Images of Excellence

I simply had to share this series of mesmerising dance photographs. From Vanity Fair portfolio "A Dance Retrospective," Bodies Swayed to Music.

Dance combines movement and music; its best practitioners add poetry and flair. From Bill T. Jones’s totemic musculature to the Radio City Rockettes’ stylish kicks, Vanity Fair has captured some of the greatest dancers and choreographers ever.

Suzanne Farrell, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. From the March 1987 issue.

Robert La Fosse and Darci Kistler, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. From the June 1990 issue.

Darci Kistler and Peter Martins, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. From the September 1995 issue.

Gelsey Kirkland, right, with dancer Mary Mills Thomas of the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, photographed by Mary Ellen Mark in New York City. From the June 2007 issue.

Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Christina Johnson and Donald Williams, photographed by Ruven Afanador. From the March 1995 issue.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Eliot Feld, and Damian Woetzel, photographed by Bruce Weber at the Ballet Tech Foundation in the Lawrence A. Wien Center for Dance and Theater in New York. From the January 2004 issue.

Damian Woetzel, photographed by Bruce Weber in Miami, Florida. From the June 2008 issue. Plus: View more photos of Woetzel by Weber.

Christopher Wheeldon, photographed by Bruce Weber in Miami, Florida. From the August 2007 issue. Plus: Read “Christopher Wheeldon’s Leap Year,” and view more photos of Wheeldon by Weber.

Marina Tkachenko, Evgenia Evgrashina, Oksana Marchyk, and Ekaterina Bondarenko, dancers from St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Ballet Academy, photographed by Arthur Elgort. From the September 2006 issue.

American Ballet Theatre stars Ethan Stiefel, Jose Manuel Carreño, Vladimir Malakhov, and Angel Corella, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in New York City. From the December 2002 issue.

Patrick Wolf and the cygnets of the Ballet West, photographed by Tim Walker at the Mar Lodge Estate, in Braemar, Scotland. From the January 2008 issue.

Dead Poets Society

I came across these fascinating animated poetry videos of some of my favourite poets (albeit at times a little 'disturbing' to watch, in a funny way). It is so wonderfully uplifting and a blessing to listen to poetry being recited - indeed, poetry for me is the music of blossoming language.


Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Remembrance by Emily Brontë

Cold in the earth -- and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?

Cold in the earth -- and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion --
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?


A Dream within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be by John Keats



When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.


Go and Catch A Falling Star by John Donne


Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'est born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.


There is a beautiful library filled with poetry animation videos, including James Joyce reading from Ulysses (passage from the Aeolus episode circa 1921), Lewis Carroll Jabberwocky, Oscar Wilde The Ballad of Reading Gaol, William Blake The Garden of Love, Charles Baudelaire Harmonie du Soir, Carl Sandburg The People, Yes, Gerard Manley Hopkins The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo, Christina Rossetti Song, Robert Frost The Road Not Taken, Walt Whitman I Sit and Look Out, Dylan Thomas A Refusal to Mourn, Sylvia Plath Daddy, and many more.


*Bonus track: Sylvia Plath herself reading Fever 103*


Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ---
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ---
To Paradise.

Ashton's "Symphonic Variations"

A real jewel of Ashton's masterpiece. The sublime beauty of Symphonic Variations lies in its almost ascetic approach to aesthetics (lines, costumes, stage designs, and even storylines/ scenarios), stripping ballet down to its "bare essentials"—the purity and nectar in the interaction between music and movement.

About this ballet:

There was originally a rather complicated scenario, which Ashton gradually simplified during the long rehearsal period until there was virtually nothing left. Many people, if pressed, would admit to seeing some vestige of a 'winter awakened by spring' idea; and Ashton once agreed with someone who said, 'it's about the morning of the world' - but equally you can just see it as these people dancing to this music, and providing us with a glimpse of heaven.

The ballet grew from Ashton's love for the music - César Franck's Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra - and there is, again, much to be said about how he uses the music, particularly about the different ways in which the choreography responds to the piano and to the orchestra. But again, you don't need to know all this to appreciate how the dancing seems to grow out of the music, looking - like all great choreography - as if Ashton had discovered the steps rather than inventing them.

Sophie Fedorovitch's backcloth is the perfect setting, matching and enhancing Ashton's choreography in its simplicity and elimination of every unnecessary detail. She uses a light clear green with a dozen or so black lines; as William Chappell, himself a designer, described it, 'She creates boundless space and controls it gently by the few dark graph lines.' Ashton and Fedorovitch were close friends and worked together often - 'Symphonic Variations' is the most perfect of their collaborations.

(*Information above is taken from ballet.co.uk.)

Click here to watch Symphonic Variations: The Ballet, with introductions and rehearsals in the fourth (final) video of this playlist. Dancers: Steven McRae, Roberta Marquez, Federico Bonelli, Belinda Hatley, Laura Morera and Ludovic Ondiviela. Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, 2007.

Kafka is Dead - The History of Love

Franz Kafka is dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. [...] they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children wake up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone. They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.

(Excerpt from The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss.)

Poetry (i)

The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1961)

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all —
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return....


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
(by e. e. cummings)

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


[What has always attracted me to the poetry of e. e. cummings is his playfulness and delicateness in employing words and language. I adore the way he flirts with different sensory perceptions (aisthētikós in Greek) quietly and mysteriously, and brings together such an eloquent and fluid amalgamation, without anything ever feeling out of place or inadequate.]


Paradise Lost

Freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall:
And some are fallen, to disobedience fallen,
And so from Heaven to deepest Hell; O fall
From what high state of bliss, into what woe!
To whom our great progenitor. Thy words
Attentive, and with more delighted ear,
Divine instructer, I have heard, than when
Cherubick songs by night from neighbouring hills
Aereal musick send: Nor knew I not
To be both will and deed created free;

(Extract from Paradise Lost by John Milton.)


To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. (Gaston Bachelard, philosopher.)

How Much I Love You (by Leonard Cohen)

Another poet will have to say
how much I love you
I'm too busy now with the Arabian Sea
and its perverse repetitions
of white and grey

I'm tired of telling you
and so are the trees
and so are the deck chairs

Yes, I have given up a lot of things
in the last few minutes
including the great honour
of saying I love you

I've become thin and beautiful again
I shaved off my grandfather's beard
I'm loose in the belt
and tight in the jowl

Crazy young beauties
still covered with the grime
of ashrams and shrines
examine their imagination
in an old man's room

Boys change their lives
in the wake of my gait
anxious to study
elusive realities
under my hypnotic indifference

The brain of the whale
crowns the edge of the water
like a lurid sunset
but all I ever see
is you or You
or you in You
or You in you

Confusing to everyone else
but to me
total employment

I introduce
the young to the young
They dance away in misery
while I conspire
with the Arabian Sea
to create
an ugly silence
which gets the ocean
off my back
and more important
lets another poet say
how much I love you

(Poem and image above by Leonard Cohen, from his Book of Longing.)

Death of the Beloved (for M. J.)

She only knew of death what all men say:
that those it takes it thrusts into dumb night.
When he himself, though - no, not snatched away,
but tenderly unloosened from her sight,

had glided over to the unknown shades,
and when she felt that she had now resigned
the moonlight of his laughter to their glades,
and all his ways of being kind:

then all at once she came to understand
the dead through him, and joined them in their walk,
kin to them all; she let the others talk,

and paid no heed to them; and called that land
the fortunately-placed, the ever-sweet.
And groped out all its pathways for his feet.


~Dedicated to Michael J., his music, art, his smiles and gentle soul; Death of the Beloved by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Maxine, from the series “Skin,” 2000, by Alexa Wright.

Cristina Coral, My Rose Garden

Cristina Coral, My Rose Garden, from “This Living Hand” series