BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: mack/misophist
Date: 03 May 04 - 11:29 PM

Moronic questions are sometimes the most interesting ones. They challenge our preconceptions. Although those from j0hn from Hull are most exceptionally moronic.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Don Firth
Date: 04 May 04 - 01:47 PM

Agreed. Sometimes the moronic questions precipitate fairly interesting discussions.

No blood pressure problems, Mack. Last check-up (a month ago) it was 128 over 76, danged good for the number of miles I've got on the clock. What yanks my chain is this:—

When you consider the longevity of these art forms (which means that centuries worth of patrons and audiences have felt they were worth supporting), the talent, effort, and dedication it takes for a performer to achieve the required skills, not to mention the talent and effort of the composers who wrote the music, the musicians who play it, the set and costume designers, and the support staff (carpenters, stage hands, etc.), and the fact that many people who really can't afford season tickets find ballet and/or opera enjoyable and inspiring enough to budget for them—and, incidentally, most of the audiences are made up of folks like this, not just rich, elite patrons—it strikes me that someone who dismisses the whole thing as "rubbish" is both ignorant and arrogant.

Sorry, but that's my sincere and considered judgment and I'm sticking with it.

I once had a U. of W. music professor ask me, "When are you going to stop wasting your time on these folk songs and start getting serious about your music?" He couldn't grasp the idea that folk music was anything one could be serious about. He may have had a PhD., but he was ignorant and arrogant.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Don Firth
Date: 04 May 04 - 02:52 PM

mack/misophist PMed me about this discussion, but I choose to answer in open forum, least anyone misunderstand where I am coming from.

Mack, I do not regard you with scorn. I just disagree with you. I'm afraid I do not agree that the human body is inherently ungainly.

In addition to having seen a lot of ballet, both of my sisters were figure skaters and both became National Champions:   Mary Firth and her partner Donald Laws won the 1948 Silver Dance Championship, and Patricia Firth won two Pacific Coast Senior Ladies' Championships and the Junior Ladies Nationals in 1954 (if I remember correctly), and this qualified her to compete in the World Championships in Vienna, where she placed seventh behind Tenley Albright and Carol Heiss. Both studied ballet to enhance their skating programs. I've watched a lot of figure skating and a lot of ballet.

I also fenced competitively when I was younger. Fencing has changed a lot in recent years. Now, competitive fencers tend to look like a couple of berserk sewing machines going at each other, but before the institution of electrical scoring equipment (able to distinguish between touches 1/25th of a second apart), one had to mind one's form, do nothing that one would not do in a real duel (hit your opponent without being hit at all, not just before he hits you), and make sure your touches were solid and clean so the judges could see them clearly. This led to some really clean-looking form (like the pictures in the fencing manuals), and the swordplay was fast, aggressive—and graceful .

Despite the fact that the human body is a product evolution, much of which could be considered a collection of (to use a computer programmer's term) "kludges," I see a well-trained dancer or athlete as marvelously efficient (within the context of the configuration) and elegantly pleasing to the eye.

If you consider the human body inherently ugly and ungainly, well, I'd say that's a matter of esthetic opinion. I repeat, I do not regard you with scorn. But I do disagree with you on this point. And as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: mack/misophist
Date: 04 May 04 - 03:13 PM

You're right about fencing.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Benjamin
Date: 04 May 04 - 10:42 PM

Mack, if you want others to respect your oppinions, you should try respecting their's first. Coming out and saying that I am wrong, that some of my favorte music is the worst symphonic music availble, you opened yourself up. No one feels sorry for you right now. There is nothing wrong with enjoying music like Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring or Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (symphonic version). This is some of the most progressive music in orchestration, one way or another, reguardless of how you may feel about it.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Sam L
Date: 04 May 04 - 11:20 PM

"Ugly" requires explanation if it wants to have any substance as an aesthetic opinion. Otherwise it's just an opinion of unknown type or cause. Could be a received idea, could be that people wear too much cologne and perfume at these things and give you a headache, could be you just don't get it and ugly means excruciatingly boring. But usually if it's an aesthetic opinion it wants to explain itself of it's own accord.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Sam L
Date: 04 May 04 - 11:34 PM

Oh, got your pm. Well, I guess that's an aesthetic opinion all right. And one I can sometimes share. The human body can certainly be ugly, and beautiful bodies have their own special ugliness, too. But to me that's what creates the drama. Otherwise one walks a tightrope laying on a floor, and has nowhere to fall. Dance is peculiarly eventful and time-bound for me, never the same twice.

I'm not convinced by time-honored tradition or that people worked so hard (oh all right give them a C+ then)--it just seems beside the point. Art isn't the special olympics, nice sentiments don't mean it works. I've worked absurdly hard on some really wretched stuff, and so I think I know better.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Once Famous
Date: 04 May 04 - 11:34 PM

I get it completely.

Ballet sucks.

An extremely over-rated art form.

Rubbish meter at 100%.

Thank you for reading this.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: fiddler
Date: 05 May 04 - 03:39 AM

So the upshot of this is some of us like it and some of us don't!

And being good folking folkies we all respect each other persons viewpoint!

OK I'm in!!!

I am not so sure about some of the narrow bigoted views expressed though I can't subscribe to them. Biggotry can starts conflicts and conflicts on a large scale end in war, so I won't make any comment s about those views or those of the originator of the thread. alos the money then spent on those wars if they didn't exist can go to the arts.

Hmmm.......

Hugsnall (even to Jo9hn)
A
XX

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 05 May 04 - 11:39 AM

'course it is! Bunch of posh tarts prancing round as if they have brush staves stuck up their arses and a load of southern pufters in tights. I'd put it on par with cotswold morris and american country music. Load of overpriced shite. Why waste good beer money on it.

As to them defending it and even suggesting that jOhns threads are anything but enlightened, witty and relevent. Shame on you!

Give me a proper good comedian, like Bernard Manning, a stripper, 16 pints of bitter and a kebab any day...

Cheers

:D

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Don Firth
Date: 05 May 04 - 12:12 PM

This thread is rubbish. I'm gone.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 05 May 04 - 02:22 PM

Listen, if I were a teenager again I'd damned well take ballet lessons! Face it, male ballet dancers really only serve one function: to lift tiny, little, lithe, supple, hard-bodied young women up in the air, twirl them around and catch them. Where else does a guy get to put his hands all over young ladies that he barely knows without getting arrested?

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Guessed
Date: 06 May 04 - 08:11 AM

Ballet Who?

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: GUEST,Penelope Rutledge
Date: 06 May 04 - 01:58 PM

Dave the Gnome, you are the kind of gutter trash for whom the most wretched slums and beer halls of Hull came into existence. My advice is, hie yourself down to the communal trough without delay and enjoy the company of your kindred swine. With any luck you may even meet jOhn. Just look for the one who is drooling and staring off vacantly over his pint while trying to think of something else that he can refer to as "rubbish".

* PR

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Sam L
Date: 06 May 04 - 11:29 PM

Art, history, and culture, are very much like rubbish, which we pick through at junk and antique shops for what we find useful or of interest. I'm surprised people take so much offense at it. Everyone picks and chooses, especially artists and musicians, who are always tossing one thing aside, or reviving interest in something forgotten. Sometimes they do both at once, like when Shaw started rubbishing Shakespeare, and in the process revived him. Or, at least that's how Shaw told it, later.

Subject: RE: BS: Is Ballet Dancing Rubbish?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 07 May 04 - 04:09 AM

Hull? HULL??? Full of posh pubs and ballet dancers. And I'd love to be gutter trash. Bloody luxury. Should try Salford for a while Madame Rutledge, soon sort you out. Besides, I bet you're all fur coat and no drawers anyway...

:D