfillment.

awake and sing!

"She's so beautiful, you look at her and cry! She's like French words" - Ralph Berger, played by Pablo Schreiber, in Awake and Sing!

i heart new york

went on another crazy whirlwind trip to ny~ i bought my ticket last minute in the trenches of finals, when i was looking for anything to look forward to. i continued my streak of fitting in as much theater as I can every day that I'm there. was so much fun!

arrive tuesday around midnight, ny time



wed: bought rush tickets for threepenny opera (check out the link, i love the preview) with alan cumming, cyndi lauper, ana gasteyer, and nellie mckay. director says about cindy lauper: "Cyndi Lauper, making her stage debut as the prostitute who betrays Macheath, is a natural. "When she sings, she embodies the song in ways that many singers don't," Elliot says. "I thought, 'I bet she can act.' And she can."" cyndi lauper was surprisingly really good (usually when "famous" people are in shows, they're more for advertising and not b/c they're good - i find that my favorite actors are the lesser known more broadway-experienced actors), and nellie mckay and jim dale was also notably great.
wed night: american ballet theater, doing giselle with diana vishneyva and vladimir malakhov. breathtaking, jacques d'amboise once said malakhov dances as half animal, half nobleman. and that's exactly how he dances.

thursday: lunch with jen at the south seaport, and got tickets to see the color purple, which was surprisingly good. (in that link, check out the song that starts around 1:30 in the video link). my favorite song! felicia fields stole the show, and this song was really uplifting, but too truthful to be funny. i don't think i've ever cried so much at a theater event, it was really embarrassing. i really thought this show was going to be a long musical oprah show, but it was so much more than that. also, the hottest guys on broadway!! definitely see this show, esp with the original cast. felicia fields alone is worth seeing this show, her love scene was worth the price of the show.

"I feel sorry for you to tell you the truth.
You remind me of my mama!
Under your husband's thumb,
You're under your husband's foot!

Why you so scared I'll never know.
But if a man raise his hand...Hell no!
Hell no!!"



friday: went to queens! visited jen at work, and smuggled her out of work so she could go and play with me. we then thought about going to MOMA but then dropped to sleep due to sheer exhaustion. :) at night, we ended up going to see dirty rotten scoundrels, so glad i did!! it was such a great show with most of the original cast members (like the tony award winning norbert leo butz), as well as new additions like lucie arnaz (lucille ball and desi arnaz's daughter) and jonathan pryce (who took over john lithgow, pryce was the original engineer in miss saigon). the audience was great, the show was amazing. at the stage door, gregory jbara saw me and said, "Jolene!" hehe he's so nice, he said he wanted to take me and Jen backstage, and so we went and got a backstage tour. and afterwards, he ended up talking to jen and me for another twenty minutes - i'm convinced he's the most charming guy on broadway. he was even kind enough to dip jen, like he does in the musical to lucie arnaz. hilarious. he told us stories of his college days at juilliard as well.

i guess i'm so into theater b/c that was my first love - to be a ballet dancer on the stage. if i could sing and act, i would love to be a broadway star. :) so i definitely live my theater dreams through people like greg jbara. so much fun!





ok i digress. one more half day to go: my flight on saturday left at 8:30 pm, so we popped by to pastis for breakfast with ken, went to billy's bakery for their red velvet cupcakes, and then ran to broadway for a last matinee show. :) i went and saw awake and sing! with mark ruffalo, lauren ambrose (of six feet under), zoe wanamaker (madame hooch, the herbology professor, in harry potter), and pablo schreiber (who was amazing!). it was my first really good play, and it was so mesmerizing. i was struck with how transparent a play is. i got swept up in the family's lives and their sorrows and their life decisions. mesmerizing.

what a great week. back to work today, but totally worth it. started the week with mild disappointment with my experiment. oh well. it makes me feel like i'm back. :)

"You are the music while it lasts." -T.S. Eliot

ack, jason mraz coming to reno again... really wish i could go! he is so adorable in concert. yes, i'm obsessed.

may have data for the first time in a year... going to show my PI today, hopefully won't be disappointing.

"i like my hair... it is pleasant to the touch"



wow, i look so happy - definitely trying to keep that happy face in mind as i plow through finals week.

above is a picture with stanley bahorek, who plays leaf coneybear in the broadway musical, 25th annual putnam county spelling bee. last night was the adult version of the show - a rare event which I really couldn't miss! so of course I went, and made a fellow graduate student go with me (we both have finals). it was really fun! very irreverent, hilarious, sometimes shocking, and different. IL and i were preparing for our road trip home when the cast came streaming out. i talked to stanley for a bit - he said the show was about 90% rehearsed, and 10% ad libbed. he said his most shocking moment was when he was given the word "tampon" to spell. that word scares a lot of men, and it must be worse for gay men! :) in the picture above, we were trying to re-enact one of his lines in the show, when he sings, in one of his character's spacey moments, "i like my hair... it is pleasant to the touch. i toss my hair, a bit too much..."

omphaloskepsis: contemplation of one's own belly button

studying sucks. need to log off and stop chatting...

and blogging...

finals week is officially about to begin. it started off with my last set of rotation talks today - so glad it's over! afterwards, i was so exhausted that i convinced all the graduate students to come to the country club near my house for a dip in the pool and laying out to tan. we hung out there for over two hours, gossiping about our graduate group. :) it was a beautiful day, and the lake view was amazing as well. i hadn't really spent time with the graduate students til now, but it was nice. i never get to use the pool there either! i really should go there more often - read on the deck by the lake, or get into a sailboat if i want to.

a ballet primer



i love these pictures. the one on the left is of maria kowroski, of the new york city ballet. the one on the right is of kaitlyn gilliland, who is creating a huge buzz with her long extensions and height (she's 5' 9", super tall for a ballerina) when she was a student at the SAB. even tho kaitlyn is an amazing dancer, you can definitely see the difference in extension between the two. maria's extensions are longer with a beautiful uplifting line - her arms and her face is uplifted, and her neck continues the line of the arm in front of her, giving more of a yearning quality that's hopeful as well (in my words :) . i think more than the poses tho, maria kowroski shows more commitment to the movement in that moment, with more emotional maturity. gorgeous.

did you see the guy behind the girl? i almost missed him in the picture~ these pictures were taken at the exact same moment in one of my favorite ballets of all time, serenade, by balanchine, because the dance melds into one with the music. i first ran across this ballet in my dance history class, and i thought the story behind it was just as charming. read below: he choreographed this for a beginning adult class.

"Of the ballet Balanchine wrote, "Serenade was my first ballet in the United States. Soon after my arrival in America, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, and I opened the School of American Ballet in New York. As part of the school curriculum, I started an evening ballet class in stage technique, to give the students some idea of how dancing on stage differs from classwork. Serenade evolved from the lessons I gave.

"It seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they had never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’s Serenade to work with. The class contained the first night, seventeen girls and no boys. The problem was, how to arrange this odd number of girls so that they would look interesting. I placed them on diagonal lines and decided that the hands should move first to give the girls practice.

"That was how Serenade began. The next class contained only nine girls; the third six. I choreographed to the music with the pupils I happened to have at a particular time. Boys began to attend the class and they were worked into the pattern. One day, when all the girls rushed off the floor area we were using as a stage, one of the girls fell and began to cry. I told the pianist to keep on playing and kept this bit in the dance. Another day, one of the girls was late for class, so I left that in too.

"Later, when we staged Serenade, everything was revised. The girls who couldn't dance well were left out of the more difficult parts; I elaborated on the small accidental bits I had included in class and made the whole more dramatic, more theatrical, synchronizing it to the music with additional movement, but always using little things that ordinarily might be overlooked.

"I’ve gone into a little detail here about Serenade because many people think there is a concealed story in the ballet. There is not. There are, simply, dancers in motion to a beautiful piece of music. The only story, a serenade, a dance, if you like, in the light of the moon."

Ruthanna Boris, an original member of the cast of Serenade, in the book I Remember Balanchine relates that "when Heidi Vosseler fell down in that first rehearsal Mr. Balanchine said ‘Stay.’ Then he put Kathryn Mullowny behind Charles Laskey, who was near sighted, to guide him to the fallen Heidi, with her hand over his eyes. ‘He can't see anyway’ Balanchine said. From these beginnings the adagio grew. The well known moment where the man promenades the soloist lady in arabesque by holding just her knee was used for the first time by Balanchine in La Pastorale (1926) for Diaghilev’s company. Mr. Balanchine has said that he was most inventive in his youth and borrowed freely from his earlier inspirations.""

article here