Aliza Final Project

RANDOM ART AND DESIGN IN AN EVOLVING WOLRD

Danseur Étoile The Opera Ballet of Paris Philippe Starck Design Phenom Katrin Thomas Living Fashion

TREND REPORT: BENT WOOD

DANSEUR E TOILE THE OPER A BALLE T OF PARIS

THE RIGHT STUFF: MODERN FURNITURE FIT FOR A CL ASSIC EICHLER

LIVING FASHION: THE PHOTOGR APHY OF K ATRIN THOMAS

HOW TO SHOP FOR A SOFA

NE W BOOK RE VIE WS: LE CORBUSIER LIVES ON

HOLY HOUSE: CHURCHES IN MODERN DESIGN

IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN TOK YO

PHILIPPE STARCK: DESIGN PHENOM

NE W ARTISTS: R ASHID JOHNSON, HAERI YOO, STEPHAN SEHLER

ARTIST DIARIES: TOM SACHS AND VALESK A SOARES

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DANSEUR ÉTO LE The Oper a Ballet of Paris

STORY BY CLIVE BAR NES ▪ PHOTOGR APHY BY GÉR ARD UFER AS When nearly forty years ago I switched (overnight and a subsequent lifetime) from being a native Londoner to become an immigrant New Yorker, I knew that one of the things I would miss most about London would be Paris, and what is nowadays their tunnel-blessed proximity.

What I didn’t know was that one of the things I would miss most about Paris was the Paris Opera Ballet. And this is not simply because I am a Francophile, although I am; it’s more a reflection of the important place the Paris Opera Ballet occupies in world classic dance.

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No, the repertoire is not as fascinating as New York City Ballet’s, or even as individual as The Royal Ballet’s— for one thing, the Paris Opera Ballet has for centuries not had a major choreographer to call its own. Its traditions are not as securely preserved as the Royal Danes’, nor are its male dancers as strong as those of American Ballet Theatre or its women as strong as the Kirov’s. But the Paris Opera Ballet is a fantastic company. It was not always so.

I first encountered the company on my first trip to Paris, in 1949. I was already not young—well, not that

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young. And I was already a sophisticated dance aficionado (actually, over-sophisticated) and emerging dance critic (although, armed with industrial-strength binoculars, I was still paying for my own tickets in the farthest, cheapest reaches of theaters). The company did not impress me overmuch—it seemed infinitely less interesting than the various independent troupes of Roland Petit and Boris Kochno. In fact, apart from my first sight of Symphony in C (with the original Paris East minus Tamara Toumanova) under its French nom

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de guerre of Le Palais de Cristal, and with those fancy Leonor Fini designs, I was totally underwhelmed.

I stubbornly remained so on many later occasions.

Even a two-week immersion season by the company at Covent Garden in 1954 (my diaries note that I saw eighteen ballets, mostly by Serge Lifar, spread over fourteen performances) did nothing to make me a fan, despite the presence of both the wondrous Yvette

Chauvire and the lustrous Nina Vyroubova, two of my most beloved ballerinas of the twentieth century. Subsequently, when in Paris I would go to the company as a mild evening relaxation. Journalistically I at least made copy out of, say, John Cranko’s 1955 La Belle Helene (underrated, by the way) or Gene Kelly’s 1960 Gershwin piece Pas de Dieux (Claude Bessy was divine, but Jerry Lewis could have done better choreography) or A U G U S T 2 0 13

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Pierre Lacotte’s 1972 adequate reconstruction of La Sylphide (not as good, I thought, as Victor Gsovsky’s earlier attempt for Petit), but my rating of the company among the majors was pretty much the lowest of the low.

By now the troupe was involved in a succession of directors. There were fine dancers, but no company. I caught the occasional “event”—Helgi Tomasson’s guest debut as Albrecht in Giselle, for example, or the revival of Yuri Grigorovich’s Ivan the Terrible, with the marvelous Jean Guizerix (a great Robbins interpreter, by the way), Dom-

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inique Khalfouni and, also a favorite at ABT, Michael Denard. Yet I still didn’t take Paris’s dancers as seriously as its cooking until I had an awakening in October 1977.

Every year the Paris Opera holds promotion examinations for its dancers--apart from the etoiles and the senior soloists—with a jury consisting of the Paris Opera administration, a delegation of dancers, and a few foreign outsiders, who in 1977 consisted of Kenneth MacMillan, Asaf Messerer, and myself. I realized that since Bessy had taken control of the ballet school some

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five years earlier, the standard of the younger dancers had risen. But seeing them en masse was an extraordinary experience. Bessy and her teachers had formed a troupe to reckon with—an instrument for dance.

It is Rudolf Nureyev who, rightly so, is given the credit for pushing the POB into the first rank. His inspiration, with his prescient promotions and his inculcation or a sense of style but even more aspiration, was vital. But the dancers were there before Nureyev took command of the company in 1983, and they re-

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mained after his resignation in 1989. And they are there today, even though the school, to judge from its appearance in New York last year, is not currently producing dancers of the quality of Bessy’s earlier years.

No real matter—the students will improve again.

And the company, as I saw in Paris at the beginning of the year, catching two performances of Lacotte’s pallid restaging of Paquita at the Palais Gamier, and at the Opera Bastille a strike-struck, virtually scenery-less, revival of John Neumeier’s imaginative Sylvia (but bring back the Ashton and give it to the French!), is still that same marvelous instrument. I’ve never been much enamored of Ag-

nes Letestu and Jose Martinez, but their alternates in the leading roles in Paquita, the glistening Clairemarie Osta and the elegant Jean-Guillaume Bart, were superb. In Sylvia, Eleonora Abbagnato, Delphine Moussin, Nicolas Le Riche, and Manuel Legris showed just that style, spirit, and sheer technique that has made today’s Paris Opera Ballet one of the wonders of the dance world. I miss Paris—and nowadays the dancers as much as the city.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.

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LIVING FASHION THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF KATRIN THOMAS

BY EVAN WALKER

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G

etting Katrin Thomas to explain her own photographs is a daunting task, nonetheless, everything that she needs to say about her work is deftly woven and crisply realized. Asked how she would describe her photography to the average person, she answers, “I would have to say that it is related to movies I’m creating at

that particular moment. I’ve always been inspired by the films of Godard, Antonioni and Truffaut. They are very real, yet they are not. Like the way all these directors use simple but profound language in an abstract, humorous, romantic way. In my photography, I try to explore in a similar way.” Thomas’ photography re-enacts slices of everyday life and

trends, to create a poetics of glamour, misery, ambivalence, attitude, ennui, etc.

A 1997 photograph that she shot in Los Angeles shows two young girls—each barely twenty years old—exquisitely decked out in fetching single-breasted, Chanelinspired plaid suits. Their bodies are crisscrossed with lemon-yellow and A U G U S T 2 0 13

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ochre chalk-bands beside a gleaming blue swimming pool, accentuated by the girls’ pale nude legs partially immersed in the pool. The alluring saturation characteristic of the California sun is evident, with its attendant aura of leisure, but the ironic subtext of chic boredom underscored in this picture, and not least punctuated by one of the girls’ yawning, exemplifies the care that Thomas took in elucidating and, in effect, demystifying the everyday life of privileged Beverly Hills girls. Fantasy and desire have a clear purpose in fashion: people want to look through and not at, fashion photographs. They want to be entertained, amused, comforted and, hopefully, live vicariously through glossy photographs of beautifully posed, manicured models. But in celebrating these iconic, spoiled girls, Thomas also betrays the limitations of luxury that under-privileged girls—unaware—long for.

The edginess of Thomas’s photography is derived not from its casualness, but from its cinematic urgency, which stirs the viewer while retaining a photographic stillness that invites contemplation. The urgency of the cinematic style captures fleeting moments. Looking at (not through) Thomas’ sepia-toned portraits of impressionable young boys and girls one by one, we find that, a touch cruel, she catalogues all the pretenses of “cutting-edge” fin-desiècle: from punk grimace, homeboy-wannabe, Rastafarian anti-coif, to Soho pseudo-downtown art scene.

Gone are the days when bohemia, underground, cutting-edge or rudeboys meant something. Nowadays

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faking it succeeds more than being it.

A pose, a look, an attitude or a style can be bought or sold in a second. In a five-minute makeover, a suburbanite can be transformed from a pale young thing into the It girl of the moment. “Escape from reality” is no longer necessary; reality has become an escape, and perception the only reality. Our life has become as real as cloning, test-tube babies, breast implants, nose jobs, face-lifts, sexchanges, race-changes, spin doctors, clever lawyers or sexgate. What are we left with but our true picture, a silhouette whose true color is greenback? Hardcore capitalism com-

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modifies everything and anything.

In Puff Daddy’s words, “It’s all about the Benjamins”.

As the popularity of fashion as a worthy cultural phenomenon grows in learned circles, so the role of fashion photography will progress from a mere decorative medium to a demanding one with critical framework that can enable us to see beyond our glamorized decorum. Fashion is not only contagious, it is also worth catching, regardless of cultural, religious or gender homogeneity. Perhaps playing, for instance, with the homogeneous trope and stereotype of what it means to be Asian, female,