October 11, 2017 Revisited Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring By Vanessa Manko Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Vanessa Manko revisits Pina Bausch’s, The Rite of Spring. Pina Bausch, The Rite of Spring, 1984. Performance view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 2017. Photo: Stephanie Berger “Dance, dance otherwise we are lost,” Pina Bausch, the German choreographer and artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal, famously said. I first saw—or rather, experienced—Pina Bausch when I was an undergraduate studying abroad in Paris. I had trained in dance since I was six years old, but I had recently left the ballet company I was dancing for, putting an end to what had been only the very beginning of a career. To say that I was lost because I was no longer dancing would be an understatement. I had fled to Paris to fill the gaping hole that ballet had left within me. I would learn French, study art and culture, travel, and take in all that Paris and Europe had to offer—but still, I had lost my way of expressing myself, and I had not yet found another artistic outlet. I had no way of dealing with the terrible grief and lassitude that followed me to Paris. “You take yourself with you,” my mother told me, wisely, before I left. All that fall and into a very cold winter, I tried to adjust to my new, chosen role as a student. But underneath all that, I was a brooding former ballet dancer, and I walked the boulevards of Paris trying to feel once again. I longed for the light and grace and beauty that had been, for so long, my existence. My identity had been built within ballet’s rigorous daily routines and the discipline of beginning each day in first position at the barre. Dancers are different creatures. They are cloistered in studios all day, rehearsing or performing late into the evenings, and they have a certain predilection for perfectionism. It’s a monastic life. I found myself in civilian life feeling as if I were one of the fallen, cast out of ballet’s mighty kingdom. “Why did you quit?” people asked. It was painful to hear that word, quit, the sound of it like an axe striking wood. “It just wasn’t working,” I’d say, as if it were a divorce. But I had stopped because I wanted to go to college, and I yearned for something more—life, knowledge, food, art, books. And so, Paris. “You’re a dancer. Your approach to the world will always be through movement, through your body,” a therapist once told me. But I ran as far away as I could from dance. I took up swimming and running, and I ran straight into the life of the mind. What saved me were books and my first tentative attempts at writing. It was in Paris that I had the first inklings that I might become a writer. By the spring of that year abroad, I felt able to, at least, see dance performances again. I took advantage of the student rush tickets at the Palais Garnier. It was 1997 and Pina Bausch was restaging, on the Paris Opera Ballet, her 1975 masterpiece, Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Truth be told, I had not heard of Bausch. I was familiar with all kinds of dance genres and techniques—Graham, Cunningham, Balanchine, Cecchetti, Vaganova, Limón—but nothing could prepare me for Pina Bausch. Read More
October 11, 2017 On Poetry Thorn Vine on the Wall By Anthony Madrid I don’t remember what I was talking about, that day in class, but somehow I found myself explaining about the Shijing. The Shijing, I said, is the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry. The poems date back to the Zhou dynasty, which fell apart in the year 256 B.C.E. They are not the oldest poems in the world, but they are old, old. Most of them—and definitely the ones that everybody loves and quotes—sound like the lyrics to folk songs. My paddle keen and bright Flashing with silver Follow the wild goose flight Dip, dip and swing Dip, dip and swing her back Flashing with silver Swift as the wild goose flies Dip, dip and swing That is not a poem from the Shijing. That is a chant the kids did, in canoes, during camping, when my friend Michael Robbins was a ten-year-old nature boy in Colorado (during the Zhou dynasty). I cite it because it is exactly, and I mean exactly, like the poems in the Shijing. Here’s one. Judge for yourself: Read More
October 11, 2017 Comics The Life of a Memoirist By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 10, 2017 On Music Thelonious Monk and Me By Fred Hersch In honor of the centennial of Thelonious Monk’s birth, the jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch shares a few thoughts on one of his heroes. Thelonious Monk has been quoted as saying, “A genius is one who is most like himself.” By that standard, Monk was an undisputed genius. He was among the inner circle of jazz musicians who pioneered bebop, along with the alto-sax master Charlie Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the pianist Bud Powell, and others. They played together at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in the early 1940s, and Monk emerged from that scene to create some of the most distinctive and enduring music in all of jazz. Thelonious Monk (1917–82) has fascinated me for more than forty years. As a budding jazz pianist on the local jazz scene in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1970s, I was hipped to him by some older jazz musicians, and intrigued by him in every way. As a jazz pianist and composer myself, I have performed something written by him in almost every concert or club performance of mine in the last twenty years. Monk’s works, some of them cryptic and difficult and others just plain fun, are designed as springboards for improvisation. Everything he wrote fits in a book of around a hundred pages—compare that to the volumes of work by Mozart, Bach or Beethoven! Yet his canonic compositions, which are subjected to reimaginings in almost every music style, still retain their essential “Monkishness.” His tightly constructed themes and challenging harmonic progressions take years to master. Read More
October 10, 2017 Bulletin Women at Work By The Paris Review We are proud to announce Women at Work—our first collection of interviews in nearly a decade. Introduced by Ottessa Moshfegh and illustrated by Joana Avillez, the twelve interviews in Women at Work span the history of The Paris Review, from Dorothy Parker (1956) to Claudia Rankine (2016)—by way of Isak Dinesen, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Jan Morris, Joan Didion, and Hilary Mantel. Intimate, deep, full of surprises, these classic interviews will be a source of inspiration and instruction to writers, students, and anyone else who cares about the creative process, or about the specific challenges faced by creative women. Printed on acid-free paper, in a limited edition of five thousand copies, Women at Work is available exclusively from The Paris Review, with all proceeds going to support the magazine.
October 10, 2017 At Work Feeling Foreign: An Interview with Hernan Diaz By Joel Pinckney Photo: Jason Fulford In Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant, traverses the western expanse of nineteenth-century America on his way to New York to find his brother. Along the way, he gains the reputation of a terror and a legend, much to his bewilderment. Håkan is an atypical Western protagonist. He is a foreigner inhabiting a space typically reserved for American desperados, and, though a figure of physical prowess, he is emotionally and psychologically unsuited for life in the American territory—he kills, but he is haunted by it, “overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness … a stillness that had nothing to do with peace.” I met with Diaz last month at a café in Chelsea. He described the café, with its kitschy diner-like booths and railway-themed decor, as “irresistibly hideous”—a characterization perhaps apt for his protagonist, a figure of endless intrigue whose form provokes others “discovering what a man could be.” Diaz was candid, eager to discuss his work (and share his cheesecake). We talked about the usefulness of considering his book in light of the Western tradition and the American experience for immigrants today. INTERVIEWER Håkan Söderström comes to the American West without any knowledge of the English language. Before he learns English, your narrative is told in such a way that the reader experiences spoken English in the same way Håkan is experiencing it, given no dialogue that Håkan himself wouldn’t be able to understand. How did you decide on that technique? DIAZ It was the result of working within very tight constraints. I was worried about abusing archaisms and relying on a hokey Western vernacular. I didn’t want the book to sound like the transcription of the fake dialect in some bad Western film. How do I make these other characters talk, then? Oh, wait a minute—Håkan doesn’t understand what they’re saying! To me, one of the most fascinating formal problems in literature is point of view, because taken to its ultimate limit, I think it’s also an ethical problem, since it’s related to power. How much about your characters do you know? How far into situations or people can you see? Is it right, just to solve a narrative problem or achieve an effect, to break the laws you had set for yourself? I stuck with Håkan’s point of view in a very drastic way, in that regard. If he doesn’t understand, neither do we. Read More