as the first snow of the year 2021 is falling in Rotterdam right now, I am reminded again of the hundreds of refugees who are still left to die away from freezing as I am writing this post, in ever new waves of people, year in year out, now in makeshift camps in Camp #Lipa in Bosnia-Hercegovina, or on #sosmoria, all literally left in the cold by our murderous longterm impotence indifference including #EU and also very notably the recent #Dutch governments.
* the Dutch cabinet resigned officially yesterday, after they no longer could hide that under their responsibility ca. 20.000 families had been systematically racially and ethnically profiled and aggressively financially ruined by bureaucrats of the neoliberalized Dutch "welfare" system. if it hadn't been for internal officers like Sandra Palmen, let alone lawyer Eva González Pérez, and continued attempts to work against being silenced, finally taken up widely by more mainstream White-oriented media, all too often casually 'forgetting' to name the ethnic profiling part, they still may be left alone today. also notable: no matter how much they already had suffered from the "missteps" of this "affair", they can apparently receive no compensations, before May ...
as much as I can accept the subjectively innocent magic of The Nutcracker ballet in its countless variations, deemed the "right" tradition, justified, high-culture, and especially the much better preserved music by Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, with its Romantic and unmistakeably Gay vibes from my childhood, it gets an especially multiple dimension today, ... after all, when this ballet was performed, millions of people, all over then the Russian Czar's Empire were equally and literally left out in the cold, ignored by those who got to watch and enjoy the ballet, in the relatively heated and comfortable theatre.... #lecharmediscretdelanostalgie (link)
today one could re-imagine this part with all of the above dimensions, including #WhiteFragility the #snowflake trope , geometric mass-dancing of the (*all white) (female) corps de ballet, all silently echoing the coldheartedness of haves versus have-nots, who as the latter are made out-of-sight-out-of-mind, at least for a moment. and still find a way to evoke what magic had been conjured by the original dance, since it, too, was and continuesto be a given.
it could become a very interesting choreographic challenge to rise to.
instead, I begin with this already very different variation by Maurice Béjart, the Marseille-born choreographer, who went on to feed Belgian, Northern French, and Swiss cultures with his highly sophisticated and crafted emotion-evoking intelligently entertaining arts and spectacles, based on aristocratic variations of what had once been peasant dance moves. notice the various cultural tweaks around race, gender & class in this part, as he revisits his own childhood ...
As visual artist Jean-Ulrick Désert said recently, it is all happening at the same time, valid and effective simultaneously, ... and it all works, together ...
* PS from June 4th, 2022
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