Author: Philip Gardner

Erik Larson’s thought-provoking non-fiction work IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS reads like a novel. It tells the story of William E Dodd, appointed by President Franklin D Roosevelt as the American ambassador to Berlin in 1933 – at the time when Hitler was consolidating his powers and the Nazi menace was just beginning to get its stranglehold on Germany. Above, the enforced boycotting of Jewish businesses – here the famous Tietz Department Store in Berlin – was an early portent of things to come.

One of the main problems facing an American ambassador in Germany at the time was the need to get the German government to start paying back $1.2 billion in loans that the US had extended to them. That’s one of the reasons that some of Roosevelt’s choices for the job had turned it down.

Roosevelt reportedly joked: “It would serve Hitler right if I sent a Jew to Berlin.” The pro-Jewish FDR presidency was sometimes referred to as ‘the Rosenberg administration’. Anti-Semitism was widespread in the USA at the time, though rarely publicly expressed. 40% of the population felt that the Jews “had too much power in the USA” while 20% actually wanted them driven out of the country. The majority of Americans were against raising immigration quotas to accommodate Jews fleeing the signs of impending danger in Europe. 95% of Americans were also opposed to any US involvement in another foreign war.

William Dodd had no diplomatic experience; he was a scholar writing a four-volume book about the Old South when the President – having ticked preferred names off his list – offered Dodd the Berlin post. Dodd had lived and studied in Leipzig and it was thought that his German-language skills would be a plus. Dodd reluctantly accepted Roosevelt’s urgent plea and he embarked for Germany on July 5, 1933 with his wife and his two grown children.

Arriving in Berlin, Dodd and his family installed themselves in rather modest quarters eschewing the more grandiose life style favored by most emissaries to Berlin. They found the city charming, and on the surface saw no signs of the rumored violence and thuggery of the rising Nazi movement.

Martha, Dodd’s daughter (above), was something of a beauty. Her circle of friends in the US included Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg; she continued to correspond with them from Berlin. She entered enthusiastically into the city’s social whirl and was soon meeting and even dating prominent Nazis; she had an on-going affair with Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo.

But one day, on an holiday excursion to Nuremberg, Martha and her friends observed the upsetting humiliation of a young woman, Anna Rath, being dragged nearly naked and head-shaven, thru the streets by a gang of brown-shirted SA troopers. Around her neck was hung a sign: “I wanted to marry a Jew!”

As an increasing number of such incidents developed, some involving even Americans who were either Jewish or mistaken for Jews, Dodd found himself slowly becoming disillusioned. There were beatings, arrests, people removed into “protective custody” in the dead of night. The rights, privileges and property of Jews were being systematically taken away. If Dodd lodged formal protests, they were met with apologies and promises from government officials that the culprits would be punished. But the downward spiral continued.

Martha meanwhile became more aware of the machinations and graspings for power among the Nazi leaders when her lover Diels was briefly exiled over a conflict with Heinrich Himmler. One prominent Nazi went so far as to suggest that Martha would be “the perfect woman for Hitler” but then went on to say that the Fuhrer was “an absolute neuter, not a man…” 

It was finally the Night of Long Knives in July 1934 that made Dodd realize there was no stopping the Nazi behemoth. The US government was as unhappy with Dodd’s work in Berlin as he was in being so far from his beloved farm in Virginia and his languishing writing project. Twice Dodd had returned to his farm for sabbaticals; as 1937 came to a close it was mutually agreed between him and Roosevelt that the ambassadorship was ill-suited to Dodd. He suddenly ‘retired’, vanishing from the Berlin scene with little fanfare.

Upon hearing of Dodd’s departure, a Nazi official chided “the retiring ambassador’s habitual lack of comprehension of the new Germany.”

In 1938, Dodd summarized his view of the Germany he had experienced as being of a time and place where “all the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to ‘save civilization’ from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy — thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed.”

Dodd died in 1940 having finished only one volume of his book, Old South.

Tuesday September 27, 2011 – When I first read that New York City Ballet were going to stage a work “composed”* by Sir Paul McCartney, the notion seemed so yesterday. The famous former Beatle, who created many beloved pop songs decades ago, has never been considered a serious force in the contemporary classic music genre. Alex Ross nails it in this review of the CD of this latest McCartney score.

Who needs another story ballet in this day and age? Boy meets girl…again? (How about boy meets boy?)  I suppose it can still work: Christopher Wheeldon’s ESTANCIA had a fresh telling of the boy/girl story but it was far more succinctly told – and with better sets and costumes and far better music – than in  OCEAN’S KINGDOM.

Peter Martins is frequently maligned as being a second-rate choreographer; working in the house that Balanchine built, it’s unlikely that any current choreographer could succeed to the mantle of Mr B without coming in for heavy criticism. Myself, I like a lot of Peter’s ballets and I never dismiss them out of hand. However, a key element in the success of a Martins ballet is always the music that he chooses. His best works (in my estimation) – MORGEN, BURLESKE, OCTET, TALA GAISMA, HALLELUJAH JUNCTION, FRIANDISES, FEARFUL SYMMETRIES, BARBER VIOLIN CONCERTO, JEU DE CARTES, MIRAGE, LES GENTILHOMMES, CHICHESTER PSALMS – all have one thing in common: they are set to great or at least very interesting music. I’m always happy to see these works being programmed at NYCB.

So here’s the lethal combination that sinks OCEAN’S KINGDOM: too much middling music is applied to a banal plot which leaves the choreographer with the stick end of the lollipop. The score starts off quite beautifully, actually. But it soon becomes evident that there is way too much music that is repetitive or goes nowhere. Each of the ballet’s four scenes is about 5 minutes too long. This requires the choreographer to make too much ‘filler’ dancing and stage business. Gorgeous as Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild are, we get tired of their long, swoony duets because they go on and on. OK, we know they love each other…how much embrace/lift/swoon do we need to see? But what else can you do to ‘their’ music?  I feel certain Peter would have wanted to avoid asking Sir Paul to make cuts, so he’s strapped with the task of creating movement to faceless, ambling music. No wonder his choreography for this piece is coming in for so much criticism. 

The contrived plot hinges on the character Scala (superb dancing and acting from Georgina Pazcoguin) who betrays her mistress, allowing the princess to be kidnapped. Since we don’t really know Scala’s motivation, we are puzzled; then just as inexplicably, Scala turns remorseful and tries to undo what she’s done. What choreographer could makes sense out of this, especially with such vapid music to work with?  

Then there are the costumes, by Sir Paul’s daughter Stella. They are, in a word, ugly. And extremely unflattering to the dancers. The lighting is quite good, especially the beams of light that create Princess Honorata’s prison cell. The rising of the moon is pretty nice.  

Tonight, it seemed a very long and winding road to get to the end of Ocean’s Kingdom. If I fell for any aspect of the ballet, it was the dancing. But the dancers – some of the greatest movers on Earth – needed far more help from composer and choreographer than they received. But: let it be…they did their best under the circumstances.

As the 50-minute ballet crawled to a close I felt like a fool for having devoted my time to watching it. My basic reaction to Ocean’s Kingdom was: I don’t want to see it again. The bottom line is – as I have so often said – you cannot make a really good dancework to mediocre music. While the house seemed nearly full there was no enthusiasm to speak of; the dancers took one set of bows to dutiful applause. A lone voice yelled bravas for Sara and Gina. And Amar Ramasar was an audience favorite, understandably. After the show, I wanted to buy Amar, Christian Tworzyanski, Daniel Ulbricht, Megan LeCrone, Craig Hall, Savannah Lowery and Emily Kikta each a beer for them to cry in. Then there were Anthony Huxley, Allen Peiffer and David Prottas as the Drunken Lords (“drunk as lords”…get it?)…what a waste of three handsome, talented guys.  

Most reviews of the piece have seemed to state that the music is OK or better than OK and that the choreography is uninspired. I would say: the music is as uninspired as the scenario and thus, so is the ballet. I really do not think any choreographer could craft something truly impressive to this score; it might make decent background music for a documentary film about the sinking of the Achille Lauro or some such nautical disaster.

More could be said but, what’s the point? The reviews (example) have been ho-hum at best, negative at worst. What annoys me more than anything else about OCEAN’S KINGDOM is all the time and effort the dancers had to put into getting this ballet onstage. NYCB have now had two high-profile flops in a row: SEVEN DEADLY SINS and OCEAN’S KINGDOM. No matter how many tickets were sold to these ballets, or how much money the respective galas raised, artistically there were lacklustre in everything but the dancing. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to haul in the pop/rock crowd or the Broadway audience (largely tourist trade anyway) and concentrate on what NYC Ballet are famous for: neo-classical ballet.

* I use the word “composed” generously; like many pop music writers, McCartney reportedly cannot read or write music in the sense of a Stravinsky or a Brahms. The Playbill shows that Sir Paul had the help of both an arranger (John Wilson) and an orchestrator (Andrew Cottee); in those circumstances anyone with a sense of rhythm and melody could be deemed a composer. Elgar and Britten must be shaking their heads, somewhere in Heaven.

DISPLACED is a dancer-portrait series being created by photographer Matthew Murphy. Above: Matt’s image of one of the participating dancers, New York City Ballet‘s Wendy Whelan, a great favorite of both Matthew and myself. (I have an especially fond memory of the day Matt came with me to photograph Wendy teaching class at MMAC.) 

David Hallberg, danseur supreme and very much in the news of late, is another of Matt’s subjects in this series.

I asked Matt to tell us a bit about this project:

Matt is presently raising money via Kickstarter to fund the Dance New Amsterdam exhibit. You can make a donation to the project here.

Update: Although Matt has already reached his Kickstarter goal, you can continute to donate. And I hope you will!