Perhaps I was just inured to the slightly disappointing loudspeakers of Nova Scena and the strange jumps in the lights didn't bother me so much.

It probably also has to do with a greater chemistry between Romeo (Arthur Abrams) and Juliet (Natalya Némethová). It's not to say that Némethová outdanced the always stunning Katarina Kosikova. But she did dance Juliet with as much passion.

See for yourself:

dance of the Patriarchs

mercutio dance

mercutio dies by romeo

mercutio surrounded by capulets

Mercutio vs Tybalt

dance of the Patriarchs

Tybalt Juliet mother

Juliet Lady Capulet

duo romeo juliet

juliet ordered to marry paris

lift romeo juliet

paris attacks romeo

Juliet Lady Capulet

romeo juliet second duet 2

dead mercutio

romeo juliet second duet

arthur abrams natalya

Lady Caulet grieves Juliet

Romeo finds Juliet in coma

Mario Radacovsky curtain call

Balet Bratislava dance of patricians 1

Balet Bratislava dance of patricians 2 2

murder of Mercutio 3

death of Mercutio 4

Juliet mourns her brother 5

Juliet mourns her brother 2 6

Capulet household mourns 7

Capulet household mourns 2 8

Rome and Juliet in bed 9

Romeo with Juliet 10

Romeo dies 11

Juliet discovers dead Romeo 12

Balet bratislava corps de ballet 13

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Brennan-Jobs writing is splendid. Her treatment of the complexities of the Ivy League and fraternities in a story about date rape is spot on. Brennan-Jobs describes eventual acceptance into the special circles of the Ivy League and how it seems like another, better world to an outsider:

One weekend that summer the four of us went to Avery’s summerhouse in New Hampshire. She drove her father’s red MG with the top down and it was just right, just how it should be, I thought, on the East Coast during college in the summer with friends. The house was small, clean and furnished beautifully, expensively. The walls were thick. Vintage quilts spilled over antique four-posters.  The house was two stories, rectangular, with a patio and a lawn in back that sloped down and ended at an inlet of the Atlantic ocean. There was no beach, just a little drop down. I didn’t understand that the water was ocean, and not lake, until we jumped in and I tasted the salt and felt the sharp cold. It had a power that a lake didn’t have, too, even though it was calm on the top. Lake water seemed thinner. I had never seen this kind of ocean before, this domesticated version of the Pacific. Later we made dinner together and ate on the patio as the sky darkened. I extrapolated, watching the ocean from the porch, sitting with my friends, eating: here with these people, even wild and violent things were calm.

I began to wonder whether I’d been wading too deeply through my life, hampered by unnecessary seriousness. Maybe life could be lived more on the surface layer, where the sheen is.

Later Brennan-Jobs reveals the friend who introduced her to these perfect circles had a dark streak and had destroyed the life of the young woman she had just met in London:

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said softly. Then she hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

I had a feeling this was about Cole. “Cole and I are just friends,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. We’re not a couple or anything.”

She began to tell me her story.

It was not, I learned, a crush at all. She had met Cole at a party at one of Harvard’s final clubs. She had a few drinks there, but didn’t remember anything after that. She woke up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, knowing that she’d had sex, missing her underwear. She went to the hospital and tested positive for the presence of Rohypnol—the “date rape drug”—in her blood.

I’d never heard of Rohypnol before. Emily said it made you cognizant, even excited or blissful, in the moment, and then you forget everything the next day. She didn’t know who had slipped the drug into her drink or who had had sex with her. Several people told her later that she and Cole had sex that night in the club in front of a group of people.

At the time, I learned, she was training to be a doctor at Harvard and had almost completed her course.  She dropped out after the incident with Cole and returned to her native London.

Here the banality of evil resonates quietly. This is what the Ivy League is about. The propriety is all surfaces, underneath which a morass of Kennedy ravishments and careless murder. The same dangers F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

In another essay about abandoning vegetarianism, Brennan-Jobs nails the paradox perfectly in describing her first baked chicken. The human body is very unhappy without meat over time. All the frustration at the murder of animals for food does not change the underlying cravings of the body for flesh.

I felt unfastened, too, roasting the chicken today, eating it at night with my boyfriend. It wasn’t my first time eating meat – but it was my first time eating meat as a meat-eater. It was moist with crispy skin and there were vegetables, too, cooked in the juices in the same pan: beautiful white beets with red veins, shallots with burnt and twisting stems, sweet potatoes – all upstaged, though, by the flavorful meat that sat between us, glistening. It collapsed the space between us, brought us closer, I think, with comfort and normality; it also collapsed time, made the vegetarian years fade.

The very word vegetarian has so many different meanings, one can never be sure what someone else means or even what one means oneself.

I grew up, left home and traveled farther and farther from California to the East Coast, then to England, then to Italy. I slipped through holes in understanding and language: in Boston one can be vegetarian and eat fish; in England a vegetarian may also eat fish, and rarely objects to the meat that flavors a dish; in Italy una vegetariana may sample everything, as the population is perplexed by the concept of meatlessness; little exceptions seem unavoidable.

I absorbed the excuses and ate. I strayed as far as I could safely stray into the universe of flesh, emboldened by anonymity, right up to the point when I would be questioned, and then stopped.  And if I was troubled by the difference between what I said I was, and what I ate, the taste of the tender, flavorful meat seemed absolution enough, as if the spiritual problem was mitigated, the animal suffering alleviated, the question of my identity (a vegetarian? who eats meat?) obfuscated by my pleasure.

I deeply sympathise with Brennan-Jobs. I loathe the idea of eating meat, consuming flesh. I wonder about the health of the activity given the tortured flesh from modern day factory farms, pumped up with fatteners and hormones. Or even the terror of transported animals forced into slaughter houses. Consuming their death throes cannot be good for us.

Most people in the West eat far too much meat. The human body needs meat about one meal every two days. I try to restrict myself to that rhythm and make fish one out of every second meal. But abolishing meat altogether creates a slow decline to weakness. I know, I've been vegetarian for as long as a year at a time.

It could be worse. Fijans ate other humans like we eat beef. And when one sees what Westerners have done to Fiji or to the Philippines one can hardly blame their blood thirstiness.

Brennan-Jobs essay takes us deep into the riddle of flesh eating in delicious prose. Alas, it would be wonderful if she would post more prolifically to her weblog. There are only four or five posts for the last two years.

While I am far from convinced that Steve Jobs and Apple have done any good in the world of technology in the last five years (I share Stallman's walled garden and privacy concerns), Brennan-Jobs fine writing is enough to take the sheen off my dismay.

• the Scottish setting can seem very campy
• adequate stagecraft to preserve a sense of wonder
• the music can come across as thin and grating
• sufficiently large, gifted and beautiful corps-de-ballet
• the male audience can fail to fall in love with La Sylphide
• the women in the public fail to identify with Effie
• the women in the public can wonder what Effie sees in James

Manuel Legris has gotten it all right with Wiener Staatsoper ballet.

Irina Tsymbal as La Sylphide
All photos courtesy & © Max Moser

The decors are very sober, even a little bit drab. You feel inside a Scottish manor somewhere in the Highlands. Yet all the space of the huge Vienna State Opera stage is all there for the variations. In the second act the woods were tremendous and airy.

The small touches of stagecraft were a delight. Sylphides flying across the stage at 15 metres above the stage, Sylphides perched in the branches of the trees, La Sylphide disappearing vertically up the chimney or disappearing instantly into the floor.

The Staatsoper orchestra was in fine form, particularly in the overture which was sufficiently lyrical and touching that one wishes a recording. Through the rest of the ballet the performance was usually very good but the limits of the score were sometimes felt and the music hinted of military marching band. Still I'm far from sure one can do better without reorchestration.

Staatsoper corps de ballet La Sylphide

Manuel Legris has continued to work wonders with the splendid corps-de-ballet that his predessor Harangoza so paintakingly built. There are no less than 23 additional sylphides on stage in the second act. The whole corps-de-ballet looked great. There are small moments of synchronicity to perfect, but it is the premiere after all. There are few over-rehearsed ballet companies left in the world and Vienna Staatsopera ballet is not one of them.

Irina Tsymbal tears of La Sylphide

Irina Tsymbal is a perfect Sylphide. Her pallid complexion and somewhat tragic demeanor finds its natural home. Tsymbal can portray imperious roles as well. She is a very versatile ballerina. But La Sylphide is the most natural fit of all for her.

After the performance, Manuel Legris elevated Irina Tsymbal to First Soloist. It is good to see Legris keep an open mind about dancers. Initially, he planned to release Tsymbal before his first season as what he saw in rehearsal hadn't impressed him. Fortunately a good fairy told him that Tsymbal's talents flame on stage and not at the bar. If Legris can remain open to talent like this, he has a long and bright career as a director ahead of him.

Effie is a more difficult role. Danced with sufficient flair, James enchantment with La Sylphide would make no sense. Nina Polakova is almost as lyric a ballerina as Irina Tsymbal, with less of Tysmbal's undercurrents of dangerous passion. As Effie she very deliberately curbs her charms to become a real girl, in love with her man but more cheerful than deep, trusting than passionate.

Roman Lazik Irina Tsymbal La Sylphide

As James, Roman Lazik is in his element. James is the ordinary guy caught in a remote fantasy. Lazik plays James as a good old boy more than a dreamer. Still, in the second act, he struggles as one feels the the emotion is not in his bones. While Lazik is a very handsome man and a very correct classical dancer and an attentive partner, he lacks a certain passion.

With a truly charismatic and masculine dancer in the role of James - Sergei Filin from the Bolshoi comes to mind - the men identify strongly with James and the women understand and feel both for Effie and La Sylphide. Lazik didn't fail to move us, but didn't move us as much as I'd like. This single weakness explains to me why the audience reception was enthusiastic and not ecstastic. I hope we will see Vladimir Shishov in the role of James.

Andrey Kaydanovskiy as Madge

We did see some great performances in secondary roles: Andrei Kaydonovsky was truly wicked as Madge. The pantomine was writ large but he pushed through it with sufficient abandon that we believed in her evil. His movement remained strong but feminine.

Kamil Pavelka was a resolute and sufficiently antagonistic Gurn. One felt his contempt for his friend who was half heartedly stealing the woman he loved. Pavelka is the kind of dancer who is perfect in the secondary role, although I'm not sure how well he'd carry a prince.

The Scottish kilt complemented Mihail Sosnovichi's shape and gave him more traditional proportions, which along with a good leap and his usual energy helped both Sosnovichi and his partner Maria Alati to an invigorating pas de deux as the young newlyweds.

Mihail Sosnovichi Maria Alatii

Solo Sylphides Alena Klochova Marie Claire d Lyse Andrea Nemethova

The solo Sylphides - Marie-Claire D'Lyse, Alena Klochova, Andrea Némethová - were very good but perhaps a little bit too heroic. Super Sylphides, I would call them. But why must Sylphides always be frail.

Manuel Legris brought in excellent pedagogues: himself and Elisabeth Platel. Gradually he is pulling Vienna up to the level of Opéra de Paris. The danger is too much success and perhaps Paris will be calling him back too soon for Vienna's good.

On the whole La Sylphide earns a 9 out of 10. If I hadn't seen Sergei Filin dance James, perhaps I'd give La Sylphide 2011 at Vienna Staatsoper a perfect 10.

Special thanks to Max Moser for his ever excellent dance and theater photos. You can book Max's services at PhotobyMM.com. His full gallery of La Sylphide.

The stage juts out into the audience, as the curtains open we see a tableau vivant of a sculpting studio in motion. The orchestra fills the deep back of the theatre. It's almost like Shakespeare's in the round Globe. This is the first of several successful staging decisions of the evening. With the orchestra pit closed and the orchestra at the back of the hall, LandesTheatre Linz becomes a magnificent concert hall.

Once again Jochen Ulrich has led a new ballet with the music. Here he chose Arvo Pärt's Collage" über Bach", "Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten" and "Spiegel in Spiegel" and finally Pärt's "Lamentate for Piano and Orchestra". From Britten we have the Requiem. Despite the two nominally very different composers, sonically the evening holds together perfectly. It a complete and powerful ballet score.

Fortunately, both subject and dance are up to the music this time round. In Michelangelo, across the centuries Ulrich has found une âme soeur. Like Michelangelo, Ulrich has lived an often lonely and tempestuous life of creation. Ulrich does not sculpt with stone but with live bodies.

Michelangelo's problems are Ulrich's very own. The personal relationship to his subject stirs Ulrich's deepest powers.

Ulrich's underlying conceit is to divide Michelangelo's role in three dancers. This time the three incarnations are not sequential but simultaneous. Michelangelo's id dances with ego and his superego. A real artist does hold several personalities inside him or herself, from charming to vicious, from naif to lascivious, so the division quickly seems quite natural and sensible instead of contrived.

Much of the first act is a moving sculpture of naked men as Michelangelo learns his craft from Ancient Greek models and later creates his David. Michelangelo then copes with success and patrons who frequent his atelier and seduce both him and his lovers.

White gowned women appear and fill the studio with another tragic energy: all of Michelangelo's women are madonnas and harlots.

Ulrich bravely attempts to relay Vittoria Colonnna's discussion of art and religion with Michelangelo. Long time Ulrich muse, Irene Bauer offers a deep and reflective performance as Colonna but even she struggles with this bit of the libretto. Verbal nuance and philosophy are complicated to communicate through dance.

Ultich's rendition of the creation of the individual masterpieces like David, Study on Piety and Leda with the Swan are the strongest moments.

At the end of the first act there is a troubled scene with a man in ecclesiastical robes who represents Michelangelo's patrons. His arrogant patron convincingly portrayed by Ziga Jereb steals Michelanglo's lovers. The bedroom scenes on both sides of the projected stage lack the clarity of the other scenes and border on the sordid.

Sakher Almonem Martin Dvorak Irene Bauer in Michelangelo

Sakher Almonem Michelangelo beloved Wallace Jones Martin Dvorak Fabrice Jucquois

Irene Bauer Anna Sterbova Michelangelo

Ulrich Michangelo ballet tableau

In the second half Ulrich is victim of his own success. He has shown us the process of creation. He has revealed the complicated relationship with lovers, collaborators and patrons. Michelangelo can only repeat itself, in rounds of new works but the same torments.

Dvorak and Wallace and PG the orchestra do much to animate their roles. Dvorak in his long robe and long beard and long hair seems to carry Michelangelo's spirit in him. I imagine it's a dream role for him: to finally incarnate one of the greatest and most tormented artists in history. As if at last he can play his true self. Dvorak portrays Michelangelo's spiritual and artistic essence.

Wallace represents Michelangelo's physical side. With wide eyes and succulent lips and lithesome frame, we believe in Wallace's incarnation of Renaissance sensuality. Jucquois' portrayal of Michelangelo's love is more strained. While his movement is adequate he lacks the reflective depth and resonance of his colleagues.

The pas de trois and cinq with the three Michelangelo are occasionally magnificent. Bauer as the muse works around the great white monument. The eternal blank canvas or blank paper which torments and obsesses every artist. How to fill it adequately. Stefan Weinert's art direction is precise and deserves praise for its transparence. With a bare minimum of costume and decorations, Weinert builds imaginary palaces, sculpting studios, the Sistine Chapel. The great white block which fills a third of the stage is the only substantial props. Ulrich's dancers with their attitude and poses create all the rest.

Weinart and Ulrich have not collaborated for four years. Once hopes they will not leave their next work together so long. The right art director helps a choreographer achieve greatness as Georgian art director Simon Virsaladze did much to help Juri Grigorovich's work.

Wallace Jones is in top form and particularly gorgeous in Michelangelo. He handles the most challenging lifts of the other male dancers including the not insubstantial Dvorak and Jucquois with aplomb. The dance between the men is some of the strongest male on male choreography I've seen.

Ulrich's Michelangelo is a masterwork and and well worth the 1.5 hour train ride to Linz from Vienna. While at Landestheater Linz don't miss dining in Promenadenhof the which stays open after the performance with a direct entrance from the theater to avoid the November rain.

Why should banks operate on other rules than small businesses? If at Foliovision, I invest our time and money badly no one is coming to rescue us. Despite our real contribution to the Slovak economy as a genuine exporter, we live by market rules.

Banks apparently live by different rules. When they crank risk up and make bad investments, the politicians in their pockets ride to the rescue with packages which can make up to 10% of GDP. The money the politicians are giving away to the banks are the taxes small successful companies like us pay.

x The whole scheme resembles a casino operating on the following principle: the players who win are allowed to take away their winnings. Well and good. But when they lose, they are allowed to run up an unlimited tab. When the tab has gone up too high and they can't even pay for their meals and drinks, the tab is reset. The money they squirreled away at home when on a winning streak doesn't get touched. They keep their houses.

Any idiot could win under such circumstances. Why are these derivatives traders are considered "masters of the universe"? There were other words for such parasites in past centuries. Let's start with Highwaymen.

The EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) is an obligation which I do not want to take on for myself or for the next generations. It's clear Greece is going belly up: they have not tightened their belts to the extent required for further support. Let Greece resolve its own issues. As a major tourist resort with a mild climate, Greeks are unlikely to starve or freeze to death.

On the other hand, a Greek default would cost Italian, French and German banks a lot of money. Good. Let them be more careful with their investments going forward.

Like Robert Sulik, I'm not anti-Euro.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the euro only causes problems, why doesn't Slovakia's government just pull the country out of the euro zone?

Sulik: I don't see the euro as the problem. It's a good project. Everyone involved can benefit from it -- but only if they stick to the ground rules. And that's exactly what we're demanding.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Which ground rules should we be following?

Sulik: We have to observe three points: First, we have to strictly adhere to the existing rules, such as not being liable for others' debts, just as it's spelled out in Article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty. Second, we have to let Greece go bankrupt and have the banks involved in the debt-restructuring. The creditors will have to relinquish 50 to perhaps 70 percent of their claims. So far, the agreements on that have been a joke. Third, we have to be adamant about cost-cutting and manage budgets in a responsible way.

If the banks go down, people will lose their savings is another sword held over European voters necks. Nonsense. Nearly all countries have depositer insurance. If a bank cracks, the depositors will get their money. Shareholders and management may not. Next time, perhaps they will be more careful.

We live in a climate of fiscal restraint in Slovakia. It seems to be working as we are a growth economy. Time for other Europeans to catch up with Slovakia and China.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Nevertheless, banks could run into significant problems should they be forced to write down billions in sovereign bond holdings.

Sulik: So what? They took on too much risk. That one might go broke as a consequence of bad decisions is just part of the market economy. Of course, states have to protect the savings of their populations. But that's much cheaper than bailing banks out. And that, in turn, is much cheaper than bailing entire states out.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does one of your reasons for not wanting to help Greece have to do with the fact that Slovakia itself is one of the poorest countries in the EU?

Sulik: A few years back, we survived an economic crisis. With great effort and tough reforms, we put it behind us. Today, Slovakia has the lowest average salaries in the euro zone. How am I supposed to explain to people that they are going to have to pay a higher value-added tax (VAT) so that Greeks can get pensions three times as high as the ones in Slovakia?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What can the Greeks learn from the reforms carried out in Slovakia?

Sulik: They have to make cuts in the state apparatus. The Slovaks could also give them a few good ideas about the tax system. We have a flat tax when it comes to income taxes. Our tax system is simple and clear.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: One last time: Do you honestly believe the euro has any future at all?

Sulik: I believe the euro has a future. But only if the rules are followed.

Yesterday I was speaking with a highly placed Greek political figure. I commiserated with him about the conditions of the loans: selling off most of the national assets to the banks and international financiers. He laughed charmingly and looked me in the eyes.

"Why should we be worried? What has been privatized can be renationalised after a change of government. What belongs to the Greeks remains with the Greeks. We will never be made slaves in our own land."

At last the cynical bankers have met a match in cynical Greeks. One must not only beware of Greeks bearing gifts. One must be careful of Greeks accepting gifts.

It's very sad to watch humanity tumble down the path to revolution and ruin and war again. The right to skim the cream from the economy with little or no contribution to the collective well being did not work out very well for the Ancien Regime in France in 1789. Men, women and children were pulled from their houses and beheaded to put an end to misuse of privilege.

When the world banking system is destroyed, the ill gotten gains and privileges of our current generation of politicians and bankers will avail their children very little. We are heading to a global reset. Hopefully, a minimum fo blood will be spilt. But if we are not careful, the inequal redistribution of wealth will lead to an endless world war.

How foolish the greedy can be.

Little did I know just 18 hours later, the Euro was to fall under its watchful walls. Despite, Bratislava's castle's air of history, the castle was in ruins for over a hundred years in Pressburg before the Slovaks rebuilt it in Bratislava.

I'm still astonished that Radicova foolishly linked her government AGAIN (this is about time number five) to a vote in Parliament. While she has been a very good prime minister, this death wish in the form of votes of confidence is an absurd game of Russian roulette.

Well now we'll have an election. Hopefully the bailout package will still not pass. This EU becomes troublesome: a plaything of the international banks, like Congress in the United States. The majority of the European population is against these unlimited bailouts.

slovak beer

miska and peter

other skies

Did the end of summer have to come so sudden and so soon?

The American Indians measured years in summers. An infinite wisdom.

On the other hand, perhaps the title is not so out of place as space is crucial to Oper Graz ballet director Darrel Toulon's latest work. The Wilder Mann studio theater where Oper Graz ballet will work for the next two years of Next Liberty renovations is very special.

The space is exceptionally wide and very shallow. What this wide space means is that everyone in the audience as first to third row seats. In the front row you are so close to the dances you could reach out and touch them. Or as in Upper Room, feel the wind of a pillow flying in the hands of a pirouetting dancer across your nose.

Upper Room: pillows, pillows, pillows everywhere
notice the breadth of the stage: this is only about half of it

The great advantage of this stage is the possibility to work with multiple independent dance units at the same time. It's easy and even desirable to have as many as three different sets of action informing one another at the same time. For choreographers who want to control the audience's eyes and minds, the opportunity to have multiple action at the same time is frustrating. For those who accept its potential, multiple centres of action is very liberating and very modern.

Upper Room Bostjan Ivanjsic

We live in a world of intense sensory input: billboards, cellphone, radio, television, telephone, street traffic, computer all compete for our attention at the same time. We are constantly making choices of what information to absorb and what information to discard. Wilder Mann is a contemporary stage for contemporary dance.

Toulon's Upper Room is an evening length work divided into two distinct parts. Part one and part two include entirely different costumes and entirely different stagings. The only unifying element is the music of singer Vesna Petkovic and violinist Boris Mihaljcic.

Including live music is a wonderful decision. Live music brings dance to another level and Petkovic and Mihaljcic offer powerful performances which visibly infuse the dancers with energy.

Michael Munoz acrobatic handstand in part one

One could argue that also unifying the two pieces is that in both parts a single metaphoric prop is central to the work. Part one focuses on metal frames, about the size of a large door or a single bed. Part two focuses on pillows, large white pillows on which to lay your head for sleeping.

Sarah Schoch in front of frames Upper Room

In part one, the dancers lie inside the metal frames, walk through these frames, observer one another across these frame and jump through these frames. At times there are up to five frames on stage at a time worked each by a pair of dancers.

Even more striking are the costumes in part one: each dancer is wearing a bob of shiny bronze hair. Each wears dark silver pants. The men are naked from the waist up, the women in small tube tops. The look is very androgynous. As is the dance.

Upper Room: part one fantastic wigs and alien look

With the strange wigs and clothing, I felt a certain alienation and otherness from the dancers. As they all look identical and different from us, it's like watching another species live out their lives and feelings. This alienation creates an interesting distance and encourages scientific observation. At one point, Michael Munoz's wig flew off in a powerful duet and we could see him for the next fifteen minutes as himself: the impression was enitrely different. If the dancers looked more human, the emotional text would be far more powerful as we could identify with them as individuals and not conceive them as a group.

Much of the dance is pairings. Sometimes two women will live an intimate relationship, sometimes a man and a woman, sometimes two men. There is a very disturbing near rape scene of a woman trapped in her frame. Upper Room Part One takes a very violent look at human emotions. Vesna Petkovic's dark Serbian songs echo and lead the action. That most of us are not able to understand the words is intentional: Upper Room Part One is about emotional text and not about literal metaphor.

Dianne Gray - Bostjan Ivanjsic

Towards the half hour mark, Swiss dancer Sarah Schoch makes a very dramatic entry in a long red dress and a baroque coiffure. Moving with abandon, Schoch reveled in her moment in the light, kicking her long legs high. Her intervention was a delight in itself but I didn't entirely understand its place in an otherwise very disciplined exploration of the frame metaphor.

Sarah Schoch - Lady in Red

Another highlight is the solo by and duets including Bostjan Ivanjsic whose physique is in magnificent form. When Ivanjsic is center stage he dominates the other dancers who struggle to keep up with his presence. On the other side, after the summer pause, Michál Zábavík has returned with a spare tire more suited to a sedentary man ten years his senior.

Bostjan Ivanjsic in good form with Laura Fischer

Among the premiere audience, some suggested that part one with the frames could make an entire evening of dance. I'd agree with that. One might be able to cut the score back to minimalist elements, leaving most of the explicit text behind.

When we reenter the theater the dancers have taken our place and Vesna Petkovic is enthroned on a mountain of pillows. We surround her as she sings. Five minutes later, the dancers being to guide us back to our places one by one. The confusion and role reversal here is very powerful. I wondered why Toulon chose not to develop the switch further by creating multiple circles of action from which spectators could move from one to the other before sending us back to our seats.

Once we are back in our places, the dancers each take a pillow to caress.

Part two is an exhiliarating voyage through violence and tenderness. But by the time it windes down after forty odd minutes, the work with pillows feels like it has run its course by the time. Pillows have been used as a giant bed, as sleeping companions, as hurled weapons, as instruments to suffocate friends, as dance partners. After watching part two you will never doubt the importance of pillows in our lives.

You don't perceive it as you watch the show, but dancing with pillows limits the range and precision of dance. A pillow is an object constantly changing form and weight balance. Unlike the frames which are stiff and certain contexts with which a dancer can work carefully.

Sarah Schoch and Laura Fischer face off with pillows

The pillow piece feels more like a great fun experiment than the normally deep work of Toulon. There is some very good work with focused light in the hands of the dancer. Dianne Gray is particularly adept in lighting the other dancers dramatically while managing to stay low to the ground and move smoothly with the action. Newcomer Challyce Brogdon danced near my place and danced with discipline and flair as did compatriot New York native Serge Desroches. There is a particularly charming catfight between Areti Palouki and Agnès Girard.

Near the end, Vesna Petkovic breaks out in Fran Landesman's 1959 Beat classic "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men". While the duet between Serge Desroches and Ruo Chen Wang is powerful, the change of musical language grates after a full evening of song in Serbian.

Upper Room opened exactly one month after rehearsals started. The normal period of development for an evening lenth work is anywhere between six weeks and three months. With Upper Room, you feel that you are watching a work in progress. All the elements have been found but not worked through to the end. It's like a half-finished sculpture where you can see the grand lines of the form, but the expression has not been finished.

My hope is that Toulon if he revisits to Upper Room will return to the frame metaphor and the very groundwork he has done for a one act evening length piece. He could retitle it very simply "Frames". While the pillows piece was more fun and valid as a technical experiment, it remains more a divertissement than a work of art.