不期而遇
带着海风和贝壳的质地
此时此地,美丽如你
——Billy Bell
---------------------------------华丽丽的分割线---------------------------------
看到有人说恐怖片很励志,恕我对这种标新立异的讲法不能苟同。我依然很庸俗的认为真正励志的是真人秀。盛大,真实,野心勃勃。
最近在看SO U THINK U CAN DANCE 6。
忽略了眼泪、自白和评委的尖叫,我只爱那些身体舞动的美好时刻,无论是当下最能抓住眼球HIP-POP,还是充满风情的JAZZ,抑或是最直击心灵的CONTEMPORARY,每一段SOLO都仿佛让我重新找到童年时代丢失的珍宝,满心都是流淌的感动与飞翔般的幸福。
最爱的是Billy Bell,那段让我难以呼吸的SOLO。我听得到To build a home行云流水的钢琴乐和回旋反复的吟唱。而他,像从天空倾泻而下的流水和白色的飞鸟,宛如刚刚在舞台上诞生的孩子,只是恣肆地舞,完全不知道自己的好。
19岁的年纪,仅仅5年的舞蹈生涯,Juilliard的学生,无论是批评,伤病,或者是赞赏,都不能改变他一如既往的腼腆、谦逊有教养,在他身上丝毫看不到刻意炫技的成分和选秀节目中常见的极端反应,而他又才华横溢得能够让每次评委大叔和评委大妈们脸上都挂满爱怜的笑容,怎么能让我不喜欢呢。而因病退赛的结果更是让我震惊且期待,期待第七季里他的每一个笑脸,每一个动作,每一句带笑出来话,腼腆,谦逊而不做作。
总之,有梦想的人是好的,有才华的人是好的,低调的人是好的,以梦想为名用才华和汗水低调地战斗着的人也是好的,所以咱的小Billy是最好的:)
P.S原谅我先为自己浅薄的遣词造句汗一把。。。
转一篇在外文博客上看到的文,博主应该是舞蹈评论的业内人士,在这里致以谢意,应该是在Billy休赛以后,给喜欢和期待Billy的人们
INTERVIEWS WITH SONYA TAYEH AND BILLY BELL
December 10, 2009
Okay, here are the interviews I did with Sonya Tayeh and Billy Bell last week at the DeMa Dance Company rehearsal. (Bell and Tayeh are most known for their work on So You Think You Can Dance, if you don’t know - Bell was on the show briefly at the beginning of the season and had to withdraw due to illness, and Tayeh is a choreographer). I spoke with them very quickly, during their tiny lunch break, and I shared the interview with a writer from Dance Spirit magazine. It was hard to get everything down (especially with Billy, who is a fast talker!) and remember the other writer’s questions, etc. (I intend to get a flip camera for the future). Anyway, it’s hard to put this in a question / answer format, so I’m just going to summarize and paraphrase what they each said.
Billy was so sweetly enthusiastic and excited about his life. So much fun to talk to!
First things first - SYTYCD, since that’s how most people know him. He said he definitely plans to return to the show next season. The producers told him he’ll be automatically advanced to the top 100 - so he’ll start out at the Vegas auditions and go from there.
He had to leave the show at the beginning of this season after being diagnosed with Mononucleosis. The problem wasn’t that he was contagious any longer by the time he was diagnosed, but that the illness had significantly enlarged his spleen, and he even had to be hospitalized. Doctors told him if he moved too much with his spleen so enlarged, he could have ruptured it and died. It would likely take a few months for the spleen to return to normal size, they said, which is why he had to leave the show at that point. Now, it’s nearly back to normal though it’s still a slight bit enlarged. “That’s why I wasn’t really dancing full-out,” he said with a little laugh, referring to the rehearsal we’d just seen. Dance Spirit woman and I nearly fell off the couch at this. “If that wasn’t full out, I can’t imagine what you normally look like!” she said. And I agreed. He seemed completely healed to me, to make a massive understatement.
I asked him how he got started in dance. He said he started late, in high school, and he actually began with Hip Hop. His lack of early training didn’t matter for that dance because, unlike ballet for example, the movement isn’t codified. But he soon became interested in Jazz, for which he needed ballet training. He initially learned by mimicking movement, but he soon enrolled in the ballet academy at Ballet Florida and, in order to make up for lost time, really threw himself into it, moving very close to the studio and taking several hours of dance per day, along with his other studies. After a while of ballet, he became interested in tap, and so began training in that too. He’s interested in multiple dance forms but considers his main style to be contemporary ballet.
I asked him who his favorite dancers were or if he had any particular heroes or sources of inspiration. He immediately named Andrea Miller, choreographer and director of Gallim Dance, whom he called his “personal mentor.” He’s worked with her before - when he was 18, his first pro experience — and he performed her work at the Joyce SoHo. He loves her approach to movement and how she teaches: she wants you to experience the movement in your body, he said; it’s not just about the positions, but about how the movement makes you feel. He’s excited to be able to work with her again at Juilliard; she’s to set a piece there soon.
I asked him what other choreographers or companies he’d like to work with. In addition to Gallim, he named William Forsythe and Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva. He finds in this “dance theater” an outer simplicity and yet so much complexity behind it. “What’s going on inside you - (with Gallim and Naharin’s Gaga training) - is simple and yet so complex.” He would also love to do some Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Jerome Robbins, to name a few.
But his biggest passion: choreographing. He wants to dance while he’s young but eventually his goal is to create dances. He said with a laugh that he loves “destroying ballet” - kind of bending those rods ballet dancers seem to hold up their spines and freeing them up, allowing them to go back and forth between different kinds of movement. He loves being able to work with dancers and bring certain things out in them. He strives to move people emotionally, to move the audience, he loves having that power. He choreographed his first piece — 15 minutes long — at Dreyfoos, his high school back in Florida. It was performed there at a show in January.
But that’s in the future. In the meantime, he’s finishing up at Juilliard (he’s about halfway through his BFA; has another couple years to go), he has the SYTYCD Vegas auditions coming up next season, he’s participating in a choreographic competition that travels throughout the States, and he just became a principal dancer at DeMa this month. Despina Simegiatos, one of the artistic directors of DeMa, says back when she was looking for strong male dancers for her fledgling company, she found him on YouTube, through some videos he’d posted, and really fell for him. He hadn’t yet gone on SYTYCD.
He’s excited about working with DeMa because it’s a company that seeks to fuse the creative with the commercial. Companies are where artists can focus on their creative work, but commercial work is what pays the bills. In an ideal world these would be fused, but in the U.S. they rarely are, he said. He seeks to be able to transition back and forth between the two. He’s excited about working with Sonya because he was just about to work with her before he had to leave the show. A couple of other Juilliard students are also dancing with DeMa, which makes the company feel homey to him.
He sweetly said he considers himself the luckiest person in the world that he gets to do what he loves and get paid for it.