One of my favorites

This is one of my favorite stories from the summer. That might be partly due to the fact that I wrote it in about two hours after jumping through some crazy hoops to get an interview, and my editor liked it.

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BEAVER CREEK, Colorado — “That was really good, guys,” Christopher Wheeldon calls as the lights come up after a dance rehearsal Wednesday.

“Can I just have a little more …” Wheeldon’s voice trails off as he bounds down the steps toward the stage in the Vilar Center.

Dressed in cargo shorts, a polo shirt and sneakers, the 35-year-old choreographer looks more like he belongs on the slopes than inside the Vilar Center perfecting a ballet for a performance.

But don’t let the look deceive you; Wheeldon’s new company, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, premiered last year with a critically acclaimed inaugural season, and is back in Vail to kick off its second season.

Damian Woetzel, Vail International Dance Festival artistic director and former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, is looking forward to their second season.

“We’re calling it Morphoses 2.0,” Woetzel said. “I went to all the shows in New York. It was just wildly popular and is moving forward tremendously.”

Local resident Joanne Morgan, who taught ballet in the valley for 28 years, saw the Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company premiere last year and is looking forward to Friday’s performance.

“I’m so happy that they are coming back — I was afraid last year would be a one-shot deal,” she said. “I love it that they’re coming back, because they’re incredible.”

As part of his residency, Wheeldon participated for the second time this year in an UpClose event designed to give the audience a better idea of what happens behind the scenes before and during a ballet performance.

Wheeldon and three other choreographers’ works were performed, then the choreographers spent time on stage answering questions from the audience about the process of creating a dance.

Read the rest here.

Poem of the week

A Prayer For My Daughter

-W.B. Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

After the truth

Are the Nazis just a distant legend? Or is there a hint of their hellish mentality in each of us?

That is one of the questions raised in the 1999 German film “Nichts Als Die Wahrheit” (After the Truth). My school sponsors a series of ethics lectures and events each year, and the kickoff event to this year’s theme of media, technology and morality was a viewing and discussion of this movie.

The film centers around the German trial of Nazi leader Josef Mengele, nicknamed “angel of death” for his role in the Auschwitz murders and “experiments.” Attorney Peter Rohm is fascinated with the life of Mengele and researching a book on him when, through a series of strange events, he ends up meeting the man himself in Argentina and flying back to Germany with Mengele in tow.

Once on German soil Mengele is, of course, put under arrest and sent to court to answer for his soiled past. Mengele insists that Rohm serve as his defense attorney, and Rohm is subsequently warned by the judge that this is an incredibly public trial and if he doesn’t defend Mengele to the best of his ability, she will disbar him.

From that point on, the movie is a journey through the dark recesses of the human mind. Rohm brings the Nazis down to the level of everyday humanity, pointing out that doctors routinely euthanize patients (in his modern Germany), sometimes without the patients’ consent; that Mengele saved some people from death at Auschwitz; that medical experiments on unconsenting patients are performed in the modern world as well.

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert, if you want to watch it for the suspense) Mengele is convicted. After doing an excellent job defending his client, Rohm offers his final argument — Mengele is merely a product of his time, and acted in the interests of the medical community. He then sits, and the judge asks for his plea.

After a pause, Rohm answers. Mengele is a monster, he says, who shows no remorse or understanding of the sins he has committed. He is guilty.

“Guilty, and I call for the maximum sentence.”

Mengele then begins speaking, and runs as a voiceover through the closing credits, justifying his actions over and over in the name of science, compassion and the future of the human race. As the credits rolled, I found myself wondering how different the Nazis were, really, from each of us — from me.

Solzhenitsyn said “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, either, but right through every human heart.” The Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on cruelty in the name of science; it happens all the time in America and elsewhere.

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which hundreds of black men were “treated” for syphilis under false pretences while the observing doctors withheld actual, proven treatment to watch the progression of the disease, is just one of countless such forays by American scientists.

And the Milgram study in the 1940s showed that ordinary people are prone to commit acts of cruelty to others when an authority figure tells them to do so.

My conclusion? Nazi-like cruelty is set apart from my behavior by degree, not by kind. I — and everyone else alive — am capable of great cruelty. All it takes is a series of small steps down the slippery slope. But I don’t think that lets Nazi-style perpetrators off the hook; if anything, it reminds the rest of us that the hook is just a few inches away from the back of our jackets as well.