I saw a Chuck E Cheese ad just after we all talked about it, after having not really seen one for eons. To name an evil is to create it, I think. Also,

Clovis says you just shot up the list for this month's "Good Minion!" competition.

Hee.

I haven't seen live ballet in years and really need to. I mean, I went to the little local dance recital here in town and it was cute and all, but there was very little of it that I would actually call ballet.

Which reminds me, one of the things I've been thinking about wrt:SYTYCD, I think one of the reasons the hair-flinging fall on the floor version of "contemporary" as a dance style bothers me is because of ballet. I feel like it's being used by dancers who studied ballet but never made it en pointe, like me, and all the flinging about is to cover up the lack of technical ability. (Insert disclaimer here: I know this is not true of the whole genre, and I've seen some excellent, technically sophisticated yet expressive contemporary dance. I'm making sweeping generalizations and I know it.)

I had to wikipedia it because I'm not clear on the history and evolution of the dance styles since I quit as a teenager decades ago. But for me, modern dance was a direct pushback at ballet; a rebellion. It took and acknowledged the forms of ballet and deliberately messed with them, angles instead of curves, flat instead of pointed. Wikipedia talks about the use of gravity, instead of ballet's defiance of it, and I agree with this in the ways it created interesting shapes and worked with the space instead of ignoring it.

But contemporary seems to not be of that struggle; its version of acknowledging gravity is the dramatic fall to the ground. I don't mind groundwork itself, I just feel like contemporary seems to think that the act of going to the ground brings the pathos and some sort of edginess.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that contemporary as a style portrayed by SYTYCD contestants seems to me to be too much of what I could do myself, leaping about the streets in collegiate self-absorption, and too little of structure and bursting out of that structure in expression.

Hmm.

That was more thinky then I meant to be.

Anyway, this weekend's plans for me include work, work, housework and deciding if I want to hang out while the SO plays two shows or skip them.

Oh, weekend plans also include working out how to get photos off my camera because...

There is a nest of baby bunnies in my flowerbed!!?!

We'd seen the digging, and yesterday I spotted a brownish hind end digging in further. I thought it was a toad and made all these excited plans to buy a little toad house for the flowerbed.

But no, today I looked again and it's four tiny baby bunnies, smaller than the palm of my hand! I now realize it's been the mom that Seabiscuit's been chasing off when we take him out for his routines. So I guess it'll all be on leash from now on until summer. Between that and the bird's nest on our deck, we're a veritable nursery.

So cute.

Rick Moody has a similar argument regarding writing, i.e., there's a difference between knowing the rules and breaking them, and not knowing the rules. [Insert "kids today" rant here.]

Yeah, I think that's the crux of it.

Breaking the rules is an earned struggle. Being ignorant of the rules is an unearned liberty.

But having made the argument, I can now see another side of it, and that is that today's dancers are looking at the whole of previous dance, which includes classical and modern and everything else, and working from within that framework. Merely taking elements from those things and using them is not the problem; it's like sampling in music. I'll need to think that through.

However, I reserve my right to have crotchety old views when necessary. Hee.

It's sooo slow here. I feel like maybe today isn't a work day, and nobody told me.

Breaking the rules is an earned struggle. Being ignorant of the rules is an unearned liberty.

But the rules also change over time. I'm not too conversant on the rules of dance, but at least in musical theater, ballet was once a pretty radical idea. As was using dance to advance the story line. (I understand Oklahoma! was the big breakthrough for both.)

So wouldn't today's young dancer/choreographer learn a different set of rules than previous generations did?

Baby bunnies? How cute, and yet what a nightmare from a gardening perspective. I think you you should name them, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

I think one of the reasons the hair-flinging fall on the floor version of "contemporary" as a dance style bothers me is because of ballet.

Remember how in the eighties it was legislated that Debbie Allen had to choreograph every single dance routine on television except Solid Gold? And about three seconds into every number... whomp dancers rolling around on the floor.

I was jaded about modern dance by the time I was 12. That's just no way to be.

Of course, at a certain point if a form is going to last it will evolve into its own expression and not remain merely a reaction.

I know, right?

They're right against the stakes we put in as a bed edging (to keep out rabbits, hee, guess that was ineffective. As it turns out our local jackrabbits can get over a 3 foot fence, so no edging in the 'verse can stop them.) so there's almost nothing I can do about them. They're also directly underneath my drip irrigation pipe, so now I can't irrigate the bed from my rain barrel (which is full for once, with all the thunderstorms!).

Fortunately, that bed was intended to be drought tolerant, and the only thing actively growing there right now are the two russian sages. The wind blew away the allysum seeds and the rabbits ate the grape hyacinths, which are past season anyway. I was intending to put some annuals in there, but I guess not!

I totally can name them. They're utterly indistinguishable from each other, although I can already see there's personality there; one keeps edging the others out of his preferred spot (see the gender discrimination assumption I did there?), so it may not be long before I'm able to tell the difference.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that contemporary as a style portrayed by SYTYCD contestants seems to me to be too much of what I could do myself, leaping about the streets in collegiate self-absorption, and too little of structure and bursting out of that structure in expression.

Since I don't know anything about dance, I always think it's interesting how different the judges' reactions are from one performer to another, because sometimes I can't tell the difference -- or I think something looks stupid that they rave about!