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(Courtesy AJC Decatur Book Festival)

In a continuing effort to dump my reporter’s notebook on this week’s cover story about the Atlanta Ballet’s collaboration with Big Boi, I thought I’d turn an interview with former Creative Loafing dance critic Thomas Bell into a “guest blog,” something I hope to do more of in the future. I should confess that not only did Tom cover dance for four years at CL, he’s also an old friend of mine. But more impressively, he now serves as co-chair of the AJC Decatur Book Festival’s Programming Committee, and is a member of the festival’s board of directors.

Tom’s comments, which barely made the story, provide a rather keen insight and context for big, considering that he’s probably one of the few Atlantans who has seen both the Joffrey Ballet collaboration with Prince (Billboards) and the Atlanta Ballet’s collaboration with the Indigo Girls (Shed Your Skin). Enjoy …

First, a little back story for my ballet studies. I was a competitive cyclist in college. I attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Minnesota has very long, bitter winters, so we always struggled to find ways to keep our legs strong in the winter. I’d seen that old “Brady Bunch” episode where one of the boys takes ballet to get better at running the hurdles. So I signed up for ballet. I wasn’t very good at it. Not. Very. Good. At. All. But my teacher was patient with me, kept helping me grow and improve in whatever ways I could. It did help my cycling. After college, I stopped racing bikes, but by then my interest in dance had become a thing unto itself. So I kept taking classes. My ballet teacher, Toni Sostek, died soon after of lung cancer — like so many ballet dancers, she was a smoker — and I haven’t taken ballet since. But I’ve taken a lot of modern dance.

I saw Billboards, a rock ballet set to music by Prince, up in St. Paul, Minn., when I lived there. Prince is from Minneapolis, so it was a good place to see it. Billboards was actually a four-part ballet by four choreographers, unified only by their use of Prince’s music. They were Laura Dean, Charles Moulton, Peter Pucci and Margo Sappington (who later choreographed the Indigo Girls/Atlanta Ballet collaboration Shed Your Skin). As you might expect with such an endeavor, some of the pieces worked better than others. My favorite was “Sometimes it Snows in April,” choreographed by Dean. It was minimalist, serialist, moved like a beautiful silver and brass clockwork. The movement would have been at home in a Philip Glass composition. I think it worked best because it didn’t try to be like Prince, didn’t try to be a rock star. Rather, Dean found the mathematics of the music, and she choreographed to that, and left the music to give the emotion.

Much of the rest was a good deal flashier. I particularly remember one male dancer who started standing, and then very, very slowly bent back, arcing … until at last his hands touched the ground. It was to “Purple Rain,” I think, and it was like a ballet dancer would do in a break-dance battle: showing off. And of course everyone screamed and clapped and whooped it up. I’d never seen that happen in a ballet performance. It was exhilarating. I was casually studying ballet at the time, had been for maybe two years. I asked my ballet teacher, Toni Sostek, what she thought of the show. She said something like, “It was OK for what it was.” So that was the other side of it, I guess. For a lot of ballet purists, Billboards was too much flash and novelty, not enough refinement, subtlety, or complexity. I saw her point. I still liked it.

I saw Shed Your Skin at the Fox during the 2004 re-mounting of the production. For the record, I’m a longtime Indigo Girls fan. One summer during college, I worked at a bike shop, mostly assembling and occasionally repairing or selling bikes. My boss was a fundamentalist Christian. On the radio, he would only play light FM or AM talk. Shows like “Swap Talk,” where folks call in hoping to trade a Ford F-150 engine block for a working washer/dryer combo. It drove us all nuts. One day, one of my co-workers brought in the self-titled Indigo Girls cassette. Their lyrics included words like “God” and “Bible.” Boss didn’t listen too much more closely than that. It was OK with him. One of my happiest days at the bike shop was spent putting together bikes while listening to the Indigo Girls. Later, living in Minnesota, I went to one of their concerts on the Swamp Ophelia tour. As you can imagine, big cheers to “The Mississippi’s might. It starts in Minnesota … .” Emily’s guitar solo in “Touch Me, Fall” was one of the best things I’d ever seen a guitar do.

Shed Your Skin was also a mixed experience for me. The Indigo Girls have that mix of little bit country, little bit rock ’n’ roll, and of course a lot of folk bringing it all together. Shed Your Skin had the hardest time with the rock ’n’ roll — dancers going through the motions of being tough and bad-ass, but doing so with dainty feet and barely touching the floor. But the ballads they handled much better, allowing more weight to settle into ballet’s native lyricism. Quite beautiful. I think maybe there was a story that was supposed to hold it all together, but if so, it hasn’t stuck with me. Having Amy and Emily performing live onstage added an extra electricity to it all. Not just that the music was live, but that they weren’t in the orchestra pit. They were up there, surrounded by dancers, blurring the lines between Amy and Emily’s performance and the dancers’ movements.

Overall, I think ballet, like any art, has to risk trying out new things, even if sometimes those things will turn out silly, flashy, unrefined. Otherwise it becomes a museum piece art, and who can blame the next generation if that doesn’t excite them? Not all these collaborations of new music with ballet work. Ballet companies have to try them anyway. It’s the only hope of remaining relevant, and alive. They have to take chances, enter unknown territory, and be willing to fail. Often. Masterworks don’t come along often. They don’t come along at all though if no one is pushing the envelope.

I so much prefer going to a ballet that’s trying something new and yet doesn’t quite work over yet another highly refined production of “Swan Lake.” I think all of these experiments are vital to the life of ballet. This is living art, and living art is messy. Some of it doesn’t work. But every once in a while it does, and then it’s extraordinary. Billboards, Shed Your Skin, and Ramblin’ Suite (the Atlanta Ballet paired with the Red Clay Ramblers) have all stuck with me, not because they were masterpieces — they weren’t — but because they were the heartbeat of ballet still alive and growing.

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