Claire Danes
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oolie coco
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What the hell? That's exactly the cover of the book I just read: "The Meaning of Wife"
Another rave review of Claire's dance performance:
Dance Review | 'Christina Olson'
Finding Desire for Movement in Wyeth's 'Christina's World'
By JENNIFER DUNNING
Published: September 24, 2005
Tamar Rogoff's new "Christina Olson: American Model," which opened on Wednesday at Performance Space 122, is first of all a tour de force for the young film and television actress Claire Danes. Ms. Danes has the rare gift of stillness, and her soft-voiced recitation of brief passages from biographies of Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth is almost as dynamic as her dancing in this evocation of the look and life of Olson, the woman depicted in Mr. Wyeth's most popular painting, "Christina's World."
Ms. Danes changes from one simple dress to another. She approaches and pulls away from a screen on which are projected images that suggest the plain yet sunlit worlds of Mr. Wyeth's paintings. But the great wonder of Ms. Danes's performance, which draws on her early training in dance, is how she fills the stage with the kind of ferocious desire to move freely that is suggested in stories of Olson's pride as she rebelled against the muscular deterioration that eventually paralyzed her lower body.
Ms. Rogoff gives Ms. Danes relatively simple-looking walks, runs and gnarled whole-body clenches that gently contrast with plain stretches that are poignant in their guileless inelegance. Ms. Danes also stares upward as if mesmerized by light, a slender creature as pale and fine as corn silk. Her intense focus has the effect of an electric charge.
The problem with Ms. Rogoff's ambitious conception is that the piece becomes a tour de force of endurance for the audience. There is a great deal of repetition with none of the power of ritual. The repetition dissipates any sense of momentum and does not further the implied story. Nor is the tone of the piece helped by an unintentionally comical film of Ms. Danes dragging her body across a street and up stairs into the lobby and second-floor theater of P.S. 122.
But Ms. Rogoff has given Ms. Danes a terrific challenge in "Christina Olson," which Ms. Danes more than lives up to. The tangy costumes are by Liz Prince, with lighting by David Ferri and visual effects by Harvey Wang, Andrew Baker and Raj Soni. The atmospheric music and soundscore were composed by a collective called Rachel's.
"Christina Olson: American Model" runs through Sunday at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101.
Dance Review | 'Christina Olson'
Finding Desire for Movement in Wyeth's 'Christina's World'
By JENNIFER DUNNING
Published: September 24, 2005
Tamar Rogoff's new "Christina Olson: American Model," which opened on Wednesday at Performance Space 122, is first of all a tour de force for the young film and television actress Claire Danes. Ms. Danes has the rare gift of stillness, and her soft-voiced recitation of brief passages from biographies of Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth is almost as dynamic as her dancing in this evocation of the look and life of Olson, the woman depicted in Mr. Wyeth's most popular painting, "Christina's World."
Ms. Danes changes from one simple dress to another. She approaches and pulls away from a screen on which are projected images that suggest the plain yet sunlit worlds of Mr. Wyeth's paintings. But the great wonder of Ms. Danes's performance, which draws on her early training in dance, is how she fills the stage with the kind of ferocious desire to move freely that is suggested in stories of Olson's pride as she rebelled against the muscular deterioration that eventually paralyzed her lower body.
Ms. Rogoff gives Ms. Danes relatively simple-looking walks, runs and gnarled whole-body clenches that gently contrast with plain stretches that are poignant in their guileless inelegance. Ms. Danes also stares upward as if mesmerized by light, a slender creature as pale and fine as corn silk. Her intense focus has the effect of an electric charge.
The problem with Ms. Rogoff's ambitious conception is that the piece becomes a tour de force of endurance for the audience. There is a great deal of repetition with none of the power of ritual. The repetition dissipates any sense of momentum and does not further the implied story. Nor is the tone of the piece helped by an unintentionally comical film of Ms. Danes dragging her body across a street and up stairs into the lobby and second-floor theater of P.S. 122.
But Ms. Rogoff has given Ms. Danes a terrific challenge in "Christina Olson," which Ms. Danes more than lives up to. The tangy costumes are by Liz Prince, with lighting by David Ferri and visual effects by Harvey Wang, Andrew Baker and Raj Soni. The atmospheric music and soundscore were composed by a collective called Rachel's.
"Christina Olson: American Model" runs through Sunday at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101.
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Here's a video of Claire being interviewed about Shopgirl at the Toranto Film Festival:
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2675243
Just scroll down, it's the 3rd interview listed
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2675243
Just scroll down, it's the 3rd interview listed
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oolie coco
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lostgirl said:
Definitely not. The book is a non-fiction research book about the meaning of the word "wife" and famous wives (fictional and real) throughout North American pop culture and history.
Claire at the Calvin Klein after party:
At the Narciso Rodriguez after party (the guy she's kissing is Narciso- no they're not together- it looks like a quick friendly kiss that the camera happened to catch)
from celebrity wonder
At the Narciso Rodriguez after party (the guy she's kissing is Narciso- no they're not together- it looks like a quick friendly kiss that the camera happened to catch)
from celebrity wonder
Morrowbright
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oolie coco said:( from this thread )
What the hell? That's exactly the cover of the book I just read: "The Meaning of Wife"
( www.mesastate.edu )
That's such a great image. It wouldn't surprise me if it were copied directly from the book, but I can't say for certain.
I'm so glad to read all of these great reviews of Claire's dance performance.
Claire appears in October's O magazine (a five page fashion spread in which she models coats), the Fifth anniversary edition of Details (one page article accompanied by one small and two full page pics) and on the cover of this month's Fashion magazine (which is only sold in Canada to the best of my knowledge; I have not seen it). she is also supposed to appear in an upcoming edition of Parade magazine (which comes with the Sunday paper). Hopefully as the general release dates for her two films draw nearer we'll see her become even more visible (Thanks to the Planet-Claire mailing list for this info)
DosViolines
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source: nytimes.com
This article is not about Claire Danes, but about the woman who inspired Steve Martin. I hope you don't mind I posted it here
This article is not about Claire Danes, but about the woman who inspired Steve Martin. I hope you don't mind I posted it here
From Artist to Muse and Back to Artist
By MARGY ROCHLIN
Published: September 18, 2005
Berkeley, Calif.
WHEN the film version of Steve Martin's best-selling novella, "Shopgirl," opens next month, audiences will see just how much of himself Mr. Martin put into the adaptation: he wrote the screenplay, produced the film and stars as Ray Porter, a wealthy older man who enters into a relationship with a shy, depressed clerk (Claire Danes) who spends her days selling gloves at an elegant Beverly Hills department store and her nights making art at her small dining table.
Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
Allyson Hollingsworth, the artist who inspired Steve Martin's film "Shopgirl."
Sam Emerson/Buena Vista Pictures
"Shopgirl," featuring Jason Schwartzman and Claire Danes.
But they will also see the work of the woman who inspired Mr. Martin's tale in the first place: the artist Allyson Hollingsworth, who created the photographs and drawings attributed to Ms. Danes's character, Mirabelle Buttersfield, and who also served as a consultant on the film. Ms. Hollingsworth previously worked as an art assistant on "Cheaper by the Dozen," another of Mr. Martin's movies, and jumped at this new opportunity, she said, when he offered it. And this time, her own artwork figured into the process: for example, Ms. Hollingsworth recreated one of her original pieces - a charcoal self-portrait of her nude body suspended in dark space - so it could be filmed for the movie as the work progressed.
"To actually be able to be paid to create something while I'm creating it?" said Ms. Hollingsworth, 36, sitting on a chair in her tidy, 9-by-13-foot white-walled studio here, dressed in baggy beige trousers and a pink and white cowboy shirt. "Not that that is a huge motivation for an artist, because that doesn't happen very often, but to be able to sit there and draw all day? It was such a luxury. My whole life, I had day jobs and fit my art in between. This was absolutely phenomenal."
At the time, Ms. Hollingsworth had yet to see "Shopgirl," which was directed by Anand Tucker, but she did catch the two-and-a-half-minute trailer on the Internet. There is a scene where Ms. Danes, wearing a thin cotton gown, sets the timer on her Nikon camera and makes a nighttime dash into a faintly lighted grove of spindly trees. Then a click, and the image is captured. "It got me really excited to see my process reproduced: the car headlights, the freezing of the white figure against the trees," Ms. Hollingsworth said.
The result is like a giant replica of a series of Ms. Hollingsworth's ghostly, faux Victorian-era photographs featuring a sleepwalking bride, which appear in a show scheduled to open last night at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. "Oh, it was so cool," she said of the movie scene.
This is her second one-person show, but the first time she is being featured as just an artist, not also an employee. From 1993 to 1996, she worked at what was then the Kohn-Turner gallery cataloging other people's art. One day, Mr. Martin, a serious art collector and a regular customer, came by.
"As soon as he left, I looked at Allyson and said, 'He likes you,' and she got all red and embarrassed and said, 'No, he does not,' " Michael Kohn, the gallery's co-owner, recalled recently. "About an hour later there was a phone call, and it was Steve, and he asked to speak to her." When "Shopgirl" the book was published in 2001, it wasn't just the "To Allyson" dedication on the flyleaf that suggested who the book's inspiration had been. "It was the truck that she drove, the cats that lived in her apartment, the apartment that was at the back of the complex," Mr. Kohn said. "You didn't have to suspend any disbelief, because he was very truthful to the model."
And what is Ms. Hollingsworth's own calculation of the fact-fiction ratio in the book? She replied in a manner that could have been lifted from actions of the self-conscious young woman in "Shopgirl." First she stammered, then her voice trailed off, then she just fell silent. The flat expression on her face never changed, but discomfort seemed to roil just beneath the surface of her pale skin. The longer she remained silent, the heavier the molecules in the air grew. Finally, she spoke: "I'm a really private person. Even with friends, I have a certain reserve."
"I think it's from moving around so much when I was growing up," said Ms. Hollingsworth, who was born in Columbia, Mo., and as the daughter of a career Army officer attended 12 schools before graduating from high school.
Still, she tried to push beyond her uneasiness and provide a better answer. "There are definitely movies like 'Erin Brockovich' or 'A Beautiful Mind,' based on a person's life from Point A to Point B," she said. "I would certainly say this wasn't a biography. There were things inspired by experiences that I had, but they've been so changed in the process of writing fiction." Ms. Hollingsworth's hesitancy extended to any and all queries placing Mr. Martin and herself in a single sentence - including something as simple as how long they were a couple. "I don't discuss my personal life," she said. (Mr. Martin declined to be interviewed.)
Perhaps Ms. Hollingsworth would prefer that her art serve as the window into her soul. Having received her undergraduate degree in jewelry and metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and a master's degree in art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she now lives in Oakland and works in various media - drawing, photography, sculpture, installations - many of them made to look as if they were made at the turn of the 20th century. Even her playful pieces have an underlying sense of longing and sadness.
"For me, it's about ephemera - her work is a lot about elegy and the question of mortality, what's fragile," said Gregory Hinton, a Los Angeles-based novelist who owns a few of Ms. Hollingsworth's romantic creations, including a quilt made of glistening communion wafers linked together with tiny brass rings, a version of the nude floating in space from "Shopgirl," as well as an antique handkerchief with the word "once" embroidered in the middle. "It's like, 'Once, I loved you,' or 'Once I dreamed about this,' or 'Once I was here,' " said Mr. Hinton. "She works in the past - like a love affair that's gone."
Recently, Ms. Hollingsworth reread "Shopgirl" and found it "moving," she said. "It's really amazing because the story that he wrote became a kind of universal theme. I think people can identify with love, loss and transforming."
Another review of Christina Olsen American Model. this person disliked the show but liked Claire:
Dance that fails to move
Monday, September 26, 2005 BY ROBERT JOHNSON
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- A fiercely independent young woman haunted by illness, Christina Olson seems a natural subject for a dance solo of the kind that choreographer Tamar Rogoff presented last weekend, at P.S. 122.
In Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World," housed at the Museum of Modern Art, Olson lies twisted upon a field of grass. Propped upon a withered arm, she gazes at an old, wooden house that looks far away. Her character seems intensely physical, defined by its relationship to the earth and by her muscular deterioration. She presents a mystery. Showing Olson with her back turned to the viewer, Wyeth invites questions about her interior life.
Unfortunately, Rogoff's dance, "Christina Olson: American Model," doesn't answer any questions. Despite a rich movement vocabulary and a terrific performance by soloist Claire Danes, this work never plumbs below the surface to suggest what Olson might have thought or felt.
Given that Danes is a film actress making her dance debut, the result of her year-long work with Rogoff seems paradoxical. Viewers might have expected a production heavy on text but light on choreography. Instead, text and video play minor roles.
Danes has a flexible and disciplined body, whose clearly defined movements take center stage. The early portions of the solo emphasize shapes rather than dynamics, perhaps in order to conserve energy. Yet Danes rises to feverish speed at the end.
While teaching Danes how to dance, Rogoff has neglected to exploit her talents as an actress, however. Not just stoic in the face of illness, Danes' character here is monotone. The plot lacks narrative details. At one point, Danes recites a list of Olson's acquaintances who married. Yet Rogoff never shows us the loneliness Olson must have felt, being left behind.
Instead, her undiagnosed malady becomes the choreographer's obsessive focus. Danes lies prone and broken in various positions; and her knees thrash from side to side as she propels herself with a spiraling movement across the floor. Her spine twists and writhes. Her chest caves in. Making a fist, she tries to scoop out the hurt. At another moment, she appears to carve open her torso, so we can see inside.
At times, Danes runs around the perimeter of the stage, as if trying to escape her fate. She rolls over and over, like someone tumbling helplessly down a hillside.
The fact that Olson was also an artist's model becomes a secondary theme that the dance addresses sketchily. Perhaps the highlight is a scene where Danes poses crouched or standing on a tilted platform that frames her figure in interesting ways.
Arguably, the dance's low-point comes in an extended video sequence. While Danes takes a breather, we see a pre-recorded episode in which she crawls across the intersection on the street outside the theater, and hauls herself laboriously up the stairs of P.S. 122. Such shenanigans and a failure of dramatic imagination turn this hour of dancing into a long and sweaty evening.
I still want to see it. I hope I get a chance- it sounds really unique and I think that some of what the reviewer objected to sounds very intersting. But the reporter got some facts wrong. This isn't Claire's dance debut. She actually performed in this same theater (Performance Space 122) when she was six years old. She started dancing at 4 and continued to dance until she was 14 when she began working on My So-Called Life. She also took dance classes when she was at Yale. So this past year wasn't her 1st time learning to dance by any means.
Dance that fails to move
Monday, September 26, 2005 BY ROBERT JOHNSON
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- A fiercely independent young woman haunted by illness, Christina Olson seems a natural subject for a dance solo of the kind that choreographer Tamar Rogoff presented last weekend, at P.S. 122.
In Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World," housed at the Museum of Modern Art, Olson lies twisted upon a field of grass. Propped upon a withered arm, she gazes at an old, wooden house that looks far away. Her character seems intensely physical, defined by its relationship to the earth and by her muscular deterioration. She presents a mystery. Showing Olson with her back turned to the viewer, Wyeth invites questions about her interior life.
Unfortunately, Rogoff's dance, "Christina Olson: American Model," doesn't answer any questions. Despite a rich movement vocabulary and a terrific performance by soloist Claire Danes, this work never plumbs below the surface to suggest what Olson might have thought or felt.
Given that Danes is a film actress making her dance debut, the result of her year-long work with Rogoff seems paradoxical. Viewers might have expected a production heavy on text but light on choreography. Instead, text and video play minor roles.
Danes has a flexible and disciplined body, whose clearly defined movements take center stage. The early portions of the solo emphasize shapes rather than dynamics, perhaps in order to conserve energy. Yet Danes rises to feverish speed at the end.
While teaching Danes how to dance, Rogoff has neglected to exploit her talents as an actress, however. Not just stoic in the face of illness, Danes' character here is monotone. The plot lacks narrative details. At one point, Danes recites a list of Olson's acquaintances who married. Yet Rogoff never shows us the loneliness Olson must have felt, being left behind.
Instead, her undiagnosed malady becomes the choreographer's obsessive focus. Danes lies prone and broken in various positions; and her knees thrash from side to side as she propels herself with a spiraling movement across the floor. Her spine twists and writhes. Her chest caves in. Making a fist, she tries to scoop out the hurt. At another moment, she appears to carve open her torso, so we can see inside.
At times, Danes runs around the perimeter of the stage, as if trying to escape her fate. She rolls over and over, like someone tumbling helplessly down a hillside.
The fact that Olson was also an artist's model becomes a secondary theme that the dance addresses sketchily. Perhaps the highlight is a scene where Danes poses crouched or standing on a tilted platform that frames her figure in interesting ways.
Arguably, the dance's low-point comes in an extended video sequence. While Danes takes a breather, we see a pre-recorded episode in which she crawls across the intersection on the street outside the theater, and hauls herself laboriously up the stairs of P.S. 122. Such shenanigans and a failure of dramatic imagination turn this hour of dancing into a long and sweaty evening.
I still want to see it. I hope I get a chance- it sounds really unique and I think that some of what the reviewer objected to sounds very intersting. But the reporter got some facts wrong. This isn't Claire's dance debut. She actually performed in this same theater (Performance Space 122) when she was six years old. She started dancing at 4 and continued to dance until she was 14 when she began working on My So-Called Life. She also took dance classes when she was at Yale. So this past year wasn't her 1st time learning to dance by any means.
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Toranto Film Festival interview with Claire:
Interview: Claire Danes
"Shopgirl"Posted: Monday, September 26th 2005 4:43PM Author: Paul Fischer Location: Toronto, ON
Quietly reserved, Claire Danes is in the Toronto Film Festival to firstly support her co-starring role in Steve Martin's Shopgirl and to accompany boyfriend Billy Crudup to the premiere of his latest film, Trust the Man. But it was the former that the pretty actress was here to discuss, a quietly poetic film in which she plays a shop assistant and aspiring artist in Los Angeles searching for requited love, which she things she finds in the arms of a wealthy, older man, plays the film's screenwriter, Steve Martin.
Hers is a difficult character to characterize, this young, naive, vulnerable young woman, whom Danes defines as "really inexperienced in a lot of ways who's pretty much just gotten out of college I mean most of my friends who are at that time in their lives, in that transitional period, feel very ill-equipped to do very practical things. They know how to talk abstractly and theoretically about sophisticated ideas but actually paying for their rent and applying those ideas in a practical way is totally overwhelming and alien. So I think she's just trying to figure out where her edges are, plus she's in a new city, out of step with the culture, trying to get a sense of it and engage with it."
Danes is adept, at interviews, to reveal little of herself and in relating to this character, a woman desperately searching for uncomplicated love, Danes is coy as to whether she can relate to her. " I mean she's very clever, and I even think that she's emotionally savvy," Danes explains about her character. "She's an artist and an observer and just not so aggressive, but identify with her to an extent because "she is so well drawn, but I don't feel like her twin at all. I had to find her and make her sensibility and story relevant to my own. I mean, she's creative, and I'd like to think that I am, and she's pretty sensitive as I am."
Fans of the pretty actress will be surprised at her first nude scene in the film, but Danes strongly feels it was a very relevant moment in the relationship between the characters played by herself and Martin. " I'm not a flasher typically," she begins, laughingly. "I think that the nudity was important for a couple of reasons: One they were in a sexual relationship. which was the dominant reason they were together initially, even though it grows into something more complex than that. Also it's an erotic story and I think that needed to be rendered. But also she's surprising because she's really unsure of herself in some ways and then in other ways she's very sure, confident and even bold, so I think I found that compelling and kind of paradoxical. So because it surprised me about her, I assumed it would surprise the audience and make her more dynamic."
Claire Danes, who will next be seen in the ensemble drama The Family Stone, attained success at an early age, spent some 6 years living with her now former Australian boyfriend in Sydney, and seems to be in the right place in her life, both personally and professionally. Despite the ferocious competitiveness prevalent within Hollywood, Danes is able to balance a perfect career. Asked what it is she is looking for in her career, Danes smiles. "What am I looking for? I tend to, I don't want to say make choices passively but, I don't originate work, I just interpret it. So I I'm not burning to play any one particular role. It's always exciting when I have a chance to play somebody who undergoes some change and growth and is not just a conduit for somebody else's big experience and who actually gets to have one herself. But by the same token I'm also really happy to play a more supporting character - if I love the writing I'm happy to be of service to that."
Beyond Family Stone, Danes says she's next set to do "a movie with Richard Gere - a psychological cop thriller called The Flock, with a Hong-Kong director named Andrew Lau. I've got to do something like that at some stage just to make it all even."
"Shopgirl"Posted: Monday, September 26th 2005 4:43PM Author: Paul Fischer Location: Toronto, ON
Quietly reserved, Claire Danes is in the Toronto Film Festival to firstly support her co-starring role in Steve Martin's Shopgirl and to accompany boyfriend Billy Crudup to the premiere of his latest film, Trust the Man. But it was the former that the pretty actress was here to discuss, a quietly poetic film in which she plays a shop assistant and aspiring artist in Los Angeles searching for requited love, which she things she finds in the arms of a wealthy, older man, plays the film's screenwriter, Steve Martin.
Hers is a difficult character to characterize, this young, naive, vulnerable young woman, whom Danes defines as "really inexperienced in a lot of ways who's pretty much just gotten out of college I mean most of my friends who are at that time in their lives, in that transitional period, feel very ill-equipped to do very practical things. They know how to talk abstractly and theoretically about sophisticated ideas but actually paying for their rent and applying those ideas in a practical way is totally overwhelming and alien. So I think she's just trying to figure out where her edges are, plus she's in a new city, out of step with the culture, trying to get a sense of it and engage with it."
Danes is adept, at interviews, to reveal little of herself and in relating to this character, a woman desperately searching for uncomplicated love, Danes is coy as to whether she can relate to her. " I mean she's very clever, and I even think that she's emotionally savvy," Danes explains about her character. "She's an artist and an observer and just not so aggressive, but identify with her to an extent because "she is so well drawn, but I don't feel like her twin at all. I had to find her and make her sensibility and story relevant to my own. I mean, she's creative, and I'd like to think that I am, and she's pretty sensitive as I am."
Fans of the pretty actress will be surprised at her first nude scene in the film, but Danes strongly feels it was a very relevant moment in the relationship between the characters played by herself and Martin. " I'm not a flasher typically," she begins, laughingly. "I think that the nudity was important for a couple of reasons: One they were in a sexual relationship. which was the dominant reason they were together initially, even though it grows into something more complex than that. Also it's an erotic story and I think that needed to be rendered. But also she's surprising because she's really unsure of herself in some ways and then in other ways she's very sure, confident and even bold, so I think I found that compelling and kind of paradoxical. So because it surprised me about her, I assumed it would surprise the audience and make her more dynamic."
Claire Danes, who will next be seen in the ensemble drama The Family Stone, attained success at an early age, spent some 6 years living with her now former Australian boyfriend in Sydney, and seems to be in the right place in her life, both personally and professionally. Despite the ferocious competitiveness prevalent within Hollywood, Danes is able to balance a perfect career. Asked what it is she is looking for in her career, Danes smiles. "What am I looking for? I tend to, I don't want to say make choices passively but, I don't originate work, I just interpret it. So I I'm not burning to play any one particular role. It's always exciting when I have a chance to play somebody who undergoes some change and growth and is not just a conduit for somebody else's big experience and who actually gets to have one herself. But by the same token I'm also really happy to play a more supporting character - if I love the writing I'm happy to be of service to that."
Beyond Family Stone, Danes says she's next set to do "a movie with Richard Gere - a psychological cop thriller called The Flock, with a Hong-Kong director named Andrew Lau. I've got to do something like that at some stage just to make it all even."
Another dance review:
DANCE REVIEW
[size=+1]Danes dances painting to life[/size]
BY APOLLINAIRE SCHERR
Apollinaire Scherr is a freelance writer.
Before her debut in the cult teen TV hit "My So-Called Life," native New Yorker Claire Danes could be found in "artsy-fartsy dance performances," as she has put it, in the East Village. Now she's back!
For a riveting hour at PS 122, Danes enacts in wordless movement the willful dream life of the real Christina behind painter Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World."
Christina Olson: American Model," by veteran New York choreographer Tamar Rogoff, kaleidoscopes Wyeth's universalizing portrait with this fiercely independent New England woman's actual - and singularly difficult - circumstances.
You know the painting: A young woman in pink sunk in the late-summer stubble at the base of a New England hill looks intently toward the weathered farmhouse on the gray horizon. We see her from behind - the graceful back, the loose knot of chestnut hair, but not the face that would individualize her.
"Christina's World" thinks globally. We all need the same thing as this anonymous girl: vast blue sky and green grass to match our essentially appealing humanity. But the hill blearily before us is sun-scorched, and the prospects at the top are low enough to bump our heads against.
The picture's easy sentiment depends on our assumption that the woman looks OK and that a whole life, however bleak, extends before her. As the externalization of our high hopes for our souls, youth and beauty make experience seem universal. Nobody wants to identify with old age and ugliness.
In fact, the portraits Wyeth painted not long after creating the iconic 1948 work reveal his model Christina Olson to be middle-aged and hideous. (He seems to have overcompensated for the widely held assumption that the woman in the painting is young. In photos, Olson looks ordinary.) Plus, Wyeth never would have imagined her crouched at the bottom of the hill if he hadn't often seen her there. She suffered from a mysterious form of muscular deterioration. Refusing to use a wheelchair, she often dragged herself from place to place.
In "Christina Olson: American Model," we are not asked to imagine Danes as any less willowy, less translucently lovely, than she is. This is not Nicole Kidman behind a rubber nose. On the other hand, unlike the painting, the solo has no ambition to universalize. Danes' Olson is not an Everywoman, she's just one woman who must gather all of her considerable will to maintain a relationship with her errant body.
Danes moves with luminous clarity and deliberateness. The solo penetrates past muscle and bone right to the woman's spirit, which not only makes for great drama but spares us the embarrassing pretense of Danes acting the part of disabled hag.
As for the boring question the press has posed - "Can she dance?" - the answer is yes. She does not resemble a person frozen inside a tree, the giveaway sign if you can't. But more important, Danes annuls issues of can and can't. Dancing in "Christina Olson" is an expression not of ability but of intent, which means there are moments you would never get from a dancer who wasn't also an extraordinary actress.
Near the piece's end, Olson is caught in an ecstatic dream of dancing. As with most dreams, in the middle she remembers reality - that, in fact, she cannot leap about. The moment is edged with danger as Danes flings herself closer to real abandon than any dancer I've ever seen.
Christina Olson: American Model. Featuring Claire Danes. Choreographed by Tamar Rogoff. Through Sunday at Performance Space 122, 150 First Ave., Manhattan. Tickets $10-$20. Call 212-477-5288 or visit www.ps122.org. Seen Wednesday.
from New York Newsday
DANCE REVIEW
[size=+1]Danes dances painting to life[/size]
BY APOLLINAIRE SCHERR
Apollinaire Scherr is a freelance writer.
Before her debut in the cult teen TV hit "My So-Called Life," native New Yorker Claire Danes could be found in "artsy-fartsy dance performances," as she has put it, in the East Village. Now she's back!
For a riveting hour at PS 122, Danes enacts in wordless movement the willful dream life of the real Christina behind painter Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World."
Christina Olson: American Model," by veteran New York choreographer Tamar Rogoff, kaleidoscopes Wyeth's universalizing portrait with this fiercely independent New England woman's actual - and singularly difficult - circumstances.
You know the painting: A young woman in pink sunk in the late-summer stubble at the base of a New England hill looks intently toward the weathered farmhouse on the gray horizon. We see her from behind - the graceful back, the loose knot of chestnut hair, but not the face that would individualize her.
"Christina's World" thinks globally. We all need the same thing as this anonymous girl: vast blue sky and green grass to match our essentially appealing humanity. But the hill blearily before us is sun-scorched, and the prospects at the top are low enough to bump our heads against.
The picture's easy sentiment depends on our assumption that the woman looks OK and that a whole life, however bleak, extends before her. As the externalization of our high hopes for our souls, youth and beauty make experience seem universal. Nobody wants to identify with old age and ugliness.
In fact, the portraits Wyeth painted not long after creating the iconic 1948 work reveal his model Christina Olson to be middle-aged and hideous. (He seems to have overcompensated for the widely held assumption that the woman in the painting is young. In photos, Olson looks ordinary.) Plus, Wyeth never would have imagined her crouched at the bottom of the hill if he hadn't often seen her there. She suffered from a mysterious form of muscular deterioration. Refusing to use a wheelchair, she often dragged herself from place to place.
In "Christina Olson: American Model," we are not asked to imagine Danes as any less willowy, less translucently lovely, than she is. This is not Nicole Kidman behind a rubber nose. On the other hand, unlike the painting, the solo has no ambition to universalize. Danes' Olson is not an Everywoman, she's just one woman who must gather all of her considerable will to maintain a relationship with her errant body.
Danes moves with luminous clarity and deliberateness. The solo penetrates past muscle and bone right to the woman's spirit, which not only makes for great drama but spares us the embarrassing pretense of Danes acting the part of disabled hag.
As for the boring question the press has posed - "Can she dance?" - the answer is yes. She does not resemble a person frozen inside a tree, the giveaway sign if you can't. But more important, Danes annuls issues of can and can't. Dancing in "Christina Olson" is an expression not of ability but of intent, which means there are moments you would never get from a dancer who wasn't also an extraordinary actress.
Near the piece's end, Olson is caught in an ecstatic dream of dancing. As with most dreams, in the middle she remembers reality - that, in fact, she cannot leap about. The moment is edged with danger as Danes flings herself closer to real abandon than any dancer I've ever seen.
Christina Olson: American Model. Featuring Claire Danes. Choreographed by Tamar Rogoff. Through Sunday at Performance Space 122, 150 First Ave., Manhattan. Tickets $10-$20. Call 212-477-5288 or visit www.ps122.org. Seen Wednesday.
from New York Newsday
