Sallie Wilson, whose performances with American Ballet Theater during the 1960s and ’70s established her as one of America’s finest dramatic ballerinas, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.The cause was cancer, said Diana Byer, artistic director of New York Theater Ballet, the company Ms. Wilson worked with most recently.
Ms. Wilson’s strong stage presence made her every role vivid, whether in classics or in modern ballets by Antony Tudor, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins or Alvin Ailey. In 1979, Jennifer Dunning, writing in The New York Times, said that Ms. Wilson had “etched herself indelibly on the consciousness of the New York balletgoing public.”
She was especially praised in the works of Antony Tudor, the great British choreographer of dramatic ballets who came to New York in 1940 and was long associated with Ballet Theater, now American Ballet Theater.
[SNIP]
Ms. Wilson always believed in total involvement in roles, even if the part was as an extra in a Wagner opera. “At the Met, I once had to stand still for 45 minutes as Tannhäuser’s page,” she once said.
“As far as I’m concerned, if you’re on stage in a ballet, you’re doing dancing,” she said on another occasion. “Any movement or non-movement on stage is dance.”
Posts Tagged ‘death’
Sallie Wilson
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008War Heros?
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime ‘kills’ was his favourite author.Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The fliers clashed in the skies over southern France in July 1944.
My last Gary Gygax post, I promise (maybe)
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.
Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.
This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.
We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Gary Gygax, RIP
Friday, March 7th, 2008
Its like part of my childhood just died
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games.Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.
“I don’t think I’ve really grokked it yet,” said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. “He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers.”
Slow Death
Friday, May 18th, 2007Unusual is my death. My young body has no cruel or destructive sickness,
And here I do not wait for the impossible blow of a blind sword so I can die spilling my blood.
I am slowly fading away: in the same way I breathe life, the sweet abandonment we call death penetrates and grows inside me.
~Antigone, Antigona by Jose Watanabe
The Architecture of Death
Thursday, May 17th, 2007If death does have a structure – or, at least, if near-death experiences do spatialize in certain pre-existing ways – if death has a spatial format, you could say – then clearly death could also be architecturally reconstructed, based on eyewitness accounts, here on earth, in the present moment, with us.
We could visit it, in groups, and emotionally prepare…
So what would happen if an architect teamed up with an anthropologist (who studies cultural narrations of the near-death experience) and with a neurophysiologist (who understands the underlying cortical mechanisms), to design themed environments specifically meant for triggering NDEs?
It’d be a kind of post-Buddhist thanatological fun ride, complete with people passing out – then waking up, blinking and vibrant, determined to change their lives, giving hugs to others and starting things over again.
Even the Hardest working die one day
Monday, December 25th, 2006James Brown, the singer, songwriter, bandleader and dancer, who indelibly transformed 20th-century music, died today at Emory Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, where he been admitted on Saturday for pneumonia, news services said. He was 73 years old and had lived in Beech Island, S.C., near the Georgia border.His agent, Frank Copsidas, told The Associated Press Mr. Brown died of congestive heart failure.
Over a career that lasted more than 50 years, Mr. Brown called himself ‘the hardest working man in show business,’ ‘Mr. Dynamite,’ ‘Soul Brother No. 1,’ ‘the Minister of Super Heavy Funk’ and ‘the Godfather of Soul,’ and he was all of those and more.
Mr. Brown’s music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.
‘I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,’ he wrote in an autobiography.
The Prayer of Ajax
Thursday, July 6th, 2006Avenging Furies, help me,
grave Furies who bestride the world,
forever virgin, who supervise all mortal pain,
witness. The sons of Atreus have destroyed my life
evil for evil, snatch them down to Hell,
let them die as I do now. Come now!
Be quick, be just, and glut yourselves on Greeks.
–Sophocles, Ajax
In his final moments, Ajax sends a prayer to the gods. He laments his fate and prays for a quick death. The quick death is granted sure enough. But there is another part of his prayer. A curse upon the souls of the Greek army who betrayed him. He asks for the just deaths of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The two brothers who are responsible for his first shame, losing the armor of Achilles, that led to his rage and madness, the cause of his second shame.
Agamemnon dies horribly at the hands of his wife upon his return to Argos. His swift return home lends an even more pathetic element to his swift and brutal death. Menelaus we know lives on to old age. His suffering is old age with a woman he knows loves someone else, who would leave him but for force of arms. In a way Ajax does get his wish granted, the sons of Atreus suffer pain and humiliation at least equal to his own.
There is no forgiveness in Ajax. His final prayer is of a man so consumed with pride that even at the moment of his own suicide he thinks only of that. While he recognizes his misery, he fails to learn the true folly of that pride and continues to hope for retribution within a logic system that does not value pride. With his suicide we see a man whose pride quite literally killed him.
I reread the play while Arvo Part’s Sarah Was Ninety Years Old pounds away incessantly. Hollow. Vacant. As I reach the suicide of Ajax, the drums give way to the organ and the sky is opened up in possibility. The drums return, but now transformed. They support the voice calling out with divine grace, the gong beats and silence. The voices return but are in some way almost hidden. They must struggle to be heard. Ethereal. Transformed.
These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.
