The Charleston Ballet Theatre performed their version of The Great Gatsby last night.

From reading about the event, I was very interested to see how literature translates into dance.

The theatre chose to use narration. So, in the beginning, to introduce all the characters, the narrator–a speaker–bounced around the novel to introduce Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom–his mistress, of course–and Jordan Baker. Then the narrator continued to bounce around so the story of Gatsby, a man who has done everything to end up in West Egg across Long Island from East Egg and his long lost love, Daisy, makes sense to those in the audience who might not have read Fitzgerald’s novel.

The music used in the performance was the best part. It was clear to the audience that the songs, their lyrics, were chosen carefully and specifically to add to the time and place of the story being told through dance.

At some points I almost did not feel like narration served the performance as well as adding an element of drama would have. I wanted the dancers to speak. I know that’s know what ballerinas do, but since they were already creating a hybrid of dance and literature, I thought it could have been taken further.

The dancing was beautiful despite the chosen narration, and it’s worth checking out–they will perform again tonight at 7 p.m., 477 King Street.

James Dickey’s widow, Deborah, prefaced reading his work this afternoon at the Circular Church by paraphrasing a quote that basically said a celebrity only truly fades when what they were famous for fades. Which said to me, a huge Dickey fan in the audience, that he is still very much a celebrity.

The event turned into something much greater than a poetry reading. Deborah Dickey allowed the audience into their home and marriage. She was candid. She spoke of her low confidence throughout, being a loner married to a people person, and of being lucky enough to sleep in while her husband got their daughter ready for school every morning. She shared his daily schedule: he rose at five, played the guitar and read for two hours, braided–the term was used loosely–his daughter’s hair and got her off to school, met with his secretary at nine, wrote until 12, lunched, tended to business, spent time with his family, and was in bed by nine. Hearing about his day-to-day, his walls of first edition copies of books, his love of bluegrass music, was a true gift for a literature lover. It helped to create another dimension, a connection to his art.

The audience was read three poems, and while the last lines of them all will stick with me, I will more so remember, as I venture more into Dickey’s work, his influences, Byron, Hardy, Rilke, and all of the personal things I learned.

Deborah Dickey told the crowd that her favorite part of Dickey’s poetry was that immortality was always woven in. She said, “There was always some way out with Jim.” And I’m sure still, even over a decade after his death, that his work consoles her. Her grief was still noticeable. She referred to her husband as a genius, and, even if you hadn’t known who he was, you would have believed her because of her sincerity. She is someone who is still very much in awe of her good luck in love.

Deborah Dickey was followed by two of James Dickey’s students from the University of South Carolina. They both gave great accounts of who he was as a teacher. One of the students said he desperately wanted to write free verse poetry at the time, in the 1960s, but Dickey would not allow them because he said, in reference to sonnets and other forms, “You have to learn them all to be really free.”

For a cute touch, only Dickey’s favorite snacks were served afterwards: sweet tea, ham biscuits, shrimp and grits, deviled eggs, and chocolate brownies.

He was truly Southern.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet–Pure Energy

Yesterday, I caught the matinee show of the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet at the Gaillard, and found it fresh, energetic and fun.  From the tennis nets being drug across the stage to the group chair dance, it made me smile.  The music was fantastic, and I liked the diverse look of the highly skilled dancers.

What else can one say about about a group of dancers who bark like dogs and groove to the theme to Hawaii 5-0 except that I hope they come to Charleston again– and soon.

9th Annual Piccolo Fiction Open–Telling Stories

Blue Bicycle Books is becoming my new favorite place downtown (besides, Knit, of course) and it was the setting for the 9th Annual Piccolo Fiction Open.

The stories that were read by the three 2009 Piccolo Fiction Open winners, John Foster, Debra Daniel and Susanna Glattly, ranged from tales of  an amnesic hitchhiker to high fashion high heels to the life of a mansion.  All were excellent and engrossing.

We were also treated to a reading from Charleston native Katie Crouch.  She read an entertaining passage from her upcoming book Men and Dogs, which is on my “must get and read” list.

My husband told her that she reminded him of Grace Adler, but she was cool enough not to be offended.

Beethoven: His Women and His Music–I Love to Listen to…

Clarence Felder was delightful as he engaged the audience as Ludwig van Beethoven in  Beethoven: His Women and His Music at the Circular Congregational Church last night.

He even thanked the members of Chamber Music Charleston for coming all the way to Vienna to play for him!

In this play, a collaboration between the Actors’ Theatre of South Carolina and Chamber Music Charleston, Felder as Beethoven reminisces about his music, his sadness and frustration with his deafness, and of course, the women in his life from his mother to his “Immortal Beloved.”

I especially loved the final piece, the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# Minor.  It brought the performance to a melancholy conclusion.  I couldn’t help but think of how different Beethoven’s life and work would have been without the deafness.

There’s one more performance at 8:00 pm tonight.  Try to catch it if you love history and music.

I probably shouldn’t admit that I went to see The Last Five Years without knowing a thing about it, nor that I’m not crazy about musical theatre. When I realized, though, that that he was enacting a failed relationship from its beginning forward and she, backwards from the end, my brain came to attention. Then when I saw that the whole thing was going to be done without dialogue, my poet’s interest in formal mastery became engaged, with Jason Robert Brown’s formidable lyrics proving deceptively natural throughout. Finally, that the characters did not interact, except when they met in the middle for the betrothal, was so existentially authentic that I forgot it was a musical at all.

Oh yeah, and the music was terrific.  Eric Johnson’s keyboard accompaniment was nuanced perfection, supporting the actors in a wide range of idiom and emotion. Emily Wilhoit’s singing was virtuosic, demonstrating the actress’s considerable gifts and making her lack of success fittingly confounding. David Mandel’s voice was a little flawed at the top of his range, underscoring that this is not an actor but a writer, confidently willing to take artistic risks and persevere. At the heart of their tragedy is that he is lucky and resilient, and she is neither, and her professional anxieties come to breach the marriage. And this was supposed to be a musical about love—talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing! Again Pure Theatre, relentlessly adventurous in the pursuit of complex emotional truth.

The Sundown Poetry Series kicked off last night on a positive note. Richard Garcia, a poet who hails from California but has been in the Lowcountry for five years, read work from new book, Chickenhead, a collection of prose poetry.

His work was the perfect mix of hilarity and introspection.

Garcia started off reading a poem about an ex-girlfriend–which really has no chance of not being hilarious and/or introspective–and after ending with the lines, “The night is a chicken with enormous black wings. And you, little one, are a grain of wheat on the floor of a barn,”  he then said he wasn’t sure why she kicked him out.

He went on from there to keep the crowd laughing with poems about a dog psychiatrist, “Louie. M.D., Ph. D.” and pokes fun at his wife, sitting in the front row, over a chair he left behind in California for which she has never forgiven him.

On more serious note, he read, my favorite of the reading, “No One.” He prefaces reading the poem with saying how much he enjoys and does not enjoy having the internet around to find old friends. When looking for one friend in particular, Garcia found that the friend had passed away, so wrote a poem about No One, who, in the end, takes on the”less formal” title of Nobody.

The Sundown Poetry Series features a different poet every weeknight at 6:30 at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. Tonight’s poet is Sue Flaster, and the readings continue through to June 5th.

Tired of seeing the same old gestures at the mic? The pumping hand, the closed eyes, the back-and-forth-with-the-head thing? Do the routine cadence, super-fast delivery, overemphasis on rhyme take you out of the pleasures of verse and into boredom? Has the uniformed tyranny of slam-approved themes become tedious? Take heart, spoken-word lovers, there is another way!

Kurt Lamkin showed us how last night at EBay, invigorating the medium with imagination, personal verve, and humanity. His recital was a progression of themes interwoven with songs, stories, and–fascinatingly–poems-within-poems. He began with the obligatory sex poem, transformed into a captivating call-and-response, that became a metaphor for the audience courted by the poet and invited to transcend.

There followed a thrilling meditation on the power of language as the infant acquires it, a celebration of the generative feminine principle , and a rare performance of the splendid ‘Fox’s Manifesto,’ based on a first-hand account of the Soweto uprising.

And all this, without the usual masterful cora-performance, showing us that Lamkin is just as good unplugged, and maybe even more intense. When he was finished, we were electrified, transformed from brow-beaten wage-slaves into the miraculous phenomena we are.

Slam poets, there is light, at the cafe’s rear exit! Follow the light!

PICCOLO SPOLETO

“Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.” Comedy at The Footlight Players. It’s about Snoopy, and anything with the words “teenage” and “blockhead” in the title has to be funny.

“The Islands.” PURE Theatre. Setting not so funny, a prison cell on Robben Island, South Africa, during apartheid. But anything by Athol Fugard has to be good.

“The Gentleman Pirate.” PURE Theatre at the Powder Magazine, a truly eccentric offering since the Powder Magazine is arguably Charleston’s strangest building. It’s about Stede Bonnet, in case the title didn’t give that away.

Skinny White Comics. Back and whiter than ever.

One Man Star Wars Trilogy. Oh, come on, you know you want to check this out. Try? There is no try. Only do. Or do not.

Improv marathon. 3 improv shows for the price of one — 12 bucks.

Smoky Weiner & the Hot Links. At Bowen’s Island.!At sunset! Does it get any better? Well, yes, it probably does. The entire Blues & Jazz series at Piccolo looks strong.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it is all the world to me

Thar dear old city by the sea!

There I was born, there i would die–

My dust with kindred dust must lie ,

In the dear old city by the sea.

–from Charleston by William Gilmore Simms

Yesterday morning, I went on the Charleston Poetry Walk given by The Poetry Society of South Carolina.

The walk started at Washington Square, were we learned about the life and works of Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne. From there, we walked to 10 more locations from Waterfront Park to Tommy Condon’s to listen to Poetry Society members discuss poets with South Carolina connections from Josephine Pickney to Edgar Allen Poe (who was stationed at Ft. Moultrie, and may have gotten some of his inspiration for Annabel Lee from his time here.)

The poems of Elizabeth Verner Hamilton stood out to me the most. I need to read more of her works.

I even got into the act when I was asked to read a Gullah work by Dubose Heyward and managed not to embarrass myself.

It was a wonderful (if somewhat hot) day for exercise and education.