Balanchine's First Square Dance Caller

Gents go ‘round, come right back,
Make your feet go wickety-wack . . .

Crackerjack square dance caller Elisha Keeler was profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 1957. Next thing you know, George Balanchine was making a new dance to the music of Baroque composers, prancing his City Ballet dancers through all kinds of stage geometry. He named it “Square Dance,” and invited Keeler to “call” it.

Keeler had only been to the ballet once in his life. He watched rehearsals, and with the help of his wife and kids, wrote the calls. “We asked him to say anything he wanted, as long as he didn’t use ballet terms,” said Balanchine.

Keeler was a colorful character, a horticulturist in his day job, famous for his way with African violets. He played piano, banjo, cello, trombone and harmonica, and his daddy was a caller before him. His family band—wife Lois on accordion, daughter Mollie on fiddle and son Kenny on banjo and trombone—often accompanied Keeler’s dances. They were known as the Happy Humdingers. Keeler made singing radio commercials too.

Keeler “sang” “Square Dance” every time it was performed at New York City Ballet from its premiere in 1957 through 1964. He called at over 2,600 festivals and conventions over his long life, but his family said “being part of the ballet was probably the high point of his calling career.” Wrote Time Magazine, “. . . when Keeler had twanged out his last call ("That is all; the dance is ended/ The music is finished; the caller's winded''), audiences cheered the blend of do-si-do and pas de deux.” Keeler passed away in 2005, at the age of 98.

Oregonians have a rare opportunity to see “Square Dance” its original form with OBT’s performances. Balanchine revised the ballet in 1976, and dropped the caller from the scenario.

(Photo: Portland violinist, composer and actor Tylor Neist will reprise Elisha Keeler’s role in the OBT performance of "Square Dance," part of the Song & Dance program playing in the Newmark in April)

Photo Above: Elisha Crofut Keeler, circa 1955


more posts about Song & Dance | Buy Tickets to Song & Dance

The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part Three: Fred the Duck

OBT staff members Linda Besant and Claire Willett sat down with Principal Dancer Anne Mueller (who retires from the stage and transitions to our artistic staff in May) to interview her about her life and career. Over the next few days we’ll be sharing with you some of her stories and anecdotes – from her childhood as a touring ballet dancer, to the craziest photo shoot she ever worked on, to how she ended up living on a farm full of goats. Stay tuned for this behind-the-scenes peek at the life of one of OBT’s most engaging, colorful and unique personalities.

by Claire Willett


(This is a brief excerpt from Anne's performance as "Fred the Duck" in the Charles Moulton piece "Chickens," which premiered in 2001 at Oregon Ballet Theatre).

Petite and angular, with a striking face and a fascinatingly geometric body, Anne Mueller is a distinctive-looking woman even in her regular-person clothes. As an OBT Principal Dancer, it’s not unusual for her to be recognized on the street or in the grocery store by a ballet fan. But we got the scoop on the very first role at OBT that ever got Anne recognized in public . . . and it’s even crazier than you can imagine.

In 2001, OBT produced a “Battle of the Sexes” Choreographer’s Showcase featuring one program using all male choreographers and one using all female choreographers. Anne had previously danced in a piece by Charlie Moulton, called “Five,” which Anne says she regrets was only done once. “It was beautiful. Very aerobic,” she says. “Charlie’s style of choreographing was really unlike anything I’d experienced before . . . That was a huge growth experience for me.” She loved it so much that she jumped at the chance to perform in his next piece as part of the "Battle of the Sexes" at OBT two years later – without any idea what she was in for.

The piece, entitled “Chickens,” was originally created on White Oak Dance Project, who premiered it at the Joyce Theatre in New York. “They were for the most part not ballet dancers,” says Anne. “They were mostly modern dancers, so both thematically and vocabulary-wise, this piece was pretty out there.” The woman who traveled out to Portland to set the piece on OBT’s company informed Anne, “You’ve been precast as the duck.” “And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m the duck! That sounds like an important part,’” she laughs. “I was very excited to be the duck.”

Then the dancers watched a video of the piece, and, says Anne, “We just didn’t even know what to think.” But it grew on them quickly. “Though we’d been kind of terrified when we first initially saw the video, once we got into the world of this piece, we all just absolutely loved dancing it so much. It was a thrill to dance,” she says. “It was just a really fantastically challenging and off-the-wall piece.”

“Off-the-wall” seems to just about cover it. There’s no music – the ballet is set to a spoken-word piece by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, based on the story of the movie The Badlands. “The speaker talks about that movie and has a real affinity for Sissy Spacek, so that’s where some of the themes from the piece come from,” says Anne. “So Sissy was the male lead; he was a cowboy, but he wasn’t much of a cowboy. And his companion was me, Fred the Duck. And the deal with Fred the Duck was that he – he, she, I don’t even know – was a confused duck. I thought I was a chicken. I didn’t get that I was a duck so I tried to do lots of chicken things. I wouldn’t get in the water because the chickens wouldn’t get in the water.”

Anne wasn’t the only dancer who had to stretch outside her comfort zone to inhabit her zany role: dancer Matthew Boyes faced an entirely different challenge. “He had to hula-hoop in this piece at the very beginning,” says Anne, “and he had never learned to hula-hoop. So when we started learning this piece – which was like two weeks before the show so we were under some serious time pressure – he took the hula-hoop home and had to learn basically overnight. He came in the next day and he could barely walk, he was so sore.”

The show was wildly successful and audiences loved it. And because of Anne’s hard work in this wacky role, “People started to recognize me on the street,” she says. “They would say, ‘Hey, you’re Fred the Duck!’ Which was exciting – I had not really been recognized at all prior to dancing that role, and I thought it was just so fantastically ironic as a classically-trained ballet dancer that the role I was being recognized for was the role of Fred the Duck.”



Are you an Anne fan? What do you think is Anne’s most recognizable, iconic role? Post your thoughts below in the comments!

More Celebrating Anne Stories | All About Anne | Tickets to Song & Dance

The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part Two: Alabama School of the Arts

OBT staff members Linda Besant and Claire Willett sat down with retiring Principal Dancer Anne Mueller to interview her about her life and career. Over the next few days we’ll be sharing with you some of her stories and anecdotes – from her childhood as a touring ballet dancer, to the craziest photo shoot she ever worked on, to how she ended up living on a “nano-farm” with her husband and two goats. Enjoy these behind-the-scenes peeks at the life of one of OBT’s most engaging, colorful and unique personalities, beginning with these two tales from her student days.

Anne meets her teacher, Dame Sonia Arova

This is an image of Anne's teacher, Sonia Arova. You can check out a video of her dancing in Coppelia here.

Anne remembers: I’d started studying in the D.C. area at the Washington School of Ballet. My dad was in the military, and he got transferred to Atlanta. I was heartbroken that I would have to leave D.C. and I was not interested in moving my training. What I had loved about Washington School of Ballet was this sense of history and elegance and etiquette. I really loved that. It had a feeling like you were being prepared for the knighthood or something like that.

My dad did a lot of research during my training, and looked into the Alabama School of Fine Arts. He took me on an advance visit and I was initially very skeptical, but I agreed to audition.

I auditioned with Sonia Arova, who absolutely terrified me. She taught from a chair, and it sounds so cliché, she had a stick in hand and she would tap that stick on the floor to keep the rhythm.

She had some of the dancers in the school take the audition class with us. It was very hard to tell how old they were, they were small young women, and they were very, very, very good, and that intimidated the bejesus out of me. She gave this really hard class, and when it was time to pirouette, she would yell, every time she would yell, “Six pirouettes.”

I had never encountered anything quite like that, and I thought, “If I do not do six pirouettes, this woman is not going to let me into this school, and I think I really want to be in this school.” I tried very hard to do six pirouettes, and of course I wasn’t doing six, but I think I was maybe doing three. They might not have been good, but it was an interesting strategy.

What she was trying to get us to do was just go for more. All I was focusing on was what I was not accomplishing correctly, and I didn’t see what she had gotten me to accomplish in trying to do more. That was my first realization about Sonia and her training style.

I did get accepted into the Alabama School of Fine Arts and decided to go there. So in the eighth grade I moved away from home and into a dormitory. The facility was not glamorous at the time. The dance studios were in a converted warehouse. The dormitory building had been a sort of mental hospital for women in the 1950s and 60s, so it was a bit of a bleak place, it had bars on the windows.

We had an integrated schedule of dance classes and academics. Somewhere through my first year Sonia decided that I should take private lessons. It was a bit of a terrifying situation. You would be in your afternoon class and she would send someone to get you to go into the small studio with her. You would spend somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour, with no accompaniment, sometimes not even doing combinations, just practicing skills, really hard skills, over and over and over again. Every lesson was different, always on pointe, you never worked with Sonia in flat shoes.

The first day of school of my freshman year, I was sitting in my dorm room, and I got a call at the one of the pay phones in the hallway. Those were our only phones. I got on the phone, and Sonia said, “Anna.” She always called me Anna and in eight years I never corrected her that that wasn’t really my name. She said, “Come over here for a private lesson.”

I was crestfallen, it was the first day of school, I was not in good shape, but dutifully I marched myself over there and did my private lesson. The deal was that she wanted me to be Clara in The Nutcracker that year. It was a really technically demanding role for a young girl, on pointe, and she knew I needed a little extra skill building to be ready for it.

This was not for a school production, this was for the Alabama Ballet’s annual performances of Nutcracker. Any time the company would go on tour doing a larger production, students in the school got to go along provided that their grade point average was high enough, so that was a tricky thing that you had to maintain.
So I started touring with the Alabama Ballet in the eighth grade, and we would leave at Thanksgiving and be gone for two or three weeks, and tour continually up until we came back to Birmingham for the run of Nutcracker. There would be a couple of us in eighth or ninth grade and together we would have to get our school work done, figure out the finer points of like, geometry, on our own. So I would tour Nutcracker every year, and then starting in the tenth grade I starting touring other productions as well. At fifteen, I was already touring and performing a lot with a professional company.

More Celebrating Anne Stories | All About Anne | Tickets to Song & Dance

The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part One: Napoli

OBT staff members Linda Besant and Claire Willett sat down with retiring Principal Dancer Anne Mueller to interview her about her life and career. Over the next few days we’ll be sharing with you some of her stories and anecdotes – from her childhood as a touring ballet dancer, to the craziest photo shoot she ever worked on, to how she ended up living on a “nano-farm” with her husband and two goats. Enjoy these behind-the-scenes peeks at the life of one of OBT’s most engaging, colorful and unique personalities, beginning with these two tales from her student days.


(This is a quick video clip of the Danish National Ballet's production of Napoli, which Anne was invited to perform in as a student at the Washington Ballet.)

Dancing at the Kennedy Center — Napoli with the Royal Danish Ballet

Anne remembers: Once I started training seriously, I was living in the Washington, D.C. area, and I had started to study at the Washington School of Ballet.

One of the neatest things about living and studying dance in Washington is that the Kennedy Center brings in a large number of the world’s best ballet companies every year. As a student it’s a dreamy place to be because you get to see the best dancers in the world performing in a lot of different styles—American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Kirov Ballet.
Generally when a large company came to town and they needed kids, they would come to the Washington School of Ballet and say, “Do you have kids that can do this?”

So I had the amazing opportunity to be a part of the Royal Danish Ballet’s Napoli.

We were auditioned and I was absolutely delighted to be chosen as one of six or eight girls, I was twelve at the time, who actually got to dance in the production. Even more exciting than that, I got to dance with a little Danish boy who was also 12 years old. I had a crush on him before I even met him. (Coincidentally, I married a Dane.) We rehearsed for maybe two weeks and then we were in the theater, and we performed this amazing, historically significant ballet with impeccable dancers. I remember the dress I got to wear. It was green silk, and so beautiful.

We danced our portion. I don’t have any memory of being nervous about it, I was just so excited. After we danced we got to go up onto the bridge that was in the upstage part of the set and stand and watch the entire Napoli Pas de Six from the bridge, and throw paper flowers at the end. It was totally incredible to be watching dancers of that skill level from so close.

Actually, the current director of the Royal Danish Ballet, Nicolaj Hübbe, was still dancing with them at the time, before he went to NYCB. I remember really liking his dancing, and having a crush on him too. I think I followed him down the hall and took pictures of him.

The dancers of that company were so very nice and generous to us. We circulated our pointe shoes around to be signed. I’m certain my parents still have that pointe shoe somewhere, signed by a bunch of members of the Royal Danish Ballet.

I had seen lots of lavish productions, but being part of it, being on that stage was an entirely different matter. It was a magical experience.

More Celebrating Anne Stories | All About Anne | Tickets to Song & Dance

Christopher's Oregonian Profile

In case you missed it, here is the link to Artistic Director Christopher Stowell's profile article in Sunday's Oregonian.

Here's an excerpt:

"Why all the Balanchine and Robbins works in OBT's repertoire?" Stowell says. "I think that these choreographers did so much to define and advance ballet in America that any company that aspires to a high level must perform their greatest works as central to the canon of this art form. Audiences deserve to see them, in the same way that classical music audiences deserve to hear Beethoven and Mozart."

Still, OBT is anything but a museum company. Stowell has created eight world premieres for the company, and he's commissioned new work from in-demand choreographers like Nicolo Fonte, Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Wheeldon, arguably the most sought-after dance maker in the world.

West says Stowell should be commended for taking risks with young and sometimes inexperienced choreographers, and that his background and relationships have helped him improve the programming at OBT.

"I think it needs to be said that Stowell has been able to program stuff Canfield couldn't because of the connections he developed during his long career as a dancer with San Francisco Opera Ballet and his pedigree," West says. "Kent and Francia were both in the New York City Ballet and directed Pacific Northwest Ballet for close to three decades. This gave (Stowell) contacts that enabled him to program three Robbins ballets, Paul Taylor's 'Company B,' three works by Christopher Wheeldon, who is a friend, even an Ashton ballet and a ton of Balanchine."

Read the whole article here.

The Real Black Swan: Dance Magazine Exposes the Controversial “Face-Replacement” Technology That Made a Ballerina Out of Natalie Portman

by Claire Willett



If you’ve happened on Dance Magazine’s website lately – or if, like me, you have Facebook friends who are professional ballet dancers – then you may have seen Wendy Perron’s columns from last week and the week before  about Sarah Lane, the ballet dancer whose body doubled for Natalie Portman in her award-winning performance as Nina in the recent film Black Swan. In the following video (caution: this contains both spoilers and some gross special effects), you can see a very cool montage of digitally-enhanced scenes from the movie with original plates overlaid by effects shots – adding feathers to Portman’s arms, erasing crew and lighting rigs in the background, color-correction, etc. One of these techniques is euphemistically titled “face replacement,” and it’s causing a major stir. Why? Because in all of the climatic moments of the movie where we see Nina in motion, it’s Sarah Lane doing the dancing. Her face has been digitally replaced with Portman’s. Watch the video here:

** One more warning, this video contains spoilers and some gross special effects **





Now, in her defense, this is not just Portman’s issue (though she may have been complicit, and I didn’t hear her thank or acknowledge Sarah Lane in her recent seventeen thousand acceptance speeches). This is a studio issue. This is a 100% Hollywood-generated fake storyline intended to create the illusion that an actress learned how to be a ballet dancer in a year with nothing but a little coaching and her own sheer chutzpah and determination. It’s shameless Oscar bait. I have my own feelings about the Academy’s constant trumpeting of big grandiose spectacle roles over the arguably more challenging task of bringing a subtle, relatable, ordinary character to life (but I haven’t seen The Kids Are All Right yet either so I’m not shilling for Annette Bening here).

Body doubles are nothing new in film; actors use them for scenes that fall outside their standard contract agreements (mostly things like stunts, motion-capture, nudity or sex scenes), or for any situation in which it might be cheaper and easier to use a double rather than pay your star. And certainly movie musicals have been openly dubbing the voices of non-singing stars for years – we all know that wasn’t really Audrey Hepburn singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” right, guys? But my point is that in this film, the physicality of Nina’s dancing – the way her body expressed her emotions – was surely a not-at-all-insignificant component that voters evaluated in the process of handing Portman award after award after award. She was playing a ballet dancer. The quality of her dancing was under scrutiny. So aren’t we compelled to say that a good 50% of that Oscar statuette, if not more, is really Sarah Lane’s? Doesn’t Portman owe a sizable chunk of this success to the hardworking athlete whose body executed all of those tremendously complicated dance moves, who was asked by the studios to stop giving interviews and keep her mouth shut until Portman had an Oscar in her hand, and to be complicit in the creation of a lie (or “façade,” to use Lane’s own more polite word) that anyone who feels like it can just become a professional ballet dancer on a whim, because they want to try something new?

What do you think? Is this just Hollywood doing what Hollywood does – create gorgeous illusions to entertain us – or is this something more akin to plagiarism – one artist receiving credit for another artist’s work? What other movies do you know of that play the body-double/voice-double card? Weigh in below in the comments and let us know what you think.

Daily Dance Break: A Bit of Public Joy to Light Up Your Monday

This flashmob took place in a German subway station as a fun stunt for a production of The Wizard of Oz that was being presented there. Check out the reactions of the people who stumbled into the midst of this "happening!"



Tweet