Liberman is Vanessa Carlton’s latest solo set and fifth overall. With classical-motif tracks like “Blue Pool,” “Take It Easy” and backward-masking-dense closer “Ascension,” Carlton has seriously upped her game, and is now composing complex etudes that easily eclipse her chiming Grammy-nominated hit from 2002, “A Thousand Miles.” Carlton will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our feature on her.
Carlton: George Balanchine is possibly my favorite artist. He is a genius choreographer. To think of a string of movements that no one has ever done before and apply your vision to moving bodies, all as a visual form of music? How unique and wonderful, right? His style is celebrated around the world, and if done right, his ballets will make a grown man cry. The origin of ballet had always been an art for the rich, performed in the courts, decidedly puritanical and austere. Balanchine was a young Russian man discovered in St. Petersburg by the patron Lincoln Kirstein, who brought him to New York and supported him. Balanchine ended up re-inventing the art. He stripped his dancers of their tutus, put them in simple black and white and created gorgeous geometric shapes. Suddenly ballet was sexy, and the relationship between the dancer and the music was all that mattered. He threw out the storybook. Ballet became abstract. Genius.
Video after the jump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoyr458kIvs
