The Four Temperaments is a ballet made by New York City Ballet co-founder and ballet master George Balanchine to music he commissioned from Paul Hindemith (the latter's eponymous 1940 music for string orchestra and piano) for the opening program of Ballet Society, immediate forerunner of City Ballet.
The work is divided into five parts, a theme and four variations, which reflect the temperaments of Galen's tradition. Balanchine downplayed the references to medieval "humors" that were believed to determine a person's temperament, saying the four personality types—melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric—were merely points of departure for the creation of abstract music and dance.
Join the largest online summit to raise global awareness on futures thinking, strategic foresight and anticipatory systems in these times of global crisis, lockdown, and isolation, from April 9-11th, 2020.
One thing that stands out to me right now about this moment is how things are becoming for open and accessible that were gated before. I’ve been able to watch so many dance videos. Take dance classes from freeskewl and mercetrust that are blunted by digital distancing but would have been inaccessible in Minneapolis before. Now there is this futurist conference, live streamed 24 hrs straight for three days.
I love the future, and think about my choreographic work about modeling for the future. Some projects more than others. It’s more impressionistic than that. I want to learn more about it. It seems very much about systems and imagination, which is what I think makes up most of dance and choreography.
This whole situation has me thinking about how I want to use this crisis as an opportunity or motivation to do something to make myself more useful in areas where I feel excitement and passion. I love dance, I love the future, and I love my dog Yoko. I feel set on dance, I’m working my strategy there. I have never been seeing more of Yoko since she was a puppy. So, I’m thinking I will take a formal foresight or futures studies class in the fall – maybe after things have settled a bit and I have a clearer sense of if I won any of the grants and fellowships I’ve been applying for. I’ve been back burnering the idea for a while, but it’s time to but it on deck.
Also, I hope this deluge of online resources continues and that the folks are seeing new demand and interest in their ideas in new places! The disruption is scary, but there are many connections and crumbs of inspiration around the edges.
Fell into a little bit of a rabbit hole today refreshing my website: www.ebenkowler.com. I’m applying for funding to make a new dance and what I meant to do was work on queueing up work samples but if I was going to do all that work I uploading things to Vimeo and writing up descriptions I wanted to do it on my website first so they would be there for next time.
Decided to clear out this old thing and start over from scratch, embedding it on my indexhibit as a place to share a little more publicly but also out of the reach of Instagram/Facebook. At least Tumblr is owned by Automattic/Wordpress which is more palatable.
