At her funniest, musician/actress/performance artist Ann Magnuson skewers pop and celebrity culture like nobody else. And there’s a lot of that skewering on her new album, Dream Girl, Magnuson’s third LP following the strangely underrated The Luv Show and Pretty Songs & Ugly Stories. Magnuson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Dream on.
Magnuson: One of the greatest tropes in contemporary Dreamology is the Dream Ballet. But it wasn’t always a trope. When Agnes de Mille first incorporated ballet-as-dream-sequence into Rogers & Hammerstein’s 1943 musical Oklahoma!, the dream ballet was a radical departure from standard musical-theater storytelling. In fact, preview audiences were reportedly so bewildered at the then-unconventional approach that one of the producers secretly sold off his shares during intermission at the New Haven opening.
De Mille’s choreography condensed the agonies of the classic ‘good girl vs. bad girl’ personality split into an 18-minute psychological thriller.
The New York Times, in their original review of Oklahoma! called the dream ballet, “a first-rate work of art … it actually carries forward the plot and justifies the most tenuous psychological point in the play, namely, why Laurey, who is obviously in love with Curly, finds herself unable to resist going to the dance with the repugnant Jud. Many a somber problem play has … failed to illuminate it half so clearly after several hours of grim dialogue. Yet this is a ‘dance number’ in a ‘musical show’!”
Hammerstein initially wanted a circus scenario to end act 1. De Mille fought for her ballet. “Girls don’t dream about the circus.” She said, “They dream about horrors. And they dream dirty dreams.”
They sure do!
Of course, Freud was all the rage in progressive New York arts circles back then. Innovators like Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham (and De Mille) were making dance increasingly more “modern.” Surrealism had already made its mark (Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist fashions—in collaboration with Dali—were featured in Vogue) and the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin musical Lady In The Dark (about an unhappy fashion-magazine editor undergoing psychoanalysis) ran on Broadway in 1941. Hitchcock’s Spellbound–with the famous Dali dream sequence—would appear in 1945.
The movie version of Oklahoma! wasn’t made until 1955. (The original Broadway production ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances and then, of course, there were the road tours, foreign productions and revivals.) In the film, innocent farm girl Laurey (played by a young and very dewy Shirley Jones; later to become the singing mom in The Partridge Family) is unable to fight off the advances of “repugnant” Jud (Rod Steiger, at his rough-hewn meatiest.) The saucy saloon girl scenes are so much more exciting than the prim goings on at the goody-goody square dance. The loose women of the saloon are absolutely faaaaabulous! They look like high-fashion models photographed by Avedon, drenched in Technicolor and “throwing shade” like nobody’s business! Once again, ‘hos trump the hoe-down.
Of course, classical ballet has been using the dream as a plot point for … well, probably ever since it was invented. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is mostly all a dream. The ballet blanc, or white ballet (where the ballerinas all where bell-shaped, ankle-length tutus), became an audience favorite thanks to the second acts in the 19th century ballets La Sylphide and Giselle. In each, ghost ballerinas live in a dark wood and seek revenge on caddish men who wronged the sisterhood.)
When I went to see the Mariinsky Ballet do Don Quixote several years ago, I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect. I knew about the Spanish pas de deux at the end. (Mostly because the Mikhail Baryshnikov/Gelsey Kirkland version was endlessly played on PBS back in the day.) But I had no idea there was a dream ballet in act 2. It was the most enchanting thing I’ve ever seen!
Don Quixote is knocked unconscious after fighting his famous windmills, then dreams of dancing in an enchanted garden with his beloved Dulcinea along with an adorably androgynous Cupid plus a corps de ballet of mythological creatures called the Dryads. It was the trippiest, sweetest thing I’ve ever seen! And so innocent! Like the pastoral scene in Disney’s Fantasia with the hunky centaurs and sexy centaurettes!
Perhaps the most luscious ballets seen in the movies are the ones from filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. All of The Red Shoes (1948) plays like a dream and Tales Of Hoffman, a 1951 film adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s opera fantastique (which was first performed publically in 1881) is beyond fantastique!
Gene Kelly gave us old Hollywood glamour and Technicolor eye-candy in the dream ballet sequences in An American in Paris and Singin’ In The Rain. His number with sexy gangster moll Cyd Charise is one of the sexiest things ever committed to celluloid!
Sex does seem to be the common denominator in dream ballets. In fact, it just became blindingly clear to me what the Oklahoma! dream ballet is … it’s the ancient Greek myth of Persephone! Abducted by Hades during the autumn harvest and taken to live in the Underworld as his queen, Persephone was ravaged all winter. Her mother Demeter weeps until the spring, when her daughter returns. Above grown, she blossoms like the budding plants, bringing fertility to all (and a successful crop for the next harvest, when she then has return to Hades for another cycle of winter sorrow.)
Oklahoma farm girl Laurey is Persephone. In her “dirty dream,” Laurey discovers the darker passions of sexual desire from repugnant Jud and the underworld saloon girls. Only after she has learned what goes on “in the dark” can return to handsome cowboy Curly whom she marries (and will eagerly procreate with), then the corn can grow as high as an elephant’s eye!
OK, it all makes sense now.
