The Washington Post, by Sarah Kaufman

Magic spells, poisons, potions and enchantments may be frequent plot devices at the ballet, but the art form itself is under a bewitchment of its own making. It's the Curse of Balanchine.

We are cursed with George Balanchine, cursed with an overload of his ballets as well as with the ubiquity of the sinewy style he favored, his preference for plotless works on a naked stage, his taste for fast, skinny, emotionally guarded dancers.

Maybe that doesn't sound so bad -- after all, that, in a nutshell, is what ballet looks like in this country. But it wasn't always so. Before Balanchine's dominating influence, in the early to middle years of the last century, ballet was more of a lively American folk art -- cavorting to music by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson -- than the highbrow prize of the connoisseur it became after Balanchine swept in, bringing Bach and Stravinsky with him.

Ballet started out here on a decidedly human scale: It nosed around gas pumps (Lew Christensen's "Filling Station"), sailing ships (Eugene Loring's "Yankee Clipper") and farm folk (Catherine Littlefield's "Barn Dance"). Its subject was the life of the times, and, in concise half-hour works, it centered on personalities: ranch hands, servicemen, outlaws and murderers.

Seen any of them onstage lately?

Balanchine's avant-garde creations knocked ballet sideways, changing it forever. But here's the problem: In his wake, ballet's range of expression has narrowed, not expanded. Gone, in new work, is theater, spectacle, satire, flesh-and-blood characters, the ache of real life, the escape offered by a sharp, piercing little story. Now more than ever, American ballet, artistically speaking, is a homogeneous entity. We are a thoroughly Balanchine nation.

That's pretty impressive considering that the New York City Ballet co-founder created his last work in 1982 and died a year later. Today, Balanchine isn't merely a legend -- he's a hot property. His ballets circle the globe, and in the United States are being danced by chamber-size and larger troupes alike, from the Richmond Ballet to American Ballet Theatre.

Balanchine's ubiquity creates a particular problem for Washington. The Kennedy Center presents more touring companies than any other venue in the country and, with other local stages in the picture, conditions are ripe for overload. In the past six months alone, audiences have seen the annual Balanchine-heavy runs by New York City Ballet and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, along with Balanchine works danced by ABT and the San Francisco Ballet. This week at the Harman Center, the Washington Ballet essays "Rubies," an excerpt from Balanchine's "Jewels."

From a marketing standpoint, this is not a surprise. Balanchine is the blue-chip stock of ballet. And unlike a lot of blue-chip stocks nowadays, it is still a stable investment. As the old saying goes, no one ever got fired for buying IBM -- or for licensing a Balanchine work. After all, who can argue against the visual and musical joys behind his innovations in the speed, virtuosity and urbane glamour of ballet?

Look at the man's background: Balanchine, born in 1904, created his streamlined, stretchy, leggy style by merging old-school Russian technique with modern-art principles and the sex appeal of the Broadway chorus line. He was a product of St. Petersburg's famed Mariinsky Theatre, whence would later come Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Serge Diaghilev made him chief choreographer of his Ballets Russes -- the trendsetting troupe of expatriate Russians who counted Picasso, Miró and Stravinsky among their collaborators. After it folded, Balanchine landed in New York in 1934, where he founded the School of American Ballet, now the nation's top ballet school. He dabbled in choreography for movies and musicals before launching the group that in 1948 became New York City Ballet.

All of those experiences -- the high-art chic, the showbiz, the forceful physicality of Russian ballet and the broken lines and fragmentation that Picasso and Stravinsky were exploring -- surface in Balanchine's work. The bulk of his ballets are abstract, musically driven "pure dance." Even his few narrative pieces are little concerned with reality. Most of his works evoke a cool, purified, distant universe. And always, refinement: He loved tutus and tiaras ("Theme and Variations," 1947), showgirl legs on untouchable goddesses ("Concerto Barocco," 1941) and bracing simplicity. His ballets costumed only in leotards and tights ("Agon," 1957) had the angular, dramatic shock of a Mies van der Rohe house.

Of the more than 400 ballets Balanchine created in his 79 years, roughly 75 are still actively performed. And they are, for the most part, so exquisite it's hard to complain about seeing them over and over. Who can tire of the radiant stasis in "Serenade," the spacious, deconstructed architecture of "The Four Temperaments," the mass precision of "Symphony in C"?

By Sarah Kaufman

"North by Northwest," Alfred Hitchcock's sprawling 1959 thriller that takes us to the top of Mount Rushmore by way of a near-miss with a killer crop-duster, begins with the basics. A man is walking down a corridor.

But because the man is Cary Grant, the moment is anything but ordinary. He has us at the first step: that long, brisk stride and its driving rhythm, a ticktock pace that telegraphs purpose, clarity and elegant efficiency. We watch him stroll out of an elevator toward the street, dictating correspondence to the secretary at his side. He's not some stiff, starchy suit. There's a relaxed, easy give in Grant's body as he moves, and as he leans toward his secretary while he speaks to her -- he's so very pleased with his own labors, and yet so exquisitely courteous to his assistant. A nice guy, and smooth as whiskey, too. He's getting further under our skin with every move.

What Grant's character, advertising executive Roger Thornhill, is actually saying in this scene isn't nearly as important as his movement. It's the movement that hooks us. It always does. Intuition? Training? Astute directors? Whatever its source, Grant knew a timeless truth: There is nothing we watch so keenly as the human body in action, because the way it moves tells a story.

The art of moving well, call it kinetic acting, has nearly vanished from movies today. I don't mean among dancers on the big screen -- that's a different subject altogether -- but among actors. The attention to physical expression, to one's carriage and gestures and their dramatic and emotional implications, has faded. I'm talking about a sense of grace. About acting that involves a meaningful motor impulse. A signature style of moving, bigger than just body language or bits of what actors call "business" -- lighting a cigarette, picking up a drink. Think of Gary Cooper's quick, impatient stride across town to the church in "High Noon," when he thinks he'll be able to round up a posse among the worshipers, folks to join his fight against a group of killers. And then his stiff, pained walk back to town after he fails to find help. He doesn't say a word, but the heaviness he feels is right there in his legs. You ache watching him.

A person's way of moving through space tells us something on a base, primitive level. It's animal to animal. It's something so subtle you may not consciously notice it, but when an actor moves honestly and with intention, your eye will follow him anywhere.

The trouble is, you don't see it that much. The buzz around this year's Oscar favorites got me thinking about how the artistic trend in acting has gone from the external to the internal. We're in the age of the close-up. Realism and psychological truth rule, and you find them in facial expression, in the little muscles around the eyes. The focus has tightened. Sure, there's gobs of emphasis on sexy bodies, but the body as an expressive instrument just isn't much in the picture.

Perhaps this is because actors aren't formally trained in dance and movement much anymore, as they were in the early years of filmmaking. There's also the invasion of psychoanalysis, and the rise of Method acting starting about a half-century or so ago, with its emphasis on emotion, interior motives and lots of mental preparation. Actors started questioning the precise blocking of action -- the choreography of the scene -- that was so prized by Grant, Cooper, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn and other stars going back to the 1930s and '40s. For that era, physical elegance signaled inner elegance. Actors today seek more of a warts-and-all approach.

Cary Grant, Nonpareil

But kinetic acting is wrongly overlooked. It has an undeniable power over an audience. Consider Grant -- and you needn't only take my word on his greatness. He's been famously deconstructed in Pauline Kael's sharp-eyed essay "The Man From Dream City." And film historian David Thomson, writing in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film," describes Grant as "the best and most important film actor in the history of the cinema." Grant's dark beauty, cultured diction and gift for comedy are unmistakable. But what I find most fascinating about him -- and I believe it's the reason he is as watchable now as he was all those decades ago -- is his physical grace, an effortlessness that borders on the surreal.

It's always there, in every role, in the way he walks, the way he slips a hand into his pocket, the way he stands, with his shoulders melting just a bit toward the co-star his character is invariably secretly in love with.

Grant's art was all about physical expressiveness and emotional understatement. He never did musical comedy per se -- no Donald O'Connor-style routines (though you can imagine much of the sophisticated slapstick in the screwball comedy "Bringing Up Baby," in which Grant teamed with Kate Hepburn, set to music and a song). But you could say Grant is one of the great musical comedy stars of the 20th century. Like the very best dancers -- think of the versatile perfectionists Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and even the ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov -- Grant based each role on an array of physical details. He got into acting that way; the Cockney kid named Archie Leach left England for America as a member of a troupe of acrobats. After he went to Hollywood and became Cary Grant, the acrobat's love of physical play, his feline reflexes and reckless courage stuck with him.

In his early films (take "Singapore Sue" of 1932, for one -- Grant plays a skirt-chasing sailor), he comes across as blocky and stiff. His delivery is corny and over-eager. Later, as he refined his athlete's energy and channeled it into a smoother physical bearing, his acting relaxed.

Revisit "His Girl Friday" (1940), one of filmdom's most perfect creations, directed by Howard Hawks. Sparks between newspaper editor Walter Burns (Grant) and his ex-reporter and ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) pop the whole way through, but in one scene Grant's nuanced physical maneuvering is particularly marvelous. Seated over a polite lunch with his former bride (for whom he still pines) and her new fiance, Bruce (Ralph Bellamy), Walter aims to show Hildy just how foolish her fantasy of impending domestic bliss sounds.

"Ah yes, a home with Mother," he enthuses -- then there's a smothered chortle and a little roll of his shoulder -- "and in Albany, too!" It's a picture of devastating mockery, but so slight and slippery that Bruce doesn't notice. Hildy does, and we do, too. Grant orchestrates the moment perfectly. With every move leading up to it, he's drawn our eye to his shoulders, squeezing them together slightly, not relaxed until now, this instant, when that little action that starts in his neck and trickles across the top of his suit jacket shouts out loud and clear that Hildy is making a stupid mistake. It's not flamboyant, there's nothing self-indulgent in that gesture, and it's over in a wink -- but it reveals the calculating trickiness as well as the feelings of his character. That liquid, nearly imperceptible roll of a muscle hangs there like an echo, a ripple in the airwaves, a shiver in the emotional current that encircles Grant and Russell and us.

Grant "accepts performance as a physical act, not just an emotional one," says film scholar Jeanine Basinger, chair of Wesleyan University's film studies department. Grant crafted his roles through movement, she says, "the way a dancer understands the role can be believable only through the physicality of it. It's not just vocal, or emotional, but head-to-toe physical."

Think of the yearning vulnerability in his posture as he leans in to trade barbs with Hepburn, playing another ex-wife who still owns his heart, in "The Philadelphia Story" (1940). What his lips can't say, his body whispers -- he stands too close, inclining toward her, yielding in the middle like a surrendering wolf flashing its underbelly. In the scene where he barges into her house just before her marriage to another man, Grant shows how much he wants to reclaim her with that long stride that eats up the space between them, propels him right up to her. His effort to follow (so microscopically beseeching; we get it, though she doesn't) as she backs away becomes a brief tango of pursuit.

Hitchcock was a master at exploiting Grant's elegance, and "North by Northwest" is the definitive study of Grant in motion. Here, in fact, is film as modern ballet. There is that churning, driving Bernard Herrmann musical score. And the story unspools in a classic ballet structure, moving from the simple to the complex in the buildup of athletic images, revolving around brilliantly restrained duets and -- most delicious of all -- Grant's stylized bravura solo turns that explode with drama and emotion. This is the film, after all, where that nice ad exec runs for his life from a crop-duster, his gait pinched and strained to show us how bewildered and trapped he feels; he makes a splayed-out, elegantly finessed dive into the dust that a Baryshnikov would envy, and later arcs spectacularly backward, up on his toes, even, from Eva Marie Saint's gunshots. All the comedy, tension and romance, the racing pace and the plot twists register on that lean, alive body.

The Modern Actors

There are no Cary Grants today. But there are a few actors who engage us with performances of luscious physical awareness. Sean Penn's liberating, joyous mobility in "Milk" is a sterling example. (More on this later.) Rarer still, there are those kinetic actors who throughout a career convey a sense of physical intelligence, as Grant had.

Tom Cruise, for one. "Valkyrie" may not be a showcase for his athletic intensity. But whether it's vanity or art, he pays attention to his physical form in his movies. Particularly when he's running. His mad dashes in so many movies have become something of a joke, but the truth is nobody looks better in a sprint than Cruise did in "Mission: Impossible III" (that helicopter in pursuit -- a nod to "North by Northwest"?). There's a blazing efficiency in his stride: relaxed shoulders, no extraneous movements. Well-coordinated limbs translate into a deadly coordinated purpose of mind.

The ever-relaxed, deadpan Bill Murray is another Grant offshoot. He delivers a Grant-like sense of comfort in his own skin in the masterfully underplayed "Lost in Translation," which is essentially a movie about energy. There's the jangly buzz of Tokyo's night life, and the somnolent unease that brings together Murray and Scarlett Johansson. But it's not just sleeplessness that joins this pair of misfits who meet at a hotel. It's that their motors run at the same leisurely rpm. It's through his slowness, his unhurried, unfussy elegance and languid physicality that Murray creates a character we can trust, who comes across as confident, humble and wise.

Denzel Washington has an especially pronounced sense of elegance, which gives the hostage negotiator he plays in Spike Lee's "Inside Man" an extra dimension of truth. He's so solid and calm, with that loose stride and its soft jazz-cafe rhythm -- you might actually trust him, even if you were a psychopath. This is a fascinating film to watch from the point of view of the body, how bodies (those of the hostages in a bank heist) are dehumanized and robbed of their individuality, and how the characters who seek to control the situation carry themselves. Jodie Foster is a supremely kinetic actor; in her role as a high-powered, behind-the-scenes operator of shadowy origins she conveys deadly sureness with a cold, unyielding physicality. She's as tightly cocked as a revolver. Watch the firm, deliberate cadence of her stroll as she lets Christopher Plummer know who's boss, and you figure she could put your eye out with one of her high heels as smoothly as she takes another step.

To me, it's a woman who is most like Grant today. Cate Blanchett, who interestingly enough plays a dancer in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," has long struck me as an actor with a dancer's energy. There is a reined-in elegance about her, a sense of explosiveness carefully under wraps, which gives her an active presence even when she's not moving. With that comes firm self-possession and a watchful intensity, even in so small a role as that of the elf queen Galadriel in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." She seems to float as she descends the stairs in her midnight scene, breastbone high, a slight arch in her back. She communicates a mystical depth in that taut, gliding physical presence.

There is unlikely to be a return to the prevalence of kinetic acting that you see in the old movies, when stars male and female bewitched us with the transcendent glory of how they moved across the screen. Emotional truths have long trumped physical truth. The emotion-driven Method acting espoused by New York's influential Actors Studio in the 1940s and '50s arose in answer to the more formal, traditional style of meticulously crafting a role, and it rejected accepted standards of bearing and grace. The camera zoomed in close, the actor's face became the canvas. Characters became more emotionally "real," and also more static.

Before Method acting came into vogue, "American acting was much more in line with English acting, where physical grace was a very important thing," says Thomson, the historian. "Approximately with Marlon Brando, we suddenly get physical gracelessness."

"We're still very much in the vogue of the Actors Studio," he continues. "The search for inner truthfulness, abandoning elegance and clarity. . . . We're into a style of more awkward personal truths."

Enter slumping and mumbling, exit agility. "From Here to Eternity" (1953) is a neat example of the split. On the one hand, you have Burt Lancaster -- onetime athlete and trapeze artist, body cut from stone, forever hot under the collar. Like Grant, Lancaster's acting was rooted in the physical, how his characters moved. (Lancaster didn't have Grant's range, though. He had the power but not the tenderness.) In "From Here to Eternity" he takes the physical to a combustible extreme; his 1st Sgt. Warden is all raw animal power.

Compare Lancaster with his co-star, the young Method actor Montgomery Clift, whose Pvt. Prewitt is freighted with the past, self-absorbed, just this side of a head case. Obsessed with personal truth. Now, remember Lancaster's roll in the surf with Deborah Kerr -- one kiss, one wave, destined to crest forever in American loins? To hell with truth; they wanted contact. They were the body; Clift, the brooding loner, was the soul.

This is why "Milk" is so interesting. There's a graceful sweep to this film, directed by Gus Van Sant, which echoes the uninhibited expressiveness and the deeply sensual nature of the gay community that it portrays. Penn, the psychologically driven Method actor, is a revelation; his portrayal of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the doomed politician, is thoroughly, exuberantly, juicily physical. And honest. Penn doesn't overplay it; there's nothing swishy here. But to watch him wield his newfound expressiveness -- the outgoingness and vulnerability in his upper body, the little fillips in his hips -- feels like a luxury, and you realize what so many other films are missing: the body with the soul. The physical awareness that Cary Grant perfected. Acting you feel as well as see. And along with it, the stories the body tells.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

Merce Cunningham earlier this year. In his creations, music and dance needn't be entwined. (Mark Seliger-AP)

As of exactly two weeks ago, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company could still drive audiences to a near-revolt, with a performance at Wolf Trap leading to cheering, a few boos and a shouting match between two men with incompatible reactions.

If you can't appreciate it, just leave! bellowed one to the other.

But with the death of the 90-year-old Cunningham on Sunday, his work -- as revolutionary and provocative as it is -- may be swiftly reduced to a memory.

He also brought computer software (choreographing with a program he helped design), motion-capture technology and even the iPod into live performance -- in a 2006 work called "eyeSpace," Cunningham lent out pre-loaded iPod Shuffles, for the audience to shuffle at will during the dancing.

Innovative rock groups Radiohead and Sigur Ros turned themselves into pit bands for him, and in creating sets for him, giants such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns eagerly relegated themselves to the background. Cunningham, a gentle man, was a great roaring lion of a choreographer.

His boundary-busting helped forge modern dance into a vital and exportable American art form. Give him a tradition and he torched it: He ripped music and dance apart -- his dancers didn't know what music they'd be dancing to until opening night. Even the sets, costumes and lighting for his works were often created independently of one another. He had a gambler's lust for Lady Luck, using "chance operations" -- tossing dice or a coin -- to set the order of sections of a dance, or to determine which piece of music would be played first.

One of the great artists of the 20th century, Cunningham was as experimental and globally influential in his world as James Joyce, Stravinsky and Picasso were in theirs. But unlike books, music and paintings, Cunningham's nearly 200 dances are at risk of extinction.

It's a problem unique to the dance world. As mourned as he is, Michael Jackson didn't leave this kind of heartache to his fans: Coming generations will still be singing "Billie Jean" and watching the "Thriller" video. But concert dance such as Cunningham created needs to be seen live to be experienced.

The problem is, the company Cunningham founded in 1953 does not plan to go on without him. If it can raise enough money, the troupe will embark on a final two-year international tour and then fold. As of Monday, a little more than $2.5 million of a needed $8 million had been raised for the tour, archiving efforts and other expenses, according to Trevor Carlson, executive director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Without his dancers, Cunningham's work is all too likely to succumb to modern dance's tragedy of evanescence.

The only museum dance has for displaying its creations is the stage. And the best curators are ballet companies, which essentially stockpile works by different choreographers -- performing "The Nutcracker" as well as ballets by, say, Twyla Tharp and Jerome Robbins -- and readily absorb older dances into their repertoires. But the much younger field of modern dance, barely a century old, has grown up around cult figures. These rebels and individualists -- Martha Graham, Cunningham, Paul Taylor, among others -- wanted little to do with one another. Like fashion houses, the choreographers launched their companies as vehicles for their own work. Christian Dior didn't display Ralph Lauren in his shop, nor did Graham want a Taylor piece taking up her time in the spotlight.

The largest exception to this is the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which has become a thriving, internationally touring repertory company for works by mostly African American artists. But it didn't have to drastically retool itself after Ailey died in 1989. He hadn't had a problem with sharing while he was alive -- his troupe frequently danced other works besides his own.

All too often, modern-dance choreography becomes orphaned once its creator dies because the field does not have a catchall, a repository for its lost children. The idea of a national modern-dance repertory company has come and gone over the years -- raised most recently by New York City Ballet's ballet master in chief Peter Martins, who tried to get one started in 2004 -- but has never taken hold.

"Financing is the biggest problem," says Douglas Sonntag, dance director for the National Endowment for the Arts. Even without a recession, modern dance has historically been underfunded. "And there are the artistic fights, the people who adore Merce and despise Paul Taylor, for instance."

Then there is the artistic promiscuity built into the field. Modern dance has a disastrously roving eye -- it's always after a hot new premiere. Because of its hunger for the next rebel with the next radical statement, the field of modern dance is more likely to abandon established works such as Cunningham's than, say, the ballet world is with its choreographers. (Cunningham did create work for a few ballet companies, and they are the best hope for carrying on some of his gentler pieces -- say, 1958's "Summerspace," with its meditative piano score and feeling of quiet attentiveness.)

But these aren't the only strikes against the longevity of Cunningham's art.

All dance is, uniquely and sadly, an ephemeral art form. It lacks a good system of self-preservation other than continuous performance, with one generation of dancers teaching the steps to the next. Even though videotaping and written notation methods are now commonly used to record some productions -- what if the dancers made a mistake? What if the camera angle misses the dancers in the back row? No technology tops the labor-intensive oral tradition as the best means for capturing a choreographer's intentions, use of music and so many other details that go into the live art and are kept in dancers' memories, rather than in reference material. Under Cunningham's Living Legacy Plan, rights to his works will be made available. But with no group of professional dancers charged with performing them, the most likely to seek these rights are college dance departments looking for a teaching exercise.

"Why do we have to throw away the old stuff? No other art form does it," says Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company. "If Merce's works are truly relegated to historic reproductions at the university level, and are not danced with the full-on professional power of people who have been trained in that genre, they won't really exist in their full artistic power. And I think that's depressing."

The reality is that Cunningham's death and the eventual self-destruction of his company may be as good as consigning his works to the dustbin. Fans might as well envision black edges all around Cunningham's works now -- the glorious creation myth that is "Sounddance," with its fierce, cyclonic score; "XOVER," a final collaboration with painter Rauschenberg, and a meditation on eternity. Cunningham loved the randomness of life that he represented in his work with the toss of a coin. But in a field ill-suited to keeping its history alive, too much is now being left up to chance.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

By Sarah Kaufman

With their squeezed-tight knees and vigorously swinging backsides, the ushers do Usher one better.

Wearing pink dresses and dark glasses, the bridesmaids swivel and high-step down the aisle with deadpan gyrations, like voguers from the House of Honeymoon. The groom turns a somersault and coolly spins off to the altar, adjusting his tie.

And when the bride makes her entrance, white satin churning as she shifts into hip-slinging overdrive, pumping her bouquet in the air to the beat of Chris Brown's "Forever," she gets the standing ovation she deserves.

From the cheering guests in this rocking St. Paul, Minn., church on June 20, it wasn't just a show of respect. It was a shout-out of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, in a profound way.

In the latest dispatch from the Internet badlands, another meta-moment: Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's dancing wedding procession -- yes, they and their attendants (seven bridesmaids, five groomsmen, four ushers) all boogied down the aisle, fabulously -- which after less than five days on YouTube snagged 1.75 million hits, the latest ordinary-folks-with-talent stunner to hit the Web.

At this wedding, the party got started well before any vows, rings and kisses were exchanged. Here is the entrance of the wedding party turned into a wedding par-tay, a cakewalk down the aisle, a processional gone phenomenal. No wonder it migrated around the world after the couple, both 28, posted it on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0. Millions of eyes recognized it as something special -- from the linebacker-size groomsmen's seam-splitting moves to the slow-motion group tableau at the altar to the sheer uninhibited happiness of it all that pops off the screen like champagne blowing its cork.

Among the video's fans were the producers of NBC's "Today" show, who put the couple on the air Friday morning -- Jill with a delightful made-for-TV smile, Kevin donning a heartland-anti-chic look in an argyle sweater vest and horn-rimmed glasses. The whole wedding party is slated to give a command performance of their aisle style on Saturday's show, which starts at 7 a.m.

Peterson danced growing up and told Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer that she "loved dance as a way to express yourself and share joy."

And that's exactly what's behind the enormous response to their video. It's all about the joy.

We all know what we're supposed to do at weddings: Look on politely as a matchy-matchy parade of friends makes its slooooow way down the aisle to Pachelbel's Canon in D. Try not to giggle. Rise for the bride.

But, by dancing their entrances and sending that upbeat, physical energy right back out to their guests, the Peterson-Heinz wedding turns the rote behaviors into spontaneous reactions. Of course the guests watch attentively as the wedding party bobs in. You can bet not a single child had to be shushed at that point. This was no longer a display of bad posture and dyed-to-match pumps -- it was an uplifting swell of celebration with a beat. The bride -- unescorted, we note; so independent! -- was and wasn't the center of attention. The true focus was on the unified, wordless but palpable emotions of her whole support system.

It plugs us in to something deeply human. Dancing is how so many cultures have celebrated weddings for eons. Okay, maybe not exactly like this, with the ushers turning their programs into confetti, with one groomsman thrusting a stray flower between his teeth and flinging himself into a handstand, with two of the bridesmaids clasping hands and doing a little riff on swing dancing.

Jill and Kevin claimed to have only had one rehearsal and said the whole group contributed to the choreography. They did an amazing job of it. It builds in force right up until the crowning moment: the pas de deux, where Kevin takes his bride's arm and they glide in step toward the beaming minister, capturing what Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse knew in their sweet "Dancing in the Dark" number from the film "The Bandwagon." There's nothing so intimate as a slow stroll. After everyone's bouncing, that short walk together was terribly moving.

This procession explodes a lot of assumptions: that church weddings are square and Minnesotans are squarer, that shaking booties and solemn vows don't go together. (It also puts a new luster on Brown's song, which must be appreciated by the pop star turned pariah, who pleaded guilty last month to assaulting his girlfriend in February.)

More important, this ceremony went deeper than behaviors. It elicited all the right feelings, in the way that good dancing transfers energy and emotion to its audience. In the way they moved -- and were able to corral their friends and family into the act -- the couple told us a lot about themselves, and about their bond.

This didn't look like a reluctant groom being dragged to the altar, nor a micromanaging bridezilla who had locked down every detail. They were open to music and movement and untucked shirts and sweat, and they gave to their guests what had to be the best party favor of all. An actual party.

Maybe we'll see the Heinz ensemble next on "So You Think You Can Dance." Maybe Jill and Kevin will go on to choreograph for the Vikings cheerleaders, or start up a wedding-planning business. Maybe not.

Whatever their future, they did with that performance what great dancers can do. They pulled us all into their story.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

By Sarah Kaufman

Michael Jackson and the moonwalk will be forever linked, the man inseparable from his slipperiest and subtlest move. It's no wonder that surreal step became his signature. What more perfect expression could there be of this most elusive celebrity, of the mystery that has always surrounded him? In the thundering melee of a live concert, amid a singularly strange life, Jackson would underscore his cool remove with a shift into reverse, coasting backward across the stage, step by gliding step, as if on a cushion of air. With his dancing, Jackson left behind everything mundane, messy and predictable.

"I don't know who you could really put next to him," said ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, reached yesterday in Madrid. "To imitate somebody like Michael Jackson is impossible. Why bother? You just relax and admire."

Jackson was a perfectionist, and could relate to other perfectionists. Baryshnikov got to know him through Elizabeth Taylor, who would "drag him to see me dance," Baryshnikov said, when he was at American Ballet Theatre and later when performing in the White Oak Dance Project, his modern-dance company. They would talk about ballet -- Jackson had a lot of questions, he recalled, "like a 12-year-old" -- and he would ask about working with choreographers. He told Baryshnikov that choreographers would suggest ideas to him, but that he created his own dances. What Baryshnikov remembers most about Jackson, he said, was "not even his turns or his grabbing his crotch. Just his simple, bouncy walk across the stage, that was what was most beautiful and arresting, swinging his hips, kicking his heel forward. That's to me what he is: that superior confidence in his body as a dancer. You wanted to say, 'Wow, this guy, what a cat; he can really move in his own way.' "

That walk was his own, but Jackson absorbed some of his other moves from his forebears. He didn't invent the moonwalk, for instance -- tap dancers stretching back at least to the 1940s thrilled audiences with what was called the backslide -- but he perfected it. He didn't invent that swift twist of a spin, or the art of punctuating a lyric or a backbeat with a punch of his pelvis. But as with every other element of his incomparable showmanship, he perfected those moves and made them his own. No pop star brought dance to the stage the way Jackson did. Not for him to draw aside and let backup dancers take the spotlight while he crooned. He was always the soloist, a Gene Kelly breaking out of a song to tell us a story with his steps.

What was that story?

If his life played out on an operatic scale, Jackson's art was at its essence exquisitely personal. As the Jackson 5's kid singer, he paid sweet tribute to James Brown, mimicking so many of his moves -- the tight, prancing, swiveling footwork and the spin that started with a craning neck and the sharp crank of the shoulders. Dancing came astonishingly easy to him, and that joy in moving, that honey-smooth musical response, was as much a part of his appeal as his girlish voice. But as his fame grew, the abandon you saw on "American Bandstand," on the early "ABC" and "I Want You Back" performances, dropped away. The dance style that Jackson honed into a corporeal autograph is one not of physical or emotional release -- it's not flashy or overblown. It's a statement of fierce, obsessive control, and in the way only the best of the best can do it, he made it look supremely easy.

Not that Jackson couldn't do flashy. In a typical number -- take "Billie Jean," for example -- he snaps and shudders with a force that could transfer up to the highest stadium rows. He also had a pantherlike grace, the square shoulders of an athlete carried serenely, with a walk like poured syrup. His understanding of costume glamour -- the jackets that nipped in at the waist, setting off those lean hips and legs -- and his embrace of the flamboyant marked him as one of the great showmen of the ages, but his moves set him apart on another level still.

He tapped into the zeitgeist with his songs, forging a reconciliation of everything -- race, sex and even age. (The boy who danced like a man became the man who somehow still lived like a boy.) But if his songs were pure pop, cemented to their disco-soul-ballad-shake-your-booty era, his dancing was timeless. You read his humanity in it. And his strength. We'll likely never know what motivated his weirder choices -- the surgeries, the home life, the child companions -- but nowhere did his inner life become more visible than in his dancing.

Did fame straitjacket him? Look at the video for "Dangerous," where he leads an army of look-alike Company Men, in their severe suits and narrow ties. He's a marvel of precision, joints popping and snapping like machinery. Somehow, it brings Irish step dancing to mind, the upper body rigidly repressed while the legs soar. Jackson added his own twist: those watch-my-crotch moves. The show nearly always centered on the crotch, even if he wasn't wearing a golden codpiece. Jackson has had an immeasurable influence on countless pop stars; among today's hitmakers, Ne-Yo and Usher come first to mind. But the essential difference is in the movement quality. Usher is more relaxed, with those rolling shoulders. He's comfortable in his own skin.

You couldn't say that about Michael Jackson. He looked easy in his youth, but later there was only a managed ease. Or maybe it's that with Jackson comfort came to mean focus, control, physical assurance. You saw it in the simplest moves, like that skimming walk. He could turn it on and turn it off, but he never let us in. Inscrutable, silent, he has always escaped us, as surely as the moonwalk pulled him away, head down, sliding backward into darkness.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

By Sarah Kaufman

The 18th century looks especially sexy in Mark Morris's "Mozart Dances" -- lots of decolletage and slim britches. Very Gothic romance. The music of the age gets undressed, too: Morris's dancers raise the temperature on three Mozart piano pieces with a luscious outpouring of earthy release and existential reflection that chases away all images of powdered wigs and polite aristocracy.

The undressing is more than an image -- it's the whole concept in this evening-length affair, which the Mark Morris Dance Group performed Thursday in a rare visit to the Kennedy Center, which continues tonight. (The troupe dances nearly every year at George Mason University, which Morris, ever the populist, says he likes because of its cheap seats for students. His group was last at the Kennedy Center in 1999.) Morris's chief interest here isn't a brainy dissection of musical structure, nor does it seem to be to match Mozart's virtuosic brilliance with his own. Instead, Morris takes us quickly into the emotional center of the music, where in each of these unrelated compositions -- the Piano Concerto No. 11 in F, K. 413; the Sonata in D for two pianos, K. 448; and the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K. 595 -- light and dark reside side by side.

One of the key pleasures comes from the warmth that Morris pours into the dancing. In the first section, "Eleven," (named for the Piano Concerto No. 11), Martin Pakledinaz's neo-boudoir costumes enthusiastically amplify the female assets, with see-through frocks over black push-up bras and blocky briefs. The women look bosomy and broad-bottomed, but their dancing is strictly plain Jane, cold and wary. In her solo, Lauren Grant, a small dancer who dominates the stage, is the antidote.

Morris has given Grant plum roles before -- most recently, she was Juliet's nurse in his "Romeo and Juliet" -- and she all but stole every scene she was in. In Grant's stage-filling energy and magnetism Morris seems to see something necessary and vital. She has a contented air of grace here, grandly taking up space, opening her arms wide to us. The other women are harder, almost boring, but bit by bit they thaw as they pick up Grant's theme.

There's a sense of ballet's lightness throughout this section. Morris tosses in brief passages of light, fast petit allegro and an especially welcoming gesture -- the arms sweeping open as if to say, "This is all for you" -- that is so identified with the romantic-era ballet style of Danish master August Bournonville. You're moved by the generous outgoingness of the movements; Morris gives us a view of ballet from its uncomplicated beginnings, before it was tensed up by technique.

"Double," accompanied by the sonata for two pianos, is a darker piece, anchored by the tranquil and unrelenting melancholy of the Andante movement, yet even as the dancers take us into its depths, they finish with an image of the communal circle that feels like an eternal balm. "Twenty-Seven," with its swiftly skipping finale, feels like May. It's especially poignant, and hopeful, in a hard winter.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.

© 2009, The Washington Post, Inc.