Friday, January 26, 2007

Don't forget that Ballet Russes kicks off The Clarion University-Venango Campus Spring 2007 Independent Film Series tonight at 7:30 pm in Rhoades Auditorium.
Part history, part love letter, Ballets Russes may be the most purely delightful documentary in years. The movie follows the birth of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the early 1930s, an event that eventually led--after years of exhilarating experiments, bitter artistic battles, and exhausting tours--to the establishment of modern ballet around the world. Ballet Russes combines astonishing film footage of fantastical ballets (featuring extravagant sets designed by Salvador Dali and costumes by Henri Matisse) and interviews with surviving dancers in their 70s, 80s, and 90s (ranging from Dame Alicia Markova, who was a prima ballerina with the original Ballet Russe under impresario Sergei Diaghilev, to Yvonne Craig, who went on to become Batgirl in the '60s tv show Batman); the result is a breathtaking range of scholarship and depth of feeling.

After the show, why not discuss the variegates of youth in the professional dance world over a beer float. Uh, yum? I...guess...

Me? I'll be celebrating the winter weather by obsessively tracking the delivery dates of the Hammerhead snow sled and threadless' "advisors" shirt.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Re: beer floats...
One balmy Friday evening, sitting in a furniture-less apartment with a songwriting friend, we stared at the one remaining Guinness (warm) and devised what we thought to be a brilliant plan to split the one remaining beer equitably. Add vanilla ice cream.
Two healthy scoops and half a pint later, the head on the glass was tell-tale of rootbeer floats of days gone by. Two sips after that, we decided that we had wasted our one remaining beer.
Beer and ice cream are not compatible, at least in my experience. The only thing that should float on a beer is a nice slice of lemon on a Franciskahner Hefewiesen.