Gallop, don’t saunter, to see Boston’s Ballet magnificent three-piece production “Wings Of Wax”, featuring works by Balanchine, Kylián, and Ekman, running at the Boston Opera House until April 2.
The show opens with a luminous plain blue background that showcases 11 dancers in the sweetest pink and blue costumes (courtesy of the Miami City Ballet). George Balanchine’s pleasing choreography to the music – romantic excerpts from Gaetano Donizetti’s final opera, Donizetti Variations – provides a sense of innocent joy touched with comedic moments. We are served a mix of playful trios and duets, the highlight of which is the delicate grace of principal dancer Misa Kuranaga with her outstanding duet partner soloist Junxiong Zhao. Interesting postscript: Donizetti Variations is one of the first pieces the Boston Ballet ever performed back in the ‘60s. It remains a delightful confection.
The second piece is Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián’s Wings of Wax. In contrast to the plain stage in the opening performance, the curtain opens on a large upside-down leafless tree hanging from the rafters by its roots and circled in never-ending rotations by a huge spotlight. The 8 dancers are all in black and the lighting comes from piercing spotlights, mostly from above. The score – a passionate quilt of selections from Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, John Cage, Philip Glass, and J.S. Bach – showcases the stunning musicality of Kylián’s choreography.
The movements of the dancers are odd and beautiful and often it is hard to distinguish among the limbs of those who are dancing together. In one section, the women move in almost imperceptible slow motion while the men weave among them with a desperate energy. In another the women are like marionettes as the strings of the instruments are plucked. When the dancers speed up, the circling spotlight circles more quickly. The choreography uses unique angles and unusual balance, but the end result has a startling and fresh lyricism.
Following the second intermission, we are treated to Cacti, the giggle-out-loud 2010 work of Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman. A hilarious if deprecating voice-over combines with selections from Joseph Haydn, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Andy Stein, and Gustav Mahler. Our very thoughts are cleverly ridiculed just as we think them – from our impressions of the gender-erasing costumes to any post-modern deconstruction we might be tempted to apply. There are pompous words of wisdom as well: “We are not dancers, nor musicians, but members of the human orchestra.”
With individual platforms as their props, the 16 dancers use them as a stage, a percussion instrument, and then later as building blocks. Dressed like topless samurai, the dancers laugh as they slap themselves squatting on the platforms. At one point they bring in pots of cacti which are brightly lit until they tumble. The dancers have removed their dark sashed pants and now appear naked in leotards that match their skin colors. It is a disconcerting “look” – and utterly unique. The evening ends in wit and wonder.
Kudos to Principal Guest Conductor Beatrice Jona Affron and the Boston Ballet Orchestra for their superb performance of this broad range of selections, including the onstage presence of a string quartet during Cacti. The entire evening is delectable, and its accessibility makes me hope that the Boston Ballet will use it as an opportunity to reach out to those who don’t get to see much ballet, including the younger generation.
My friend Eleanor and I hopped into Panera, knowing we could grab a booth and a nibble for a long-awaited visit. I have a home-made button on my backpack that says “Ask Me About My Book.” It’s been there since my last book, and I never remember until some says, “So tell me about your book.” Which happens not infrequently.
It’s a low-cost marketing strategy that relieves me from approaching people and lets them ask if they’re interested. The guy behind the counter is interested and so I give him a little leaflet about Lillian in Love I keep in my bag. We get our food and settle in, when the guy comes around and says that the whole staff wants to buy a copy together – how much does it cost? He leaves and comes back with $13 and I inscribe it to the “Panera Staff.” When Eleanor goes up to order a cup of coffee, they give it to her on the house.
A minute later a young woman who works in the back comes out and says she wants to buy two copies – one for her and one for her best girlfriend. I run out to the car where I keep some in my trunk. We get to talking: she’s half Brazilian, half Dominican but says her Portuguese isn’t all that good. She says she finds the topic very interesting – and I wonder which topic she means – old lesbians? senior housing? She asks me if I’ve written other books and Eleanor mentions Lillian’s Last Affair. She wants a copy of that too. I get one out of the trunk of my car and when I return she’s got another tenner for me. We hug.
It reminds me of my friend at dance, who’s just in the midst of doing an advanced degree and who is a fantastic dancer, who astonished me one night when I had the thrill of leading her in a dance. She said that having read my book, she feels like she’s dancing with a celebrity. An actual author. I realize that not everyone hangs out, like I do, with a lot of writers. These exchanges all made me feel so good. I’m desperate to feel good because otherwise, with fascism looming, I don’t feel so hot.
GET OUT is about the objectification, use, and abuse of the Black body. This is what makes it a horror film. It is also about solidarity and the crucial friendship between the protagonist Chris (played vividly by Daniel Kaluuya) and his captivating best buddy Rod William (Lil Rel Howery). Even though the two guys were rarely in the same space at the same time, TSA agent Rod was a viewer favorite. GET OUT is not, as some reviewers say, a satire about the awkward social interactions of Rose and her parents’ circle of friends when they meet her new Black boyfriend. The sustained tension of the film bears the weight of what racism feels like – not just what it looks like. Huge kudos to Jordan Peele (of the comedy duo Key & Peele) for giving us this “social thriller” (as he calls it) that he says has been living in his head since he was 13.
My thoughts:
GET OUT is the only horror film I’ve ever seen. So all the references to classic horror flicks that other friends of mine spotted in it went over my head. Nonetheless, my impression is that the horror isn’t the blood per se: it’s the racism. To me this film is about the Black experience of racism. It conveys how something that might appear to a white person as a micro-aggression, may very well have a much bigger impact on a Black person because of the context of their lives. Two hundred and fifty years of slavery were followed by the Jim Crow era, itself followed by contemporary types of institutional racism. Top this all off with a hateful President and a vicious regime. This very dangerous, very heavy reality can turn what seems like a small insult or a well-meaning asinine remark into something that feels perilous and threatening.
I understood this by thinking through the experiences behind my own fears:
Try to stick with me as I attempt to explain. The same day as I saw GET OUT, I happened to be watching a TV show called House Hunters while I was washing the dishes. It’s just one of those low-budget cable series about people looking for houses and realtors trying to meet the conflicting desires and needs of the couple/family/etc.
This episode featured a husband who, because of years of sports, had several knee operations and hated climbing stairs, so he was insisting on a ranch house. His wife said over and over to both the realtor and the husband that she had to have a two-story house because she would feel unsafe for herself and any future children sleeping on the ground floor. She repeated that she needed a staircase between herself and any potential intruder. The husband never heard what she was saying. As a big beefy white man he saw her desire for a two-story as frivolous.
But I could relate to what she was saying. I have been raped. It happened in the 60s. Not a day goes by, hardly an hour goes by, since then, that the fear of being raped again isn’t hovering close to consciousness. I relate to the house hunter’s fear of living on the ground floor. When I’ve stayed in the rural cabins of friends to write, I am afraid of the noises at night – not because it might be a bear or a wolf – but because no neighbors are close enough to hear me if I scream when some man breaks in.
Racism continues to color every experience in this country.
The house-hunting husband didn’t get it. He hasn’t experienced that kind of threat and has insufficient empathy. And too often white people don’t get the reactions of Black people to what the whites see as “compliments” or innocent “mistakes.” And not just because of slavery – which formally ended only in 1865 (just 50 years before my dad was born – not so long ago). Books have helped me understand the continuum of racism until today. When I read The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson, I understood for the first time how profoundly murderous the Jim Crow south was after slavery. She told of the man who was fatally tarred and feathered because he pointed out to a white shop-keeper that he had given him wrong change. How one man was mangled viciously, never to really recover, because of a false accusation that he had stolen a chicken. How surreally severe segregation became.
But although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ostensibly ended Jim Crow, in fact other kinds of institutionalized racism were developed, as I read in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This includes almost every arm of the criminal justice system, from the massive funding of the prison-industrial sector, to draconian sentencing regulations, to the use of profiling tools like “stop & frisk”.
Now we are facing an openly racist, fascist agenda by a regime unlike any we’ve seen. The unrelenting, tenacious, pernicious racism of the United States is the true horror. I’ve rarely seen a film that has made me think so hard and so long about the experience of racism, and how, within my own life as a woman, I can find connective paths to insight about the oppression of others. I am grateful to GET OUT.
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