Letter from New York
3
November 2003.
Copyright ©2003 by
Mindy Aloff
Letter from New York
Jinx
Falkenburg, one of the pioneers of live talk on television, estimated
that, during the 1940s and ‘50s—when she was producing two
radio shows and a live t.v. show daily, five days a week, with her husband,
Tex McCrary—she conducted over 16,000 interviews. Many of them were
with political figures, such as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. Some
were with intellectuals, such as Albert Einstein. And thousands were with
entertainers, among them, Fred Astaire, whom Jinx interviewed while dancing
with him. Among the youngsters on the production crew for these programs
were William Safire and Barbara Walters, who closely studied Jinx’s
interviewing style and went on to incorporate it into her own way of approaching
subjects on camera.
Journalist; cover girl; movie starlet (she played a bit part in the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen movie Cover Girl, whose script was based on her own career); champion swimmer, tennis player, and golfer—Jinx only danced for pleasure. She was never formally trained. However, her lanky frame (5’9” or so), intense athletic discipline, perfect posture, and lush, high-boned beauty gave her the look of a dancer. Had her life taken a different turn, she might well have been a great one. Two weeks before her death, on August 27th of this year, she excavated several publicity photos taken of her on the set of Tahiti Nights, a hapless movie from 1945. One shows her in a vivid leap, somewhere between a saut de chat and a grand jeté; another shows her poised in sous-sus on high, 7/8th point, her legs pulled up like the stems of martini glasses—each producing one smoothly continuous line that might have been drawn by Al Hirschfeld.
Looking
at these images, a dancegoer is reminded that a fundamental part of one’s
effect in dance is a matter of the cards that Nature has dealt: proportions,
musculature, flexibility, stamina. I think of what the Martha Graham dancer
Phyllis Gutelius once observed in an interview I conducted with her during
the 1970s: that a dancer has two bodies—the body that she or he
is born with, and the body that she or he creates. Jinx Falkenburg lived
a tremendous, rich, ranging life that included heroic acts of generosity—entertaining
some million G.I.s in Burma, China, and India during the Second World
War, cofounding North Shore Hospital in Long Island and participating
for decades there as a volunteer. I expect to chronicle some of them in
another context: her body, lovely as it was, couldn’t compare with
the dimensions of her heart. Still, it was one of the great bodies of
the 20th century, photographed tens of thousands of times; and the playfulness,
the fire, the joy in being alive that animated it belonged to a generation
that included Maria Tallchief, Janet Reed, Lena Horne, Alicia Alonso,
Rita Hayworth, Jeni LeGon, and a host of other stage and screen goddesses,
as well as to my mother, who, like Jinx, never studied dance but loved
it anyway—a generation that, when it stepped out, often went dancing.
It was in their blood to make their own fun, with their swinging skirts
and shapely gams and unself-consciously immediate relationship to rhythm
and song. Their bodies eventually betrayed them, yet they never lost that
cocktail of realism and humor that W.W.II served them when they came of
age. They are the girls encapsulated in Fancy Free, Diversion of Angels,
Gaîté Parisienne, La Valse. Young dancers who impersonate
them today have to be coached to produce the spontaneity they dispensed
with such seeming effortlessness and élan.
Jinx’s memorial service, a celebration of her life organized by her elder son John McCrary, took place at the Congregational Church of Manhasset, Long Island, on Saturday afternoon, November 1st. Members of her family and several close friends spoke affectingly, and the church’s choir sang selections from operas and cantatas by Delibes, Vivaldi, Brahms, and other luminaries with a perfection of tone that parallels the sound of the choir at the Metropolitan Opera.
On
Saturday evening, I attended a second facet of heaven: Soirée
Baroque en Haïti, an imaginatively programmed
and impeccably performed evening of music and dance at the Alliance-Française,
produced by The New York Baroque Dance Company and the early-music orchestra,
Concert Royal. For this show, collaborators included the Dallas Black
Dance Theatre and several master drummers from Haiti, Panama, and Canada
by way of New York. Soirée Baroque marries reconstructions
and free impressions of the French court dancing imported to Haiti prior
to the 1804 slave revolution there with theatricalized possession dances
of Haiti’s native practitioners of Vodun, for which, according to
a program note, dance constituted a “sacrifice to the Gods. . .the
greatest gift [of] one’s entire being.” When the dancers in
heeled shoes and the dancers who were barefoot, each separately wonderful
in their own realms, intermingled in an Allemande to “Le Devin du
Village,” music composed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one saw in art
what one would never have seen in life: an Apollonian abstraction of how
dancing can level differences of race and class by requiring attention
to a process larger than any individual. The French made slaves of the
Haitians; however, all of them have equal citizenship in the contredancing.
It is a utopian vision of society as well as of art, and it was powerfully
argued by all the performers involved. Most touching also was the performance
by Concert Royal, distributed over the evening, of the three movements
from the Violin Concerto in C by Joseph Boulogne (also known as Chevalier
de Saint-Georges)—who, as Richman explained, was a 19th-century
Caribbean virtuoso of color who almost became the director of the Paris
Opéra. (In 1775, the year Boulogne was appointed the music director
for Queen Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI wanted to make him the Opéra’s
director as well, but withdrew that appointment after protests over the
composer’s race.) It is a very good concerto, and the adagio, especially,
speaks with a feeling that transcends the centuries.
Yet
the vision of this extraordinary program only persuaded because the dancing
and choreography across the evening were so fine. I single out the aquiline
flights of Edmond Giles and the liquid charm of Ingrid Abbott from the
Dallas company in Raboday (choreographed Marcea Daiter, dancer
and NYU professor); and the New York Baroque’s David Rodriguez and
Caroline Copeland, whose Orpheus and Euridice duet to Glück (choreographed
by Turocy in period style) could have stepped directly out of a painting
by Watteau, with all the rose petals and piercing thorns still dewy fresh
(perhaps, given the rather brisk tempo of the "Dance of the Blessed
Spirits," the phrase should be "skittered out.") I was
especially moved by two moments: the figure for the arms in a waltz, danced
by Copeland and Timothy Wilson (and reconstructed by Elizabeth Aldrich),
in which one saw the couple’s limbs momentarily gel into a rectangular
window with a hand lapping over the sill, like a scarf, and the pre-curtain
appearance of Jean-Léon Destiné—choreographer, legendary
star of the Katherine Dunham company, and scholar of dance history—who,
with charismatic dignity, voiced welcoming remarks on the art and spirit
of dancing that started the evening on a very high level, indeed. It seems
unfair that this complex and fascinating evening of dancing and music
should only have had two performances (there was a matinee on Sunday,
November 2nd). The fact that the theater was only half filled on Saturday
is an excellent particle of evidence on behalf of the thesis that, however
the times we live in might be characterized, the word “reason”
is not a part of it. –Mindy Aloff
Soirée
Baroque en Haïti
With The New York Baroque Dance Company (Catherine Turocy,
Artistic Director; Dancers: Caroline Copeland, Sarah Edgar, Ani Udovicki,
David Rodriguez, Seth Williams, Timothy Wilson)
Dallas Black Dance Theatre (Ann Williams, Artistic Director
and Founder; Dancers: Ingrid Abbott, Nycole Ray, Melissa M. Young, Edmond
Giles, Garfield Lemonius, Armando Silva)
Concert Royal (James Richman, Artistic Director and Harpsichord;
Cynthia Roberts, Judson Griffin, Baroque Violins; Tamara Meredith, Baroque
Flute and Viola; James Gallagher, Baroque Violin and Viola; Christine
Gummere, Baroque Cello; Melissa Slocum, Violone)
Drummers for Haitian Dances (Damas Fan-Fan Louis, Master
Drummer; Paul Daiter, Jean Mary, Rogelio Teran).
Special Guest Speaker: Jean-Léon Destiné
Program
I. Prologue
Violin Concerto in C Major, Opus 3, #2 - Allegro (Joseph Boulogne, dit
Chevalier de Saint-Georges)
Haitian Overture: Welcome by Jean-Léon Destiné
II. Social Dances from the French Colony
La Valse (Reconstructed by Elizabeth Aldrich; Dancers: Caroline
Copeland and Timothy Wilson)
Menuet à Quatre (Music: W.A. Mozart; Period Choreography:
Catherine Turocy; Dancers: Sarah Edgar,
Ani Udovicki, Seth Williams, Timothy Wilson)
Koye
Asaka (Contredanse) (Choreographic Reconstruction: Marcea Daiter;
Dancers: Nycole Ray, Melissa M. Young, Garfield Lemonius, Edmond Giles,
Armando Silva)
III. Violin Concerto in C Major, Opus 3, #2 – Adagio (see above)
IV. Pantomime
Colonial French: Les Caractères de la Danse (Music: Jean
Féry Rebel; Choreographer and Dancer;
Catherine Turocy)
Story Dances of the Haitians: A Haitian Myth (Choreographic Reconstruction:
Marcea Daiter; Dancers: Ray, Garfield Lemonius, Edmond Giles)
V. Dances for the
Sailors and Stevedores
The Hornpipe of John Durang (Choreographic Reconstruction: Carol
Téten; Dancers: Seth Williams, Timothy Williams)
Raboday (Choreography: Marcea Daiter; Dancers: Ingrid Abbott,
Garfield Lemonius, Armando Silva, Edmond Giles)
VI. At the Salle de
Spectacles (Haitian opera house, burned down 1804)
Dance of the Blessed Spirits (Music: Christoff Willibald von
Glück; Choreography: Catherine Turocy; Dancers: Caroline Copeland
(Euridyce), David Rodriguez (Orphée)
Violin Concerto in C Major, Opus 3, #2 – Rondeau (see above)
La Nouvelle Yorck (Music: anonymous; Choreography: M. Roger,
reconstructed by Catherine Turocy; Dancers: Nycole Ray, Melissa M. Young,
Ingrid Abbott, Sarah Edgar, Amando Silva, David Rodriguez, Seth Williams,
Timothy Wilson)
VII. Haitian Spirit
Dances
Vodun Zépaule
Yanvalou
VIII. Drum Solo (Damas Fan-Fan Louis)
IX. The Contredanse
Allemande (Music, Le Devin du Village, by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau; Period Choreography: Catherine Turocy, assisted by Marcea Daiter)
Originally
published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 1, Number 6
November 3, 2003
Copyright
©2003 by Mndy
Aloff
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