Quiet Bubble

Slip on your dancing shoes: Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4”

“1, 2, 3, 4” by Feist, directed by Patrick Daughters, choreographed by Noemie Lafrance.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Thai tradition of cinematic blessings before feature films, and why we need more of them. I think I’ve found one that I’d be thrilled to see right as the lights go down.

If you’ve watched TV at all over the past month, you’ve seen snippets of the video for Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4,” since it accompanies the commercials for Apple’s new line of colorful, shiny iPod Nanos. Feist appears, fetchingly, on the Nano video screens, which are spread out like playing cards. The commercial seems unavoidable, and Apple’s pushing these damn things like new candy bars.

Feist is, of course, part of the product package—now, you can watch her video on your tiny-ass video screen, if you squint really hard! It works both ways—Apple uses her to promote itself as hip; Feist uses Apple to get more airplay, and music videos are essentially extended commercials for musicians, anyway.

But nothing about Feist and director Patrick Daughters’s vision can be reduced to mere product. The three-minute video is an ode to melancholy wrapped in joy, and it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

The scene is an open warehouse, lit coldly. The camera stares at a multicolored wall, which contrasts with the stark gray floor, in the distance. The environment’s scruffy and scuffed—it’s seen better days, or maybe it’s just in use. Slowly, our hero (Leslie Feist) emerges from behind an exit door, dressed in a sparkly blue catsuit and with shimmering brown hair, and walks confidently towards us. The camera follows her slowly—the entire video’s shot in a single take—as an acoustic guitar gently strums out a one-two-three-four riff like a heartbeat. “One two three four, tell me that you love me more,” Feist sings in a fragile but somehow tough croon. (Sasha Frere-Jones describes her voice, rightly, as “gentle but grainy, and full of emotion—capable of swooping up to end a phrase on a full, strong tone.”) She completes the verse—“Sleepless, long nights/ That’s what my youth was for”—as she completes her motion. She’s facing it, in medium-closeup, as the camera’s gradually zoomed in as she was walking in a turn.

And then all hell breaks loose. As the string section and the banjo and the handclaps enter, along with the throaty gospel choir belting out “whoa-oh-oh!,” people start collapsing behind her. The shot moved so fluidly, and as a long shot, that we know there was no one behind her up to this point. But there they are, about ten of them, tumbling out from behind her, as if emerging from Feist. Thank goodness there are people running in, from both sides of the frame, to catch them. Of course, these people immediately also fall down, with others to catch them. The catch-fall continues in a semi-circular pattern, like a slow wave, until Feist is singing and dancing with the accompaniment of about 40 dancers. This all takes five seconds. Then everyone rises, and starts singing and clapping in a somewhat synchronized dance.

“1, 2, 3, 4” as a song could be called ramshackle chanteuse, in that the lyrics—about teenage love, as seen both nostalgically and realistically—and vocal styling is sophisticated and world-weary, but the music is charmingly eccentric and unpolished. At some point, you’ll hear everything from a quick piano cascade to sliding trombone to triumphant crowd whoops to a joyous but almost out-of-step trumpet section, all structured by that simplistic guitar strum and soft-shoe drumwork. Handclaps and finger snaps are more prominent percussion than actual drums. Feist’s earlier stuff feels polished, rubbed to an ironic but immaculate sheen of 1980s new wave and electro. This song sounds as if it were recorded with one microphone, on Feist’s front porch. It clatters, charmingly so, and it’s catchy.

The video emulates the song brilliantly, with abstraction instead of trying to visually show the lyrics’ narrative. The dancers move in rough synchronicity but it’s not exact. The teams of dancers are clad in either red, purple, green, or yellow, but the clothes aren’t uniforms. From person to person, they don’t match shades—one woman’s yellow shirt is solid, while another’s is striped. The clothes themselves don’t even match, as some wear khakis while others wear leotards or skirts or cargo pants. The casting call must have said “Come as you are; we’ll make it fit.” The dance routine is practiced, but not so much so that you can’t see the frayed edges.

In a prominent sequence, we can see one man moving obviously against the current, accidentally bumping into and twirling into others. A lesser director would have used a less sloppy take. But messiness is part of the point. The song and the dancing are both so exuberant that we don’t care about missed notes. Feist reveals her multiple selves and moods symbolically by having all these pieces seemingly s/tumble out of her, just as we all contain multitudes. And some of them clash, go against the grain, and don’t make sense.

In any case, these minor slip-ups have a way of correcting themselves so well that I wonder if choreographer Noemie Lafrance actually planned for that man to be visually off-key. When the zealous choral dances threaten to dissolve into chaos, Feist’s singing snaps onto a precise idea—“One, two, three, four, five, six, nine and ten/ Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then”—and so do the dancers. Suddenly, as we see from above (and, again, the whole video is a single take; no cuts), they’ve formed into a spiral through which Feist is carried by a strong dancer. Just as we have a habit of spiraling back into nostalgia for “teenage hopes” that nevertheless “have tears in their eyes” and “left us with nothing” (all Feist’s lyrics), she literally spirals into herself. She pantomimes shooting out the spiral—again, collapsing dancers all around—and returns to adulthood.

The precision of the visual motifs and motion matches the clarity of such lyrics as “Sweetheart, bitter heart/ Now I can’t tell you apart/ Cozy and cold/ Put the horse before the cart.” At the same time, both song and dance reveal how ecstatically love (especially young love) makes us feel. Again and again, the seemingly slipshod group dances coalesce into tight patterns and formations. Feist bodysurfs on a sea of hands that we don’t quite believe has come together so fluidly; she’s soon after boxed in by the crowd; and then she gets to bodysurf again, this time with the hands moving in a wave.

Throughout it all, Feist proves to a casual, expressive dancer. Her movement, awkward but self-assured and with no trace of self-consciousness, goes well with her conversational singing voice. The song and dance are talking to each other—I’m not sure the crowd cheering is part of the album version of the song or just appropriate to the video. Feist’s videos for “Mushaboom” and “My Moon, My Man” (also collaborations with Daughters) also show a love for non-professional but deeply felt body motion. (Her video for “One Evening” hilariously rips off Michael Jackson and the ultra-low-budget reels of 1980s girl-pop videos such as Toni Basil’s “Mickey.”) Daughters, bless him, understands the need to see the full choreography in long and medium shots, without chopping it into incomprehensibility. His camera moves lusciously from zooms to pans, elevating up to get bird’s-eye views and back down again to ground level.

Because of this, we sense the dance as an organic, singular entity, despite the large number of dancers and not-always-in-sync swirling arms and legs. Shooting this as a single take was risky but necessary. This chaos and clarity, says Feist in her singing and Daughters in his direction, are both part of us simultaneously. We’re the clutter and order and spasticness and fluidity, and nothing brings all this out at once quite like love. At the end of this orgy of motion, all the dancers seem to collapse perfectly behind Feist again. She’s alone again, but sated. She walks forward slowly, the camera backs up, she stops, and takes a bow. We can’t see anything but her on a seemingly empty stage, but we know that the flood of energy must still be there. The façade is a sparkling, smooth, single entity. But facades are tricky things. Each of us contains multitudes of emotion and longing—all it takes is a little love and music to bring it all out.

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UPDATE: To the hundreds of you who've apparently found this site through this place, welcome! To the left, you'll quickly find 2½ years worth of posts on everything from more music and film commentary to personal posts, stuff about food, and everything in-between. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by.

Crouch breaks out his tap-dancing shoes

Well, here’s something you don’t see everyday: a well-written essay by Stanley Crouch. Sure, he goes overboard comparing Fred Astaire to Louis Armstrong–the essay’s entire concept is a stretch to begin with–and he takes an unnecessary swipe at Ginger Rogers. But here’s a taste of why Crouch is (for once in his damn life) compelling instead of windbaggy:

Astaire, who well understood swing, was one of Armstrong’s children. As Arlene Croce and others have observed, Astaire took the cinematic dance number away from the artifice of overhead shots and camera positions that were unlike what one would see in person. Astaire had no need for a logistical visual genius like Busby Berkeley. Astaire wanted the camera to serve the dancer so that all the complexity, nuance, and expression would be the dancer’s responsibility. He would not stand for crosscutting or anything other than the camera being far enough away to capture his entire body. The reason: His instrument stretched from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. Novelty shots and startling setups were replaced with a luminescent individual power held in place by an overwhelming ease. Astaire gave the impression that the way he was moving at any moment was three things plaited together: the only, the most natural, and the best choice.

There’s more; hop to it, folks.

A Great Program

26 February 2004, 2 p.m.: I’m sitting high up in the fourth ring of the New York State Theater, waiting for the lights to dim. An amiable, passionate man is pointing at names in his program, and regaling me with stories and gossip about dancers and choreographers. He’s so enthusiastic that he keeps saying “holy crap” and “un-fucking-believable” when describing a dancer he particularly loves. “We’ve got such a great program today,” he’s saying. “Everything is here. We’re so lucky and privileged to live in a place that has this sort of thing.” I don’t mention that I’m a tourist.

Thirty minutes earlier, I had gravitated towards an elderly Brooklyn woman who was yelling something at me. I must have a friendly face; cranks always feel comfortable unloading on me. After a liturgy of complaints about her legs, her children, the lack of handicapped seating in the theater’s lobby, and the security guard who wouldn’t allow her to sit on the steps leading into the theater, she told me that she’d been coming to see the New York City Ballet for over thirty years. Thirty years. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. She was funny as hell, and I was glad to listen to her. She was genuinely thrilled to be seeing yet another dance, even if it meant a long subway ride and security guards who got “fresh” with her.

I looked around me. The lobby crackled with conversation, smiles, and bonhomie. There were balletomanes everywhere. In most places, the average adult doesn’t know what a balletomane is, much less that dance aficionados actually exist. It seems mildly juvenile for an adult to be passionate about such a thing. Two years ago, I would have agreed. Dance is not something widely appreciated by straight, black men. Snoop Dogg doesn’t name-check Arlene Croce.

But here I am, mashed into a small seat in the nosebleeds, talking with this excited man, listening to the creaks of musicians tuning their instruments, and waiting for the curtain to rise on my first ballet since junior high. The “great program” features Shambards (music by James MacMillan, choreography by Christopher Wheeldon), Apollo (Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine), and Glass Pieces (Philip Glass, Jerome Robbins).

Movies I’ve Seen: The Company (2003)

Written on 27 October 2004, this is one of my favorite pieces so far, not so much because I loved the movie—although I did—but because I felt like I was discovering the movie as I wrote about it. I only wish I could have see this on the big screen.

The Company starts with the opening dance of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago’s season, and ends as curtains go down on the season’s big finale, an overly bombastic, special-effects-drenched number (“Blue Snake”) that’s sure to please—and is intended only to please—the Ballet’s board members out in the suburbs.

In between is a glorious examination of a working company’s daily triumphs and tribulations. Neve Campbell is ostensibly the protagonist, but she’s just an organ in the company’s body. Just as in Nashville, Short Cuts, and Cookie’s Fortune, Robert Altman is interested in the workings of a broader community, not just one individual narrative. Campbell’s character is valuable because she’s a symbol of all of the dancers. They all train mercilessly, work two jobs to pay rent, massage their feet, argue over finer points of choreography, and worry that the next landing might go awry… and end a career. The dances pulse with life because the dancers live with dance—it consumes them so much that even their Christmas parties and barhopping ventures are accompanied by dancers...

Movies I’ve Seen: The Red Shoes (1948)

I saw The Red Shoes about a week after seeing Talk to Her. The former uses dance front-and-center as its subject; the latter uses dance as a cinematic framework by which to view the world. Both are amazing movies; neither one is quite done justice by my commentary. But I try.

For the first hour, we see a temperamental ballet leader (Anton Walbrook) lead his troupe—the Ballet Lermontov—through the rehearsal and creation of his new ballet, The Red Shoes. Lermontov never smiles unless he’s being ironic, and never glances when he can glare rapaciously. He infuses his dancers, choreographers, orchestra, and set designers with the same fervor that he has. In particular, his composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) is as tempestuous as Lermontov, and their increasingly tense exchanges charge the air. In between them, simmering, is Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a redheaded beauty who dances astonishingly well. Co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger use this bizarre love triangle as a crucible for their color-drenched masterpiece.

The movie is panoramic and intimate all at once. We see, seemingly in real-time, the rehearsals, set design, compositional work, orchestral practice, and delicate financial maneuverings that lead to a dance’s premiere. Powell and Pressburger focus on the hardship, pointing out that the dancer’s calling is hard, intense, and brutal, but they bathe this hard work in rich, luminous colors and brisk, witty repartee.

And then, midway through the movie, comes the dance. Up until this point, we’ve seen it only in fragments, as it’s being refined, dissected, and compressed. All this practice can’t prepare us for Page’s big solo. Shearer, with her red hair and long limbs, glows throughout The Red Shoes, but she positively radiates energy when she begins to dance. The directors leap right into fantasy as soon as her toes touch the floorboards. After showing the raw dailyness of the dancer’s life for so long, Powell and Pressburger decide to show us the dance, but not as it would have looked to the audience. Instead, they give us a vision of how it might have made the viewer feel, and what it could make one imagine. Their eyes, which had been mostly reportorial up until this point, become interpretive. Fantastic scenes overlap over her as she twirls, with imagery that could have come out of Lord of the Rings, and she flies and ignites the skies. By showing how dance approaches poetry, the directors have created poetry themselves. She dances through painted and drawn scenes—it’s a wonderful, conscious choice. Instead of editing it so that she dances on real landscapes, the multiple scenes she moves through are handcrafted scenes, places that don’t exist anywhere but in the mind until fleshed out on a canvas.

The 20-minute solo is the film’s centerpiece, but it by no means goes slack afterwards. Page struggles to choose between her love for Craster and her love of the stage, just as real artists must choose. Ultimately, though, the choice takes on mythic dimensions, and her art decides tragically for her. The movie fuses phantasmagoria with quotidian life. The Red Shoes is a fairy tale but, like the Hans Christian Andersen tale on which it’s based, it’s a tale carefully weighed down with the burdens of reality.

Movies I’ve Seen: Talk to Her (2002)

I wrote this in May 2004, minutes after the movie finished. I wasn’t interesting in writing a plot summary of a movie I’d just seen—I almost never am, as you’ll see this week. In general, I’m more interested in reading a critic’s impressions of the movie’s tone and feel than in her ability to detail the whos, whats, and wheres. Anyway, I’ve edited and cleaned this piece since I first wrote it, but the sentiments remain the same. I hope you like it as a piece of writing, even if you hated the movie.

I became a fan of Pedro Almodóvar in my teens, because you were guaranteed to see tits in his movies, and you knew you were in for a good time. The near-constant sexual audacity of his movies, and the rich and complex beauties he got to act in them, delighted me to no end. (Until I saw Almodóvar’s movies, I wouldn’t have found sexiness in women who were oddly shaped, dressed garishly, or had big, crooked noses. Silly me.) The snappy clutters of funny dialogue, near-operatic gestures, and eye-popping color schemes floored me even more than the presence of sex. At age sixteen, I bought tickets for the flesh; I stayed past the end credits for his spirit.

Maybe I still buy for the boobs, but now I’d old enough and perhaps wise enough to recognize that, on some horny-adolescent level, I had really good taste. Almodóvar is as least as humane as he is cinematically innovative, and usually as emotionally honest as he is lascivious. Talk to Her flips his script, however, in that it’s more melancholy, cerebral, and silent than previous Almodóvar concoctions. The vibrant colors are still present, his sense of composition is still astonishing, and the movie’s centerpiece is a black-and-white silent film that’s as surreal and perversely entertaining as anything he’s done. (It involves a man traipsing over and into a beautiful woman as she sleeps. I refuse to give away anything more.)

This week's program

Spoiler alert: This week is all about the dance, folks. If you know next to nothing about modern and classical dance, well, welcome to the club. Quiet Bubble’s posts will feature longwinded, amateurish, and inadvertently funny comments on pirouettes, synchronized limbs, and my baby steps into an appreciation of dance. I hope they will enlighten, or at least amuse.

I was first exposed to good dance criticism last year, while reading A Terry Teachout Reader. Within this excellent book of cultural criticism, Teachout has included essays on dance. It’s an art form he loves dearly, thinks is capable of a tremendous range of expression, and he wonders why so few others love it as he does. His dance love is infectious. Despite a lifelong aversion to dance, I was drawn into these essays on choreographers I had never heard of, dances I had never seen, and critics I had never read.

On the day I’d finished the Reader, I rented Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her on DVD. I watched the movie that night, and was left slack-jawed and astonished by its beauty. Unbeknownst to me before seeing it, the movie is framed by a modern ballet full of tension and resonating silence. Two of its protagonists are dancers—one onstage in a ballet troupe, the other in the ring as a bullfighter. The camera moves gracefully like a dancer taking steps; the editing moves fluidly back and forth between timeframes and narratives. It’s a filmic ballet.

I also rented that weekend, on a friend’s recommendation, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s sumptuous The Red Shoes. The movie is a colorful, exuberant, deeply unrealistic portrait of a working ballet company, and is one of the best fairy tales I’ve seen onscreen. Four months later, I was dazzled by Robert Altman’s The Company—again, a DVD rental.

A month after that, I read Teachout’s All in the Dances, his brief biography of master choreographer George Balanchine, and resolved to see New York City Ballet as soon as I could afford to do so. So, in late-February 2005, I took a whirlwind trip to Manhattan. Among many other activities, I attended my first ballet since elementary school, at the New York State Theater.

This Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will feature, respectively, my reviews of the three movies that helped to trigger my interest in dance: Talk to Her, The Red Shoes, and The Company. They’re all masterpieces, but each is radically different from the others. On Friday, I’ll post my reflections on the NYCB experience. Stay tuned.