Gymnastic Grace

Where did it go?

Starting with Ludmilla Tourischeva and Olga Korbut in 1972, something happened to women’s gymnastics. It went from elegance to acrobatics. As the long legged and graceful Tourischeva won the all around gold in Munich, it was the small and perky Korbut who won gold on the floor exercises. Four years later in Montreal, 14 year old 4 foot 11 Nadia Comaneci won the first perfect 10 on the uneven parallel bars and the sport has never been the same. Today, Simone Biles is the undisputed dominant figure of the sport, a 4 for 8 acrobat of flipping twisting virtuosity.

Yesterday, I enjoyed the opening of the new action comedy Deadpool & Wolverine, because you know, I’m a dude. It is the apotheosis of crude, clever bombast and I laughed my ass off. But one of my favorite films of all time is The Philadelphia Story which is about as far removed from butt scratching cartoony camp as you can get. What happened to the thread of feminine grace that seems to have evaporated in a thunderclap of muscularity?

I discovered it.

I don’t possess the vocabulary of dance, but I understand what I’m seeing, and here is an example of the hole in our society. Then again it may just be that I’ve been traveling in too many dude circles to notice - but this certainly is not coming out of the program of UCLA whose performing arts catalog I get on a regular basis.

What do you call the kind of person who appreciates beauty, heroism and majesty? I’ve called myself Old School and Formalist. So I am unsatisfied with cultural productions of this sort:

Friends of mine are breaking down a bunch of stuff now being associated with JD Vance, and I’m certain to tangle with some of those angles. But I have to assess the field. For me that means I don’t need to be a national chauvinist. I simply don’t believe that American arts are the best, nor do I need them to be. Even when the most yokel of us pronounce Target as the French would, we understand something of our raw American crudity as contrasted with the healthy French crudités. But I cannot avoid the thought that I believe those young women dancing in Switzerland are better taken care of than those young women flipping on gymnastic mats. Then again, I’m new to ballet. Maybe Aronofsky’s Black Swan (which I’ve refused to watch) is more true than I’d like to believe. I certainly believe Simone Biles hews to the best traditions of sportsmanship and has her head on straight, even when she’s upside down.

But the art is gone. There is nothing subtle about women’s gymnastics today. That’s sad.