1977 continued
Still a Spring Chicken
Now in their 19th year, The Paper Bag Players are still going strong. In early shows like Scrap and Group Soup the Bags established a distinctive, economical, highly visual revue format combined with an energetic performance style of the utmost clarity. They began using props and costumes made of undisguised, commonplace materials, and transformed them in the eyes of the audience; they used familiar household items in humorous new ways. In more recent years, under the direction of Judith Martin, the Bags have gone to develop shows with more thematic coherence, like their new Grandpa, which deals loosely, in most of its 14 songs and skits, with aspects of growing up and growing older.
The idea of growing older can be as worrisome to a child as to any of us. And with respect to that idea, Grandpa takes two tacks--sometimes emphasizing humor in the dramatic differences age can make, and other times stressing the ordinariness of change and the sense of continuity that can persist through it. In one little song that kids connected with strongly and gleefully, Irving Burton and Jeanne Michaels step rhythmically across the stage singing, "Let the great big daddy give the little baby a great big kiss." She walks on her knees with a cardboard cutout of a baby dress in front of her. They cross again with Jeanne as a little girl now. Last time around she's suddenly full-size, awfully tall. Her voice has deepened and gotten sexier, while Irving has shrunken slightly and looks rather intimidated. "Let the great big baby give her little daddy a great big kiss." There's a feeling, almost, of glorious revenge--though nothing in the slightest bit unpleasant has occurred. Kids love to be reminded their turn is coming. Another skit kids liked a lot had two babies, Irving and Virgil Roberson, chatting in the hospital. Irving's gurgling, no worries for the future, and Virgil's crying about what'll happen to him when his parents take him home. "I'll be getting teeth - and I just know they'll take my bottle away!" Everyone old enough to be safely past these terrors can laugh and feel agreeably superior to that baby Virgil up there.
My favorite piece in Grandpa was one of the most simple - a chalk talk. Irving sits in a chair in front of a "blackboard." Judy come in and tells us that he used to spend his time all alone reading the newspaper. He got married to a wife with lots and lots of curly hair - and Judy begins to draw a smiling, round face with a pile of looping circles for the hair. They had a skinny son who became a tall, skinny man and married a skinny wife. They had six, smiling, happy boys, only one was serious and he liked horses so his father bought him one. Briskly the blackboard fills up with scribble drawings. Then the neighbors - both fat, she so fat she could hardly fit in the house. And their daughter. Was there only one? And the grandparents who came to live with them and were very old and lay down all the time. When the board is covered with figures, erasing begins. "The skinny couple - they spilt. She went east." And the kids move too and are erased. And the neighbors. Oh yes, the original man's wife dies, and years later "there was the same man spending his days all by himself reading the newspaper."
I loved the chatty way this chalk talk breezed through the enormous changes that families and individuals undergo, without climaxing, without concentrating on conflict. I liked the focus on the long rhythms of life. Several other skits had a somewhat similar mellow tone. In one, old friends too busy to arrange to meet on Wednesday or Thursday next week, make an appointment to visit Judy's new apartment in 25 years. They walk slowly in a circle, stopping to announce the passing years and changes in their lives. Virgil puts on a mustache and to celebrate his 30th birthday buys himself a new coat. Irving, at 75, puts on a beard. He never had the courage to wear one before. "now I dress as I please," he says. Judy turns 80. "And to think, when I was eight I was worried about 10."
For me, the most problematic part of the show was the opening part which seem intended to remove the sting from the idea of getting older by showing some of the benign changes that come can about. Irving wants to be taller. He thinks himself tall. He gets everybody to pull on his limbs to stretch him out. It doesn't work but, at last, he finds his own immutable height to be quite perfect--because he's getting older. Four pushy people crash their cardboard carton cars; they pause and become gracious to each other. "Must be getting older." And in a baseball game (with Judy's head stuck though a bagel hole in an enormous cutout baseball), Virgil, a rotten sport and a bad loser, strikes out (with lots of help from the maliciously swerving ball), and suddenly doesn't mind losing. But in this whole section, something's fishy. The issue is not age, but maturity. And whatever causes these sudden new attitudes is not happening onstage. It's so internal it doesn't exist. In these 18-plus years, The Paper Bag Players have become one of our most joyous and durable theatrical institutions. They're our classic children's theatre--the standard by which others are judged.
Grandpa continues on Sundays at 1 and 3 p.m. through March 27 at the 92nd Street Y.
Tickets are $2, $3, and $4. For ticket information cal 427-6000, extension 720.
The idea of growing older can be as worrisome to a child as to any of us. And with respect to that idea, Grandpa takes two tacks--sometimes emphasizing humor in the dramatic differences age can make, and other times stressing the ordinariness of change and the sense of continuity that can persist through it. In one little song that kids connected with strongly and gleefully, Irving Burton and Jeanne Michaels step rhythmically across the stage singing, "Let the great big daddy give the little baby a great big kiss." She walks on her knees with a cardboard cutout of a baby dress in front of her. They cross again with Jeanne as a little girl now. Last time around she's suddenly full-size, awfully tall. Her voice has deepened and gotten sexier, while Irving has shrunken slightly and looks rather intimidated. "Let the great big baby give her little daddy a great big kiss." There's a feeling, almost, of glorious revenge--though nothing in the slightest bit unpleasant has occurred. Kids love to be reminded their turn is coming. Another skit kids liked a lot had two babies, Irving and Virgil Roberson, chatting in the hospital. Irving's gurgling, no worries for the future, and Virgil's crying about what'll happen to him when his parents take him home. "I'll be getting teeth - and I just know they'll take my bottle away!" Everyone old enough to be safely past these terrors can laugh and feel agreeably superior to that baby Virgil up there.
My favorite piece in Grandpa was one of the most simple - a chalk talk. Irving sits in a chair in front of a "blackboard." Judy come in and tells us that he used to spend his time all alone reading the newspaper. He got married to a wife with lots and lots of curly hair - and Judy begins to draw a smiling, round face with a pile of looping circles for the hair. They had a skinny son who became a tall, skinny man and married a skinny wife. They had six, smiling, happy boys, only one was serious and he liked horses so his father bought him one. Briskly the blackboard fills up with scribble drawings. Then the neighbors - both fat, she so fat she could hardly fit in the house. And their daughter. Was there only one? And the grandparents who came to live with them and were very old and lay down all the time. When the board is covered with figures, erasing begins. "The skinny couple - they spilt. She went east." And the kids move too and are erased. And the neighbors. Oh yes, the original man's wife dies, and years later "there was the same man spending his days all by himself reading the newspaper."
I loved the chatty way this chalk talk breezed through the enormous changes that families and individuals undergo, without climaxing, without concentrating on conflict. I liked the focus on the long rhythms of life. Several other skits had a somewhat similar mellow tone. In one, old friends too busy to arrange to meet on Wednesday or Thursday next week, make an appointment to visit Judy's new apartment in 25 years. They walk slowly in a circle, stopping to announce the passing years and changes in their lives. Virgil puts on a mustache and to celebrate his 30th birthday buys himself a new coat. Irving, at 75, puts on a beard. He never had the courage to wear one before. "now I dress as I please," he says. Judy turns 80. "And to think, when I was eight I was worried about 10."
For me, the most problematic part of the show was the opening part which seem intended to remove the sting from the idea of getting older by showing some of the benign changes that come can about. Irving wants to be taller. He thinks himself tall. He gets everybody to pull on his limbs to stretch him out. It doesn't work but, at last, he finds his own immutable height to be quite perfect--because he's getting older. Four pushy people crash their cardboard carton cars; they pause and become gracious to each other. "Must be getting older." And in a baseball game (with Judy's head stuck though a bagel hole in an enormous cutout baseball), Virgil, a rotten sport and a bad loser, strikes out (with lots of help from the maliciously swerving ball), and suddenly doesn't mind losing. But in this whole section, something's fishy. The issue is not age, but maturity. And whatever causes these sudden new attitudes is not happening onstage. It's so internal it doesn't exist. In these 18-plus years, The Paper Bag Players have become one of our most joyous and durable theatrical institutions. They're our classic children's theatre--the standard by which others are judged.
Grandpa continues on Sundays at 1 and 3 p.m. through March 27 at the 92nd Street Y.
Tickets are $2, $3, and $4. For ticket information cal 427-6000, extension 720.
Subway Saga
Down the subway entrance on the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn is that New York City Public Transit Exhibit you've seen advertised ("Catch all the trains you missed"). I'd wondered what kind of display space was big enough to hold a lot of subway cars: It's the old Court Street station, where the one-stop HH shuttle used to run from Hoyt-Schermerhorn until it was topped in 1946. Since then, it's been used for filming subway sequences in movies like Death Wish and French Connection. The station looks spiffy. When I came in, a group of school kids were clicking their raucous way through 11 different up-to-date and old-fashioned turnstiles behind me.
But that's the end of the show - first are a series of simple maps showing the growth of the subway system from 1904 to 1925, 1940, and 1976. There's a giant map on a low platform showing the location of railroad tracks and yards throughout the city, and eight tables of models on loan from the Brooklyn Children's Museum of old cable cars, world cars, locomotives, streetcars, and elevated train cars from 1894 to 1950. And there are color photos of subway mosaics: a ferry from Seventh Avenue-Cortlandt Street station; an eagle from 33rd Street; the head-on view of a locomotive from Grand Central; the gnawing beaver of Astor Place; the Santa Maria of Columbus Circle. Men from the transit system (some here on their day off) are around to answer questions, explain how signal mechanisms work or anything you want to know. There are displays of transit-police badges, caps, and insignia, photos of double-decker buses and trolleys. Beyond, a horde of kids piles into the front end of a bus (that's all there is - from the white line forward) to sit at the wheel. A wheel and axle on the floor stands taller than most of the kids. In a partitioned-off room nearby about 20 minutes of films are shown on a regular basis. And here I started feeling old - looking at the old "Subway Sun" courtesy placards and sanitation signs I didn't know I missed. Like "sidewise sitters steal space" or poetic advice, like "high heels are hazards/wearers be wary."
Downstairs at the station platform are the old railroad cars. (Extraordinarily pleasant to see a whole station full of cars with no graffiti.) On the platform were various pieces of electrical and mechanical equipment, including several of the massive truck assemblies that support the car bodies and to which are attached drive motors, axles, and wheels. First on the track were articulated BMT Triplex cars of 1927 (which were in use till 1965!). Three of these cars were mounted on four trucks and enclosed, swiveling circular sections permitted passengers to pass from car to car. Next was an IND car from 1930 (the kind I grew up with) with woven seats and naked bulbs, and the interiors the same dark khaki as the exterior. Then came a model with "bull's eye" indirect lighting, a public-address system, and brighter green paint inside. The modernistic BMT-IND R-11, the first post-WWII stainless steel car, had long horizontal windows that cranked open, fluorescent lighting, provision for air conditioning, and those porthole windows in the doors. Across the platform, along with red steeple-cab electric locomotives from 1910 and 1920, were IRT cars, the older kind, with regular train roofs; a model from 1950 showing the first arched roofs on the IRT; and the standard IRT car of today (2080 are in service).
Back upstairs, near the exit, are photos, prints, and printed texts on the beginning of rapid transit in New York, starting with stages, omnibuses, and horsecars that ran on tracks. There's a print of a proposed elevated railroad of 1853 with the passenger car slung underneath the locomotive; a picture of the first elevated railroad of 1868, which ran along Greenwich Street. Then an old cable system; a proposal for a pneumatically operated system from 1871; other, more architecturally ornate proposals; and photos of the construction of our first subway, the IRT, which opened in 1904. (Though the last of the old IRT subway kiosks were not removed until 1967, typically, not one has been preserved.) Somewhere around there are future/futuristic designs for trains and stations. If we live to see them, we probably won't be able to pay for them. Anyway, by then, unless we make a persistent enough stink now to demand efficient and cheap mass transit, we certainly won't be able to afford the fare.
The exhibition is open every day from 10 till 4.
Admission is a token for adults, 25 cents for people under 17.
But that's the end of the show - first are a series of simple maps showing the growth of the subway system from 1904 to 1925, 1940, and 1976. There's a giant map on a low platform showing the location of railroad tracks and yards throughout the city, and eight tables of models on loan from the Brooklyn Children's Museum of old cable cars, world cars, locomotives, streetcars, and elevated train cars from 1894 to 1950. And there are color photos of subway mosaics: a ferry from Seventh Avenue-Cortlandt Street station; an eagle from 33rd Street; the head-on view of a locomotive from Grand Central; the gnawing beaver of Astor Place; the Santa Maria of Columbus Circle. Men from the transit system (some here on their day off) are around to answer questions, explain how signal mechanisms work or anything you want to know. There are displays of transit-police badges, caps, and insignia, photos of double-decker buses and trolleys. Beyond, a horde of kids piles into the front end of a bus (that's all there is - from the white line forward) to sit at the wheel. A wheel and axle on the floor stands taller than most of the kids. In a partitioned-off room nearby about 20 minutes of films are shown on a regular basis. And here I started feeling old - looking at the old "Subway Sun" courtesy placards and sanitation signs I didn't know I missed. Like "sidewise sitters steal space" or poetic advice, like "high heels are hazards/wearers be wary."
Downstairs at the station platform are the old railroad cars. (Extraordinarily pleasant to see a whole station full of cars with no graffiti.) On the platform were various pieces of electrical and mechanical equipment, including several of the massive truck assemblies that support the car bodies and to which are attached drive motors, axles, and wheels. First on the track were articulated BMT Triplex cars of 1927 (which were in use till 1965!). Three of these cars were mounted on four trucks and enclosed, swiveling circular sections permitted passengers to pass from car to car. Next was an IND car from 1930 (the kind I grew up with) with woven seats and naked bulbs, and the interiors the same dark khaki as the exterior. Then came a model with "bull's eye" indirect lighting, a public-address system, and brighter green paint inside. The modernistic BMT-IND R-11, the first post-WWII stainless steel car, had long horizontal windows that cranked open, fluorescent lighting, provision for air conditioning, and those porthole windows in the doors. Across the platform, along with red steeple-cab electric locomotives from 1910 and 1920, were IRT cars, the older kind, with regular train roofs; a model from 1950 showing the first arched roofs on the IRT; and the standard IRT car of today (2080 are in service).
Back upstairs, near the exit, are photos, prints, and printed texts on the beginning of rapid transit in New York, starting with stages, omnibuses, and horsecars that ran on tracks. There's a print of a proposed elevated railroad of 1853 with the passenger car slung underneath the locomotive; a picture of the first elevated railroad of 1868, which ran along Greenwich Street. Then an old cable system; a proposal for a pneumatically operated system from 1871; other, more architecturally ornate proposals; and photos of the construction of our first subway, the IRT, which opened in 1904. (Though the last of the old IRT subway kiosks were not removed until 1967, typically, not one has been preserved.) Somewhere around there are future/futuristic designs for trains and stations. If we live to see them, we probably won't be able to pay for them. Anyway, by then, unless we make a persistent enough stink now to demand efficient and cheap mass transit, we certainly won't be able to afford the fare.
The exhibition is open every day from 10 till 4.
Admission is a token for adults, 25 cents for people under 17.
The Meanest Show on Earth
What can have been Ronald Tavel's intent in writing The Clown's Tail? Or Harvey Tavel's in directing it? Why did New York Theatre Strategy produce it? What may have started out as a zany idea is a sour, repellent event. The world we are shown - and all the people in it - is mean, ugly, utterly petty - a place of gratuitous viciousness on all sides. This is the familiar, frenzied world of limp-dick '60s travesty - asexual and unfeeling. What of this is particularly fit for children? Slapstick is always rich in bullying and violence and undeserved cruelty. But what gives it verve and interest is clarity and energy and intelligence and a complementary zesty spirit that endures adversity and can win. But, in Clown's Tail, the physical action is crude, mincing, and sloppy. Nastiness and confusion are pervasive. Nothing is positive except, remotely, Manny, the "hero," a boy who gets kicked out of the choir and tries to land a job as a clown. But Manny's only virtues are that he's handsomer than anyone else (though that doesn't help him onstage, it gives him a cachet with the audience) and that he's an "innocent" - if to be innocent is to be cheated, insulted, struck, and played for a fool.
What is bad taste, what is inappropriate for children (or, indeed, for people) is often difficult to pinpoint or explain. But, if you can do just about anything onstage, how and why you do it become everything. When someone sniffs the behind of some buxom big-assed blonde in drag for no other reason but to be disgusting and get a laugh, that's tasteless. High spirits can override questions of good or bad, but, in fact, Clown's Tail gets most of its audience response specifically from behavior that kids have been rightly taught to recognize as "bad." There's no notion of expanding or revising ossified values or manners - just exploitation and debasement of those values to make taboo jokes. Kids are excited to give their approval to vicious behavior; many wind up rooting for whoever is freakiest, meanest, loudest, most outrageous. They read the values of the show correctly.
The Clown's Tail"compensates" for its ugliness with some sentimental morals. One bit of doubtful blanket advice is that competition is bad. "I'm never going to compete again," moans Manny, after winning the clown contest but failing to get the job because the other competitors have trapped his tail in the floorboards. "Did you see how mean those guys got?" But those guys have been nothing but mean from the start. There's no other possibility in their characters. It's sad that Manny, with his potential, wins the contest by becoming equally ruthless and still winds up a loser. "Kids, be yourself," Manny advises. Then goes back to the disagreeable choir he was thrown out of in the beginning to be himself? What does that mean? That you are your job? Don't try to learn anything new? Know your place?
Manny, whether clown or choirboy, has no real interest, no personality except that of a victim. What could he know about being one's self? "Keep away from bad companions" might be more to the point, but any advice on this rubber stamp level is worse than worthless. Such advice only confirms the cynical view that personal integrity is a joke, that moral values are not only empty but irrelevant. Kids don't need a special dose of this stuff. Growing up is hard enough already.
What is bad taste, what is inappropriate for children (or, indeed, for people) is often difficult to pinpoint or explain. But, if you can do just about anything onstage, how and why you do it become everything. When someone sniffs the behind of some buxom big-assed blonde in drag for no other reason but to be disgusting and get a laugh, that's tasteless. High spirits can override questions of good or bad, but, in fact, Clown's Tail gets most of its audience response specifically from behavior that kids have been rightly taught to recognize as "bad." There's no notion of expanding or revising ossified values or manners - just exploitation and debasement of those values to make taboo jokes. Kids are excited to give their approval to vicious behavior; many wind up rooting for whoever is freakiest, meanest, loudest, most outrageous. They read the values of the show correctly.
The Clown's Tail"compensates" for its ugliness with some sentimental morals. One bit of doubtful blanket advice is that competition is bad. "I'm never going to compete again," moans Manny, after winning the clown contest but failing to get the job because the other competitors have trapped his tail in the floorboards. "Did you see how mean those guys got?" But those guys have been nothing but mean from the start. There's no other possibility in their characters. It's sad that Manny, with his potential, wins the contest by becoming equally ruthless and still winds up a loser. "Kids, be yourself," Manny advises. Then goes back to the disagreeable choir he was thrown out of in the beginning to be himself? What does that mean? That you are your job? Don't try to learn anything new? Know your place?
Manny, whether clown or choirboy, has no real interest, no personality except that of a victim. What could he know about being one's self? "Keep away from bad companions" might be more to the point, but any advice on this rubber stamp level is worse than worthless. Such advice only confirms the cynical view that personal integrity is a joke, that moral values are not only empty but irrelevant. Kids don't need a special dose of this stuff. Growing up is hard enough already.
Giving What We Need
March 7
The Floating Hospital, docked at one of the South Street Seaport piers, is a diagnostic and treatment center with a strong commitment to health education. So, as one of its programs, the Floating Hospital Puppet Theater presents a pair of “health-oriented” puppet shows: health, in this case, not merely medical, but the health of the whole being. The idea of people helping one another through caring and contact is a central theme of both shows and of a short final skit in which a distraught, raving witch (“Abigail, one of our problem puppets” “No! You’re our problem puppeteer!”) is soothed, and, with the help of the audience, conjures up a basket of balloons.
The Shy Fox is an agreeable but rather ordinary hand-puppet show about a fox who is painfully shy - he deprecates himself, mistrusts others, justifies his shyness by imagining other people’s disinterest - and, of course, longs for a real companion. Drawn out of himself by a persistently friendly monkey he really admires, he becomes downright brave when the monkey’s in danger. “I didn’t think much about it at the time,” he says, not modestly, but when the monkey praises his courage. But the first show, an exquisite shadow-puppet play called Roots, sets the tone for the entire program. It couldn’t appeal more directly to its audience. The scene is idyllic and somewhat oriental, of watercolor delicacy and transparence - a tree, some rocks, a few plants, a curling blue stream. A mallard swims downstream, tilts its head up to see a flight of birds pass overhead, nods to a stag that bounds across. Linda - puppeteer, narrator and warmer-upper - in front of the screen, plants two round pea-like seeds. As soon as she goes they open their big mouths to talk. The second seed doesn’t like the open place she chose to plant him in. He decides to travel and moves over to plant himself near some fancy weeds (whose leaves are as expressive and hands). The sun comes out and the rain (a watering can with falling drops) passes by but both miss the seed, hidden by the weeds.
Meantime, his sister sprouts leaves and a bud. And the bud blows into a deep-red seed. Nothing happens to the relocated seed. Luckily, deus ex machina Linda returns and replants him in a better spot back near his sister. She makes sure next time that the sun shines on the seed and that the rain gives it some water. (“Drip, drop, rain for the rock,” sings the watering can, showering on every damn thing.) The plight of the stymied seed evokes a lot of tenderness from the children in the audience. But the seed’s survival is very doubtful “Some people and plans,” says Linda, “don’t grow up as healthy and happy as they can unless they know that people care.” Of course, the Tinkerbell technique always works: When kids start to say “I care”, the seed begins to sprout and bud and flower. “Aaah,” a child’s thin voice quavers with relief and satisfaction. “He got it!”
Shy Fox and Roots are presented Sundays at 1:30 and 3 p.m. though March 27.
Admission is $1.50. For information, call 744-8636.
The Floating Hospital, docked at one of the South Street Seaport piers, is a diagnostic and treatment center with a strong commitment to health education. So, as one of its programs, the Floating Hospital Puppet Theater presents a pair of “health-oriented” puppet shows: health, in this case, not merely medical, but the health of the whole being. The idea of people helping one another through caring and contact is a central theme of both shows and of a short final skit in which a distraught, raving witch (“Abigail, one of our problem puppets” “No! You’re our problem puppeteer!”) is soothed, and, with the help of the audience, conjures up a basket of balloons.
The Shy Fox is an agreeable but rather ordinary hand-puppet show about a fox who is painfully shy - he deprecates himself, mistrusts others, justifies his shyness by imagining other people’s disinterest - and, of course, longs for a real companion. Drawn out of himself by a persistently friendly monkey he really admires, he becomes downright brave when the monkey’s in danger. “I didn’t think much about it at the time,” he says, not modestly, but when the monkey praises his courage. But the first show, an exquisite shadow-puppet play called Roots, sets the tone for the entire program. It couldn’t appeal more directly to its audience. The scene is idyllic and somewhat oriental, of watercolor delicacy and transparence - a tree, some rocks, a few plants, a curling blue stream. A mallard swims downstream, tilts its head up to see a flight of birds pass overhead, nods to a stag that bounds across. Linda - puppeteer, narrator and warmer-upper - in front of the screen, plants two round pea-like seeds. As soon as she goes they open their big mouths to talk. The second seed doesn’t like the open place she chose to plant him in. He decides to travel and moves over to plant himself near some fancy weeds (whose leaves are as expressive and hands). The sun comes out and the rain (a watering can with falling drops) passes by but both miss the seed, hidden by the weeds.
Meantime, his sister sprouts leaves and a bud. And the bud blows into a deep-red seed. Nothing happens to the relocated seed. Luckily, deus ex machina Linda returns and replants him in a better spot back near his sister. She makes sure next time that the sun shines on the seed and that the rain gives it some water. (“Drip, drop, rain for the rock,” sings the watering can, showering on every damn thing.) The plight of the stymied seed evokes a lot of tenderness from the children in the audience. But the seed’s survival is very doubtful “Some people and plans,” says Linda, “don’t grow up as healthy and happy as they can unless they know that people care.” Of course, the Tinkerbell technique always works: When kids start to say “I care”, the seed begins to sprout and bud and flower. “Aaah,” a child’s thin voice quavers with relief and satisfaction. “He got it!”
Shy Fox and Roots are presented Sundays at 1:30 and 3 p.m. though March 27.
Admission is $1.50. For information, call 744-8636.
Honesty is Not Enough
March 28
Tannis Hugill’s Three Dialogues with a Single Performer - interactions with her own hands, with an audio tape and with a sequence of slide projections - were on the whole too private to communicate much to an observer. In Hands, she stared at her own hands, pressed and rubbed them red, reached out, turned them toward the audience like soft beacons. She seemed to be making bread in air; she molded her face, kneaded her body and limbs. She incomprehensibly felt the space around her. She moved her hands like mine detectors, vibrating close to the floor. Frequently she shook them out and slapped them together. “What does she expect of those hands?” I wondered. “Is she rubbing them into alertness or punishing them for their stupidity?”
Psalter, to a tape of shore sounds, was even more vague - neither sufficiently meditative nor sensual. Hugill seemed slightly derelict at first, making arm gestures and small hand movements. Later, she walked, staring, with her arms across her bosom. When her movements became fuller, she lounged (like a mermaid?), rowed vertically to sounds of a splashing sea. But, “Don’t bother me,” she seemed to be saying, with a serious face and her mouth tight, spoiled. What was most troubling here was that her movements had no beginning, no completion. She seemed to be limply thrashing about, preoccupied, feeling something about something the sounds called up. But, for us, Psalter was like a text from which the consonants had been removed.
The last piece, Without Interval, in which we saw Hugill in relation to 11 slides, was the most nearly coherent and communicative of the works. Hugill, standing in profile against a huge image of her own face, seemed almost defeated by the larger image. Against a projection of herself leaping, she bent her body backwards, away fro us, and then crawled down the wall. Her bare legs slanted upward into a projection of the sky. The slides showed her much more spirited than we had the chance to see her. When she repeatedly turned and pushed against the wall, she seemed frustrated, almost broken, perhaps trying to enter a world lost to her. Finally, she slumped against a dawn or sunset on the sea. Hugill, though never dishonest, doesn’t really come to grips with her material in performance terms. Too much is obscure, incomplete, and monotonous. Perhaps she hasn’t decided whether she wants to reveal or conceal, whether she trusts herself and the audience. Meanwhile, she’s keeping the audience at bay by keeping us ignorant.
Presented at the Byrd Hoffman Space (Closed).
Tannis Hugill’s Three Dialogues with a Single Performer - interactions with her own hands, with an audio tape and with a sequence of slide projections - were on the whole too private to communicate much to an observer. In Hands, she stared at her own hands, pressed and rubbed them red, reached out, turned them toward the audience like soft beacons. She seemed to be making bread in air; she molded her face, kneaded her body and limbs. She incomprehensibly felt the space around her. She moved her hands like mine detectors, vibrating close to the floor. Frequently she shook them out and slapped them together. “What does she expect of those hands?” I wondered. “Is she rubbing them into alertness or punishing them for their stupidity?”
Psalter, to a tape of shore sounds, was even more vague - neither sufficiently meditative nor sensual. Hugill seemed slightly derelict at first, making arm gestures and small hand movements. Later, she walked, staring, with her arms across her bosom. When her movements became fuller, she lounged (like a mermaid?), rowed vertically to sounds of a splashing sea. But, “Don’t bother me,” she seemed to be saying, with a serious face and her mouth tight, spoiled. What was most troubling here was that her movements had no beginning, no completion. She seemed to be limply thrashing about, preoccupied, feeling something about something the sounds called up. But, for us, Psalter was like a text from which the consonants had been removed.
The last piece, Without Interval, in which we saw Hugill in relation to 11 slides, was the most nearly coherent and communicative of the works. Hugill, standing in profile against a huge image of her own face, seemed almost defeated by the larger image. Against a projection of herself leaping, she bent her body backwards, away fro us, and then crawled down the wall. Her bare legs slanted upward into a projection of the sky. The slides showed her much more spirited than we had the chance to see her. When she repeatedly turned and pushed against the wall, she seemed frustrated, almost broken, perhaps trying to enter a world lost to her. Finally, she slumped against a dawn or sunset on the sea. Hugill, though never dishonest, doesn’t really come to grips with her material in performance terms. Too much is obscure, incomplete, and monotonous. Perhaps she hasn’t decided whether she wants to reveal or conceal, whether she trusts herself and the audience. Meanwhile, she’s keeping the audience at bay by keeping us ignorant.
Presented at the Byrd Hoffman Space (Closed).
Jumping for Joy
April 18
What a pleasure to like Lar Lubovitch’s new Exultante Jubilate ( to Mozart) so much! Christine Wright and Harry Laird dance a smiling duet with a deep, soft bounce and lots of playful, curvy intertwining without touching - voluptuous without being sexy. He’s solicitous and keeps his eye on her; her demeanor is lively but always modest. Their pursuits climax in small side lifts that tip her slightly forward, skirt held carefully aside - ladylike in the most gracious way. Their tender play develops into a teasing conversation, as they stand face to face. Then another quick chase round and round and off. An exquisite and too-brief (that it, just right) solo for Mari Ono follows, with pure and rather restrained waist-high gestures. The final alleluia solo is danced by Wright with wonderful resilience and exhilaration. It’s sensual but modest, and seems almost Spanish in the fresh flicking of the skirt. I remembers turns with swirling arms and Wright’s luscious sensitivity to the floor. She finishes with several small jumps straight up and down, arms uplifted, feel lifting higher and higher off the ground. Simply joyous.
Lubovitch’s Les Noces, for 10 dancers, owes plenty to both the Nijinska and Robbins versions, both in costumes and overall style. But Lubovitch does have a feeling for this sort of hive activity (witnesses the gremlin hell of Whirligogs) though it loses steam as the wedding celebration heightens and the iconographic element is diminished (or wherever the ritual turns into a party). The most formal attitudes seem most “real” - and there are some nice tableaux. The piece opens with the stage divided as to sex - four men seated in a row on one side, four women on the other. The women, torsos rounded over, arms woven together, roll the bride off their laps onto the floor. The men haul the groom head over heels. Separately, each undergoes a sort of hazing. Their hesitant meeting seems weak, but their consolation, each lying on the floor with his or her parents, cradled in turn by mother and father, is sweet and couldn’t be simpler. In the end a couple is left alone seated on a bench. Each offers a hand to the other. Then, moving to the floor, they roll apart and back together, and snuggle at last as the guests reappear running past like exulting shadows in the background.
What a pleasure to like Lar Lubovitch’s new Exultante Jubilate ( to Mozart) so much! Christine Wright and Harry Laird dance a smiling duet with a deep, soft bounce and lots of playful, curvy intertwining without touching - voluptuous without being sexy. He’s solicitous and keeps his eye on her; her demeanor is lively but always modest. Their pursuits climax in small side lifts that tip her slightly forward, skirt held carefully aside - ladylike in the most gracious way. Their tender play develops into a teasing conversation, as they stand face to face. Then another quick chase round and round and off. An exquisite and too-brief (that it, just right) solo for Mari Ono follows, with pure and rather restrained waist-high gestures. The final alleluia solo is danced by Wright with wonderful resilience and exhilaration. It’s sensual but modest, and seems almost Spanish in the fresh flicking of the skirt. I remembers turns with swirling arms and Wright’s luscious sensitivity to the floor. She finishes with several small jumps straight up and down, arms uplifted, feel lifting higher and higher off the ground. Simply joyous.
Lubovitch’s Les Noces, for 10 dancers, owes plenty to both the Nijinska and Robbins versions, both in costumes and overall style. But Lubovitch does have a feeling for this sort of hive activity (witnesses the gremlin hell of Whirligogs) though it loses steam as the wedding celebration heightens and the iconographic element is diminished (or wherever the ritual turns into a party). The most formal attitudes seem most “real” - and there are some nice tableaux. The piece opens with the stage divided as to sex - four men seated in a row on one side, four women on the other. The women, torsos rounded over, arms woven together, roll the bride off their laps onto the floor. The men haul the groom head over heels. Separately, each undergoes a sort of hazing. Their hesitant meeting seems weak, but their consolation, each lying on the floor with his or her parents, cradled in turn by mother and father, is sweet and couldn’t be simpler. In the end a couple is left alone seated on a bench. Each offers a hand to the other. Then, moving to the floor, they roll apart and back together, and snuggle at last as the guests reappear running past like exulting shadows in the background.
Making Nice
March 28
I’m fond of the way David Varney’s dances (at the Cunningham Studio) keep in touch with the floor with tricky strings of steps sliding, sputtering, stamping. The movements are usually swivelly and angular with smart sharp toes and knees. But the pieced, start-stop structure of the danes tends to keep them distant - reserved and amused. Fairplay plays partly with the notion of team games. Varney, Tom Brown, Jeffrey Urban and Dianne Sichel Perrelli choo-choo in and pile up, then go into a dance of slowed-down motions from baseball or cricket. They shake themselves out tidily, freeze for a sec, and saunter in a rough circle, slapping hands in greeting as they pass. One moment all four rush forward, then move away to display runs, slides, odd, tapping leaps, galumphs... There are moments when the performers turn oddly casual, as if they;re practicing; other times, everybody snaps into a still, formal arrangement, for example when all run in place, jump into “setting-up” exercises, and are suddenly flat on the floor. In the second half, when they form a slow-moving Laocoonlike cluster, it’s as if each were trying to catch something, but missing. No matter how closely they link up, no matter how they use each other, there’s a kind of coolness if their contact, as if each were quite contentedly independent.
A droll halftime divides the piece nicely: Anne and Michael Sahl plod across the floor with wide dust mops, barely avoid perilous collisions, get involved with the patterns the mops describe, then with the mops themselves. Varney’s 35th and Dearborn also stops and starts, with Brown, Urban and Perrelli posing as a group, hanging out, lounging into their hips. Brown falls in a deep arc; he comes up and he group rearranges. Each man pairs briefly with Perrelli. A solo for Urban has him twisting and sliding, scraping the floor with his soles, while the others pet gently in the background. Brown’s solo is more sensual and narcissistic. He has a clean, tight kind of vigor, made somewhat curious by the overly precise way he often uses his hands - though everyone’s hands in 35th and Dearborn are generally used as if they’re giving abrupt, regulating signals, just a hair too opaque to convey familiar information. A nice trio toward the end has the dancers walking fast into a swaggering, stamping dance with casual falls, nearly swooning lay-backs.
Ann Sahl’s Fancy Fruit and Nuts, for herself, Jan Wodynski and Perrelli, is a rather goofy trio, with full, plain movements and unison dancing. Throughout, there’s a quality of coy playacting - as if the dancers were imitating children playing, but with any sense of real “play” absent. Occasional interruptions to stretch, little introverted skittering runs with floppy paws, funny heel-and-toe choruses, made me believe I was watching a parody - but a parody of what? And why? In her In Back of the Real, to Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Sahl appears in red lipstick, dressed in a floor-length black dress with her hair lusciously loose. She speaks and enacts the poem word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, using literal though irrelevant gestures to shatter the sense. She measures out “yard,” elbows invisible people out of the way for “in front,” presses hand to forehead for “thought,” leaps with joy for “yellow,” smears her hand across her front and makes a moue of disgust for “soiled.” Some of the gestures themselves are funny and effective, but each seems isolated from all the others. The result is bits and pieces.
Cunningham Studio.
I’m fond of the way David Varney’s dances (at the Cunningham Studio) keep in touch with the floor with tricky strings of steps sliding, sputtering, stamping. The movements are usually swivelly and angular with smart sharp toes and knees. But the pieced, start-stop structure of the danes tends to keep them distant - reserved and amused. Fairplay plays partly with the notion of team games. Varney, Tom Brown, Jeffrey Urban and Dianne Sichel Perrelli choo-choo in and pile up, then go into a dance of slowed-down motions from baseball or cricket. They shake themselves out tidily, freeze for a sec, and saunter in a rough circle, slapping hands in greeting as they pass. One moment all four rush forward, then move away to display runs, slides, odd, tapping leaps, galumphs... There are moments when the performers turn oddly casual, as if they;re practicing; other times, everybody snaps into a still, formal arrangement, for example when all run in place, jump into “setting-up” exercises, and are suddenly flat on the floor. In the second half, when they form a slow-moving Laocoonlike cluster, it’s as if each were trying to catch something, but missing. No matter how closely they link up, no matter how they use each other, there’s a kind of coolness if their contact, as if each were quite contentedly independent.
A droll halftime divides the piece nicely: Anne and Michael Sahl plod across the floor with wide dust mops, barely avoid perilous collisions, get involved with the patterns the mops describe, then with the mops themselves. Varney’s 35th and Dearborn also stops and starts, with Brown, Urban and Perrelli posing as a group, hanging out, lounging into their hips. Brown falls in a deep arc; he comes up and he group rearranges. Each man pairs briefly with Perrelli. A solo for Urban has him twisting and sliding, scraping the floor with his soles, while the others pet gently in the background. Brown’s solo is more sensual and narcissistic. He has a clean, tight kind of vigor, made somewhat curious by the overly precise way he often uses his hands - though everyone’s hands in 35th and Dearborn are generally used as if they’re giving abrupt, regulating signals, just a hair too opaque to convey familiar information. A nice trio toward the end has the dancers walking fast into a swaggering, stamping dance with casual falls, nearly swooning lay-backs.
Ann Sahl’s Fancy Fruit and Nuts, for herself, Jan Wodynski and Perrelli, is a rather goofy trio, with full, plain movements and unison dancing. Throughout, there’s a quality of coy playacting - as if the dancers were imitating children playing, but with any sense of real “play” absent. Occasional interruptions to stretch, little introverted skittering runs with floppy paws, funny heel-and-toe choruses, made me believe I was watching a parody - but a parody of what? And why? In her In Back of the Real, to Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Sahl appears in red lipstick, dressed in a floor-length black dress with her hair lusciously loose. She speaks and enacts the poem word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, using literal though irrelevant gestures to shatter the sense. She measures out “yard,” elbows invisible people out of the way for “in front,” presses hand to forehead for “thought,” leaps with joy for “yellow,” smears her hand across her front and makes a moue of disgust for “soiled.” Some of the gestures themselves are funny and effective, but each seems isolated from all the others. The result is bits and pieces.
Cunningham Studio.
ABT’s Fierce Firebird
May 2
BALTIMORE - It’s sunny and hot. Outside, sunburnt walkers, mostly young people, are wobbling or limping through the last stretch of a 25-mile March of Dimes walkathon. Inside the dowdy old lyric Theater,
Natalia (Natasha) Makarova, guest star in a benefit for the Maryland Ballet, is dancing with Ivan Nagy in a ballet of Romeo and Juliet she’s been waiting to do since 1969. She has danced three other Juliets; however, this role was made on her, made for her, by the Russian choreographer Igor Tchernichov, of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet. But the ballet, to the luscious Berlioz score, was banned by the Kirov’s repertoire committee after they saw it in a preview. Maybe there was some bureaucratic jealousy or behind-scenes maneuvering involved in the decision. Maybe they thought it was too erotic. Makarova says, “Basically, I think the form was too contemporary. They just didn’t like the way of thinking - the conception. It’s very far from realism, so it doesn’t fit into the framework that dictates what art has to be. I don’t think art can be dictated,” she continues. “Art is art. It’s inspiration. It’s free. What is inside must grow. As for this Romeo, it goes far over the frontier of what is permitted...And that is why I’m here!”
Tchernichov’s impassioned Romeo and Juliet looks old-fashioned - but it’s sturdy and tough and wonderfully concise. Nagy and Makarova, in the simples of costumes, are separated by the whole width of the stage. “Two solitary figures,” as she says. “Reaching, just feeling to reach something, for something to happen.” They look almost blind to me. Neither knows the other is there or what he or she is moving toward. These lovers are hardly characters, more like barely conscious creatures who’ve been impelled to live this out. The chorus faces upstage, like furniture; she inspects the men, he the women, touching, looking at the faces we cannot see. They seem to be under some kind of restraint, somehow bottled up. When they meet, it’s dead on. They move toward each other in a series of shuddering lunges, stubbing their toes repeatedly against the floor as they stretch toward each other across the stage. They begin a long pas de deux full of twisting and pressing against each other.
Makarova seems more fulsome than I’ve ever seen her - rounder and more sensual. Now they’re down on the floor, reaching and rolling over each other. Clamped together. Their love produces an anguish of adjustments and awkward maneuvers. Nagy reminds me of the wounded St. Sebastian. They walk together - a respite - leaning on each other slightly. But they can’t stop. She totters back to an embrace. He drags her along; her leg stabs the floor for support. They seem without strength except for making love. Events move quickly. Mercutio, then Tybalt, are dead. A sharp gesture or touch of the foot is enough to kill. The lovers have a moment of horror at the bodies, and then Juliet is flat on the ground, center stage, apparently dead. No Friar Laurence nonsense. As Makarova says, “It’s not necessary to explain everything - everybody knows Shakespeare.” Romeo dies on his feet, head slumped forward. I thin he kills himself with a gesture of his hand to his mouth. When Juliet wakes and finds him dead, she pushes herself up off his shoulders, flailing the air. Then, she wraps herself in his arms, facing out like a pair of mummies, and dies.
At American Ballet Theatre’s school, I catch a glimpse of Makarova looking momentarily pale and puzzled after class. But when she comes out of the dressing room to meet me, she’s alert and gracious. Her streaky blond hair’s been chopped off in a bob. She’s wearing a loose beige ensemble, peacock-blue eye make-up, but she’s been rushed, and a friends tucks in the label at her neck. We go upstairs to a padded gallery lounge that overlooks ABT’s rehearsa; studios ad talk about the Romeo. To recreate her role, she works with Elena Kittle-Tchernichova, the choreographer’s ex-wife and assistant who came to America recently and has been teaching for the Maryland Ballet. (Kittel-Tchernichova is credited with the restaging and for additional choreography.) “It’s quite difficult to stage it without the choreographer,” Makarova says in something of an understatement. “it’s a kind of paradox.” Her voice is soft and grainy. English is still an effort. “The choreographer is Russian. But I never danced that ballet in Russia. I left - and now I dance it here. To come back to the past, just by accident...all life is like that!” She walks to a window to look down into the big studio, where there’s a corps rehearsal for the Bayadere she staged. “My girls,” she says, smiling. I tell her that the Kirov’s was the first Bayadere I ever saw. “But now,” she says, “somebody came - Tchernichova - she said the girls from ABT now dance Bayadere better than the Kirov. I was really proud. They did work hard. And what's amazing is...new girls coming in, I don’t rehearse them anymore. The old girls with whom I worked, who started two years ago in Bayadere, are teaching them. They feel responsible to keep the ‘dimension’.” She holds a cigarette tightly, deep in her hand, lets it burn. “I’m tired,” se says, “of seeing many modern pieces without sense. People doing one movement, and another, and another. Okay, so you see it and you think that’s interesting and that’s interesting - but nothing touches you inside. It doesn’t make any logical sense. I think the public now is also missing that. That’s why they come back to the classics - because, at least with Swan Lake and Giselle, everything makes sense. And people want to be touched, to be involved...I want to be involved."
And she wants to be well used. “It doesn’t really matter what - but to feel this creative process, that’s what I live for. This fulfillment. I need fulfillment. And I try my best.” Makarova has danced The Firebird in Los Angeles; now she’s doing it in New York. I se her before her rehearsal with Nagy. She sits in the lobby, in a dark blue leotard and tights. Her bag, which, like all dancers’ carry-alls, is pretty hefty bulges with pointe shoes. She’s hunched over, sewing ribbons on new pink ones. She’s businesslike; done it a million times. She snaps the thread off briskly. Starts on the next shoe. In the studio, Fernando Bujones and Birgit Keil are finishing up a long rehearsal. Nagy is on the floor, warming up, rocking through his back. (It’s Tuesday. Sunday night he fled the theater to catch the last plane from Baltimore; Monday he partnered Cynthia Gregory in ABT’s opening-night Swan Lake.) Makarova does ronde de jambes at the barre. She runs a comb through her hair (What’s there to comb?) But I see later she; put some bobby pins in to keep her hair from flipping around. Eleanor D’Antuono steps in. “It’s hideous, trying to put Firebird together,” she says to Makarova. And later, Cynthia Gregory, who might be dancing the role, stretches patiently at the barre, keeping a keen eye on things. Makarova does some plie-releves to soften up the shoes. She looks straight in the mirror, like an eagle. A cigarette firmly in her fingers, she starts a series of little jumps. Nagy wants to talk their pas de deux through. It’s be rough. “I don’t remember too much.” He has never done Firebird before. They sing and count and mark their way through one section of the pas de deux for the Tsarevitch and the Firebird. “Dja da da. Chu-da da-da.” Makarova’s hands are flapping like little winds. “She goes away seven,” says Erik Bruhn, who is conducting this rehearsal, “and catch, eight.”
Makarova checks out the way her arms curls around her head and touches the center of her forehead with her middle finger in a characteristic gesture of the Firebird. I think I am an emotional person,” she told me earlier. “Sometimes a role touches my emotions, inside, and there is no way for it to go out. It has to be projected. The only thing I don’t like is when a role is one-dimensional. That’s quite boring for me - it’s not contradictory - probably because I have that contradictory quality inside myself. I’m not like that, you know, smooth. One side is always fighting with the other side inside of me.” “Luddleluddle um,” she sings, wagging her tongue inside her mouth, her lips half-pursed. “Oh, now is the neck!” Nagy says, recognizing what comes next. She runs to him, puts her arm around his neck, and arches forward into arabesque penchee. The biggest problem of the day seems to be the bird-catching business. Her arms flash down from overhead and cross in front. Nagy’s must come down and enclose hers. “It’s impossible,” he says, and they cheerfully flub it and get knotted up each time through. Now they’re running through it more fully. They’re exhilarated, and there’s a lot of laughing along with concentrated work. He picks her up, sets her hips on his shoulder “Late!” she squeals. And, suddenly uncertain, “How do you put me down?”
Now Bruhn demonstrates a pose with Makarova to show Nagy how to finagle it. She’s got a cigarette again and so does he. They’re marvelously adept at keeping them out of the way. She stops for a moment, holding her left side. “Hurts?” asks Nagy. “Hurts,” she says. They go on and the stitch, or whatever it was, is seemingly forgotten. Makarova grows more and more playful and fierce and astonishing. Quicksilver. They struggle with the part where she gets pulled up off the floor and gives him a feather. A bit of her hair comes unpinned, pokes her in the eye, and she shakes her head to get it away. They run through part of it again. Flushed, fierce, her eyes dart from Nagy to check herself in the mirror. The energy in her face focuses her brow; she’s nearly scowling with concentration. “It’s terribly difficult,” she says, to no one in particular. If she doesn’t really fly, it can only be because she doesn’t care to.
BALTIMORE - It’s sunny and hot. Outside, sunburnt walkers, mostly young people, are wobbling or limping through the last stretch of a 25-mile March of Dimes walkathon. Inside the dowdy old lyric Theater,
Natalia (Natasha) Makarova, guest star in a benefit for the Maryland Ballet, is dancing with Ivan Nagy in a ballet of Romeo and Juliet she’s been waiting to do since 1969. She has danced three other Juliets; however, this role was made on her, made for her, by the Russian choreographer Igor Tchernichov, of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet. But the ballet, to the luscious Berlioz score, was banned by the Kirov’s repertoire committee after they saw it in a preview. Maybe there was some bureaucratic jealousy or behind-scenes maneuvering involved in the decision. Maybe they thought it was too erotic. Makarova says, “Basically, I think the form was too contemporary. They just didn’t like the way of thinking - the conception. It’s very far from realism, so it doesn’t fit into the framework that dictates what art has to be. I don’t think art can be dictated,” she continues. “Art is art. It’s inspiration. It’s free. What is inside must grow. As for this Romeo, it goes far over the frontier of what is permitted...And that is why I’m here!”
Tchernichov’s impassioned Romeo and Juliet looks old-fashioned - but it’s sturdy and tough and wonderfully concise. Nagy and Makarova, in the simples of costumes, are separated by the whole width of the stage. “Two solitary figures,” as she says. “Reaching, just feeling to reach something, for something to happen.” They look almost blind to me. Neither knows the other is there or what he or she is moving toward. These lovers are hardly characters, more like barely conscious creatures who’ve been impelled to live this out. The chorus faces upstage, like furniture; she inspects the men, he the women, touching, looking at the faces we cannot see. They seem to be under some kind of restraint, somehow bottled up. When they meet, it’s dead on. They move toward each other in a series of shuddering lunges, stubbing their toes repeatedly against the floor as they stretch toward each other across the stage. They begin a long pas de deux full of twisting and pressing against each other.
Makarova seems more fulsome than I’ve ever seen her - rounder and more sensual. Now they’re down on the floor, reaching and rolling over each other. Clamped together. Their love produces an anguish of adjustments and awkward maneuvers. Nagy reminds me of the wounded St. Sebastian. They walk together - a respite - leaning on each other slightly. But they can’t stop. She totters back to an embrace. He drags her along; her leg stabs the floor for support. They seem without strength except for making love. Events move quickly. Mercutio, then Tybalt, are dead. A sharp gesture or touch of the foot is enough to kill. The lovers have a moment of horror at the bodies, and then Juliet is flat on the ground, center stage, apparently dead. No Friar Laurence nonsense. As Makarova says, “It’s not necessary to explain everything - everybody knows Shakespeare.” Romeo dies on his feet, head slumped forward. I thin he kills himself with a gesture of his hand to his mouth. When Juliet wakes and finds him dead, she pushes herself up off his shoulders, flailing the air. Then, she wraps herself in his arms, facing out like a pair of mummies, and dies.
At American Ballet Theatre’s school, I catch a glimpse of Makarova looking momentarily pale and puzzled after class. But when she comes out of the dressing room to meet me, she’s alert and gracious. Her streaky blond hair’s been chopped off in a bob. She’s wearing a loose beige ensemble, peacock-blue eye make-up, but she’s been rushed, and a friends tucks in the label at her neck. We go upstairs to a padded gallery lounge that overlooks ABT’s rehearsa; studios ad talk about the Romeo. To recreate her role, she works with Elena Kittle-Tchernichova, the choreographer’s ex-wife and assistant who came to America recently and has been teaching for the Maryland Ballet. (Kittel-Tchernichova is credited with the restaging and for additional choreography.) “It’s quite difficult to stage it without the choreographer,” Makarova says in something of an understatement. “it’s a kind of paradox.” Her voice is soft and grainy. English is still an effort. “The choreographer is Russian. But I never danced that ballet in Russia. I left - and now I dance it here. To come back to the past, just by accident...all life is like that!” She walks to a window to look down into the big studio, where there’s a corps rehearsal for the Bayadere she staged. “My girls,” she says, smiling. I tell her that the Kirov’s was the first Bayadere I ever saw. “But now,” she says, “somebody came - Tchernichova - she said the girls from ABT now dance Bayadere better than the Kirov. I was really proud. They did work hard. And what's amazing is...new girls coming in, I don’t rehearse them anymore. The old girls with whom I worked, who started two years ago in Bayadere, are teaching them. They feel responsible to keep the ‘dimension’.” She holds a cigarette tightly, deep in her hand, lets it burn. “I’m tired,” se says, “of seeing many modern pieces without sense. People doing one movement, and another, and another. Okay, so you see it and you think that’s interesting and that’s interesting - but nothing touches you inside. It doesn’t make any logical sense. I think the public now is also missing that. That’s why they come back to the classics - because, at least with Swan Lake and Giselle, everything makes sense. And people want to be touched, to be involved...I want to be involved."
And she wants to be well used. “It doesn’t really matter what - but to feel this creative process, that’s what I live for. This fulfillment. I need fulfillment. And I try my best.” Makarova has danced The Firebird in Los Angeles; now she’s doing it in New York. I se her before her rehearsal with Nagy. She sits in the lobby, in a dark blue leotard and tights. Her bag, which, like all dancers’ carry-alls, is pretty hefty bulges with pointe shoes. She’s hunched over, sewing ribbons on new pink ones. She’s businesslike; done it a million times. She snaps the thread off briskly. Starts on the next shoe. In the studio, Fernando Bujones and Birgit Keil are finishing up a long rehearsal. Nagy is on the floor, warming up, rocking through his back. (It’s Tuesday. Sunday night he fled the theater to catch the last plane from Baltimore; Monday he partnered Cynthia Gregory in ABT’s opening-night Swan Lake.) Makarova does ronde de jambes at the barre. She runs a comb through her hair (What’s there to comb?) But I see later she; put some bobby pins in to keep her hair from flipping around. Eleanor D’Antuono steps in. “It’s hideous, trying to put Firebird together,” she says to Makarova. And later, Cynthia Gregory, who might be dancing the role, stretches patiently at the barre, keeping a keen eye on things. Makarova does some plie-releves to soften up the shoes. She looks straight in the mirror, like an eagle. A cigarette firmly in her fingers, she starts a series of little jumps. Nagy wants to talk their pas de deux through. It’s be rough. “I don’t remember too much.” He has never done Firebird before. They sing and count and mark their way through one section of the pas de deux for the Tsarevitch and the Firebird. “Dja da da. Chu-da da-da.” Makarova’s hands are flapping like little winds. “She goes away seven,” says Erik Bruhn, who is conducting this rehearsal, “and catch, eight.”
Makarova checks out the way her arms curls around her head and touches the center of her forehead with her middle finger in a characteristic gesture of the Firebird. I think I am an emotional person,” she told me earlier. “Sometimes a role touches my emotions, inside, and there is no way for it to go out. It has to be projected. The only thing I don’t like is when a role is one-dimensional. That’s quite boring for me - it’s not contradictory - probably because I have that contradictory quality inside myself. I’m not like that, you know, smooth. One side is always fighting with the other side inside of me.” “Luddleluddle um,” she sings, wagging her tongue inside her mouth, her lips half-pursed. “Oh, now is the neck!” Nagy says, recognizing what comes next. She runs to him, puts her arm around his neck, and arches forward into arabesque penchee. The biggest problem of the day seems to be the bird-catching business. Her arms flash down from overhead and cross in front. Nagy’s must come down and enclose hers. “It’s impossible,” he says, and they cheerfully flub it and get knotted up each time through. Now they’re running through it more fully. They’re exhilarated, and there’s a lot of laughing along with concentrated work. He picks her up, sets her hips on his shoulder “Late!” she squeals. And, suddenly uncertain, “How do you put me down?”
Now Bruhn demonstrates a pose with Makarova to show Nagy how to finagle it. She’s got a cigarette again and so does he. They’re marvelously adept at keeping them out of the way. She stops for a moment, holding her left side. “Hurts?” asks Nagy. “Hurts,” she says. They go on and the stitch, or whatever it was, is seemingly forgotten. Makarova grows more and more playful and fierce and astonishing. Quicksilver. They struggle with the part where she gets pulled up off the floor and gives him a feather. A bit of her hair comes unpinned, pokes her in the eye, and she shakes her head to get it away. They run through part of it again. Flushed, fierce, her eyes dart from Nagy to check herself in the mirror. The energy in her face focuses her brow; she’s nearly scowling with concentration. “It’s terribly difficult,” she says, to no one in particular. If she doesn’t really fly, it can only be because she doesn’t care to.
Caution, Kids at Work
May 2
When I saw Acting by Children’s Sincerely Yours, Literally Yours a year or two ago at the Hudson Guild’s packed little theatre, the audience went wild. It was a neighborhood and family affair - everyone there was a cousin or grandma or friend of some performers, or a friend of somebody’s mother. There were lots of encores and a medley of rousing hits from the show, which has the central character, an adult Noah Webster, devising appropriate names for new doohickies, new activities, new articles of clothing, etc. The six weeks of workshops (two hours a week on Saturday) that preceded the performance had concentrated on - I believe - using props, and I particularly remember a mass of kids waving scarves in a ‘30s flyboy number.
ABC’s Square Balloon, which I caught recently in a free performance in the auditorium of the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, had a more neutral audience, not quite so large a cast, and is about rewriting nursery rhymes and fairy tales to make them turn out happy. But both scripts are muddled and lumbering (though Square Balloon is by far the worse); constructed as a sort of revue to accommodate a large cast of kids of varying ages ad abilities. The workshops are open to anyone between the ages of five and 18 and any performance at the end of that brief period is a kind of miracle, but it may serve the performers - certainly in the case of Square Balloon - better than the audience. For the performers it is the culmination of six weeks’ work; they get to dress up, to sing a lot of songs together in a group, to do set steps and gestures - to be seen and appreciated. Even the youngest has a chance to stand out, singing or speaking at least a line or two, and perhaps much more. The stage is essentially bare; the costumes are haphazard. Older kids and one or two adults are on stage to handle the thread of “plot” and to guide the littlest kids about (“The Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe” can naturally manage five or six youngsters). Musical numbers are choreographed with simple moves and gestures in unison or opposition.
But the kids really shine when, for example, they get to swivel and stamp and finger-pop to ‘50s type rock. It’s interesting to watch them arranging themselves or getting set for a number or being shuffled around. It’s fascinating, and sometimes amusing, to observe their concentration on the most basic tasks of performing. But when they have to stand around, or pretend phony feelings, we get hung up as well. Its simple in this kind of production: pleasure for the audience (adults and children both) comes directly from the kids’ enjoyment of what they’re doing. When they really dig it, we do too.
ABC is based now at the West Side YMCA, 5 West 63rd Street.
For information call 255-4968.
Kids and parents seem to have a fine time at the Meri-Mini Players productions. (The Meri Minis are the original and younger division of what’s now the First All Children’s Theater Company.) The costumes are colorful and bright, the tunes are catchy, and the children who perform are disciplined and charming (they have to audition). It’s a sort of Junior Broadway. You don’t hear anyone say, “Sing out, Baby June,” but that lesson has been thoroughly assimilated. Though I can appreciate the effort and skill that does into bringing these shows off, I often mind their “professionalism.” Being involved in a theatrical production, o in any craft that takes skill and application, is bound to be satisfying and valuable. And it’s important for kids to have the opportunity to give themselves concentratedly to a task they enjoy. But I worry some when I’m faced with a group of kids who are learning to project glossy images of themselves - even though those images are only “pretend.” Though singly these young performers differ in age, size, race, character, background,etc., they’re in the business of making themselves interchangeable. They’re aping the same facile patterns of expression. Though they perform with energy and clarity, something of their individuality seems trapped in the measured manners the slick productions demand Why are they coming on cute? Why all the posing and pouting? They’re irresistible to start with.
The Meri-Minis are currently presenting Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz on Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. to May 21 at he Hotel Opera, Broadway and 76th Street.
When I saw Acting by Children’s Sincerely Yours, Literally Yours a year or two ago at the Hudson Guild’s packed little theatre, the audience went wild. It was a neighborhood and family affair - everyone there was a cousin or grandma or friend of some performers, or a friend of somebody’s mother. There were lots of encores and a medley of rousing hits from the show, which has the central character, an adult Noah Webster, devising appropriate names for new doohickies, new activities, new articles of clothing, etc. The six weeks of workshops (two hours a week on Saturday) that preceded the performance had concentrated on - I believe - using props, and I particularly remember a mass of kids waving scarves in a ‘30s flyboy number.
ABC’s Square Balloon, which I caught recently in a free performance in the auditorium of the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, had a more neutral audience, not quite so large a cast, and is about rewriting nursery rhymes and fairy tales to make them turn out happy. But both scripts are muddled and lumbering (though Square Balloon is by far the worse); constructed as a sort of revue to accommodate a large cast of kids of varying ages ad abilities. The workshops are open to anyone between the ages of five and 18 and any performance at the end of that brief period is a kind of miracle, but it may serve the performers - certainly in the case of Square Balloon - better than the audience. For the performers it is the culmination of six weeks’ work; they get to dress up, to sing a lot of songs together in a group, to do set steps and gestures - to be seen and appreciated. Even the youngest has a chance to stand out, singing or speaking at least a line or two, and perhaps much more. The stage is essentially bare; the costumes are haphazard. Older kids and one or two adults are on stage to handle the thread of “plot” and to guide the littlest kids about (“The Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe” can naturally manage five or six youngsters). Musical numbers are choreographed with simple moves and gestures in unison or opposition.
But the kids really shine when, for example, they get to swivel and stamp and finger-pop to ‘50s type rock. It’s interesting to watch them arranging themselves or getting set for a number or being shuffled around. It’s fascinating, and sometimes amusing, to observe their concentration on the most basic tasks of performing. But when they have to stand around, or pretend phony feelings, we get hung up as well. Its simple in this kind of production: pleasure for the audience (adults and children both) comes directly from the kids’ enjoyment of what they’re doing. When they really dig it, we do too.
ABC is based now at the West Side YMCA, 5 West 63rd Street.
For information call 255-4968.
Kids and parents seem to have a fine time at the Meri-Mini Players productions. (The Meri Minis are the original and younger division of what’s now the First All Children’s Theater Company.) The costumes are colorful and bright, the tunes are catchy, and the children who perform are disciplined and charming (they have to audition). It’s a sort of Junior Broadway. You don’t hear anyone say, “Sing out, Baby June,” but that lesson has been thoroughly assimilated. Though I can appreciate the effort and skill that does into bringing these shows off, I often mind their “professionalism.” Being involved in a theatrical production, o in any craft that takes skill and application, is bound to be satisfying and valuable. And it’s important for kids to have the opportunity to give themselves concentratedly to a task they enjoy. But I worry some when I’m faced with a group of kids who are learning to project glossy images of themselves - even though those images are only “pretend.” Though singly these young performers differ in age, size, race, character, background,etc., they’re in the business of making themselves interchangeable. They’re aping the same facile patterns of expression. Though they perform with energy and clarity, something of their individuality seems trapped in the measured manners the slick productions demand Why are they coming on cute? Why all the posing and pouting? They’re irresistible to start with.
The Meri-Minis are currently presenting Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz on Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. to May 21 at he Hotel Opera, Broadway and 76th Street.
Columbia Cold-Shoulders 28 Kids
May 16
Come July 1, the Children’s Free School has to be out of its storefront space on Morningside Drive. Columbia University plans to construct new dormitories and has served an eviction notice. So, for over two weeks the kids have had outdoor classes on the Columbia campus. Last week, boys and girls from the school had their kickball game busted up by the university's security police. The kids had played on that empty brick plaza near the School of International Affairs for about three years without incident. In 1969 the Children’s Free School was a small, parent-run day-care center that desperately needed some space.
Under pressure from the community at large and prodded by the dogged parents who, for months, had been alternately ignored and given the runaround, Columbia allowed them the rent-free use of a badly dilapidated storefront on Morningside Drive. Working weekends, anytime, and pouring in whatever money they could get together (t the tune of about $7000 over the years), parents knocked down and rebuilt walls, installed new floors and wiring, plastered and painted, built desks and chairs and other equipment. Now the economically and racially integrated school, in its ninth year, handles 28 children from five to 13 years old in nongraded classes. The school day runs from 8:30 to 5:00 so working mothers and single parents can earn a living. There are two full-time teachers; parents work one half-day per week as well. The kids’ reading scores are well over national averages; students who have left the school have all been placed at grade level or above. The school gets no subsidy from either the city or state or private foundations. And, because of the required parents participation, costs have been kept down to $700 a year per child, less than half of what it costs the public schools to “let the kids rot”, according to Alan Adelson, a spokesman for the school, and less than one-third the tuition of most private schools. For most of the parents involved in the school, there is no alternative. Few can afford private school fees. “We’ve done so well by our kids here,” says Adelson. “We don’t want to send them out into the jungle.” In order to keep operating at a fee that its parents can afford, the Children’s Free School must have a rent-free space.
According to Arthur Carlisle, Columbia assistant vice-president for community affairs, “We do not have any space available, period.” Considering the number of buildings Columbia owns in Morningside Heights, this is hard to swallow. Adelson says Columbia agreed years ago to find the school another suitable space if relocation should become necessary. Carlisle, however, denies this. An any case, no provision has been made for the school in Columbia’s current plans. Carlisle is supposedly willing to help them find an alternate space.
So far the parents have been directed to commercial spaces on Broadway with respective monthly rentals of $1100 and $1400. (“We don’t need a real estate agent,” says Adelson.) The other place they’ve been shown is a nursery space up on Claremont Avenue near 125th Street. “The parents were vague about why it was unacceptable,” says Carlisle of this space he last saw nine or 10 years ago. “It’s too small and too dark and too far out of the way,” says Adelson. “That’s why the nursery that was there went out of business.” The rent is $500 a month.
“Let’s not get hung up over the rent until we’ve defined a space,” says Carlisle. But so far he’s got no other ideas. The parents mad a written request for space in the Van Cortlandt - a building on 113th Street Columbia is renovating as a student residence - and have offered to pay rent on a phased-in basis, figuring that with time the school could find a way to accommodate the additional costs. But, numbingly unresponsive, Carlisle says no. And a former nursing home on the corner of 114th and Broadway, also in the process of renovation, is earmarked for other purposes as well. “They’re stonewalling us,” says another CFS father. “It’s not the university’s purpose to provide, r not to provide, free space to a private school,” says Carlisle. “we’re not making any value judgments.” Well, why not? What Columbia is being asked for is modest. For the Children’s Free School, it’s life or death.
Come July 1, the Children’s Free School has to be out of its storefront space on Morningside Drive. Columbia University plans to construct new dormitories and has served an eviction notice. So, for over two weeks the kids have had outdoor classes on the Columbia campus. Last week, boys and girls from the school had their kickball game busted up by the university's security police. The kids had played on that empty brick plaza near the School of International Affairs for about three years without incident. In 1969 the Children’s Free School was a small, parent-run day-care center that desperately needed some space.
Under pressure from the community at large and prodded by the dogged parents who, for months, had been alternately ignored and given the runaround, Columbia allowed them the rent-free use of a badly dilapidated storefront on Morningside Drive. Working weekends, anytime, and pouring in whatever money they could get together (t the tune of about $7000 over the years), parents knocked down and rebuilt walls, installed new floors and wiring, plastered and painted, built desks and chairs and other equipment. Now the economically and racially integrated school, in its ninth year, handles 28 children from five to 13 years old in nongraded classes. The school day runs from 8:30 to 5:00 so working mothers and single parents can earn a living. There are two full-time teachers; parents work one half-day per week as well. The kids’ reading scores are well over national averages; students who have left the school have all been placed at grade level or above. The school gets no subsidy from either the city or state or private foundations. And, because of the required parents participation, costs have been kept down to $700 a year per child, less than half of what it costs the public schools to “let the kids rot”, according to Alan Adelson, a spokesman for the school, and less than one-third the tuition of most private schools. For most of the parents involved in the school, there is no alternative. Few can afford private school fees. “We’ve done so well by our kids here,” says Adelson. “We don’t want to send them out into the jungle.” In order to keep operating at a fee that its parents can afford, the Children’s Free School must have a rent-free space.
According to Arthur Carlisle, Columbia assistant vice-president for community affairs, “We do not have any space available, period.” Considering the number of buildings Columbia owns in Morningside Heights, this is hard to swallow. Adelson says Columbia agreed years ago to find the school another suitable space if relocation should become necessary. Carlisle, however, denies this. An any case, no provision has been made for the school in Columbia’s current plans. Carlisle is supposedly willing to help them find an alternate space.
So far the parents have been directed to commercial spaces on Broadway with respective monthly rentals of $1100 and $1400. (“We don’t need a real estate agent,” says Adelson.) The other place they’ve been shown is a nursery space up on Claremont Avenue near 125th Street. “The parents were vague about why it was unacceptable,” says Carlisle of this space he last saw nine or 10 years ago. “It’s too small and too dark and too far out of the way,” says Adelson. “That’s why the nursery that was there went out of business.” The rent is $500 a month.
“Let’s not get hung up over the rent until we’ve defined a space,” says Carlisle. But so far he’s got no other ideas. The parents mad a written request for space in the Van Cortlandt - a building on 113th Street Columbia is renovating as a student residence - and have offered to pay rent on a phased-in basis, figuring that with time the school could find a way to accommodate the additional costs. But, numbingly unresponsive, Carlisle says no. And a former nursing home on the corner of 114th and Broadway, also in the process of renovation, is earmarked for other purposes as well. “They’re stonewalling us,” says another CFS father. “It’s not the university’s purpose to provide, r not to provide, free space to a private school,” says Carlisle. “we’re not making any value judgments.” Well, why not? What Columbia is being asked for is modest. For the Children’s Free School, it’s life or death.
Restoring Primitive Mysteries
May 30
“There was a surge. People were practically shrieking,” says Lily Mehlman, describing the first performance of Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries, in 1931. “The kind of thing you don’t forget, ever.” And the movement? “Well, it sang.”
Primitive Mysteries, inspired by a visit to the Southwest, is a starkly formal, worshipful dance for 13 women - a central figure clad in an angelic white dress and a chorus in dark blue. It’s in three parts, “Hymn to the Virgin,” “Crucifixus,” and “Hosannah.” In 1964, the dance was revived as a memorial to the late composer and teacher, Louis Horst, who had been Graham’s longtime adviser and friend. “Everyone who’d ever been in it was called back,” said Sophie Maslow, who, though not one of the original cast, became responsible for that reconstruction and this season’s revival at the Lunt-Fontanne as well.
“Some of them came. There were no notes on the music, no cues, no tempo markings. But we got photos together...For some reason, “ she continues, “I remembered almost all of the dance. And Martha had once said that she wanted me to learn her part. She never taught it to me. I just watched. She never saw me do it, she never asked me to do it. But that stuck, too.”
Mehlman remembers the work’s genesis. “Martha had received her first Guggenheim. I guess she went to New Mexico...and there she saw Indian dances and ceremonies no one else could see. She came back and talked about it. We were big-eyed, open-mouthed, listening . It was a revelation. Martha’s feeling was so rich. I’d been in the group six, seven years; I can’t remember any time when Martha was creating a dance (she always worked right there with us, she never did things on paper) when I was more entranced. It was like being mesmerized. Listening...the way she climbed up those steps...someplace, a terrible name...I can’t begin to pronounce it....millions of steps, absolutely vertical. The way the Indian women walked up those steps - that, she told us, that was the quality she wanted in our backs when we did this dance. And in her talking she gave us that feeling.”
“Martha worked so hard all day on her own things, and then she’d sit, curled up in blankets on her chaise longue, and never demonstrated. She said, ‘I want you to walk with your bodies slightly forward (Mehlman’s sweetly precise voice becomes breathy, dramatically accented) and take one large step, and then bring the other leg up sharply.’ And that was the walk across the stage from Primitive Mysteries. It was the way she told it - the way she talked to us about any dance she choreographed. You were spellbound. You couldn’t help but do what she wanted.”
“I remember one part there were three of us waiting off in the corner. And then she suddenly said, ‘And you three little ones, fall flat on your face.’ Without thinking. Boom. Flat on the face. Without a break in the back, down you went. We were disciplined. Real Spartans. No thought. You just did it.”
In 1931, Maslow says, the technique was in a fairly early stage. Training was very different. Graham was not concerned with a well-rounded class every day; she was interested in developing the aspects of her own work that were different from other people’s. “The movement was very earthy, strong, simple, weighted. Technique was simply part of whatever was in the dances. The makeup of our bodies was different, too,” she says. Most dancers today are pretty much stripped of whatever they don’t need.”
Though they’ve been given some classes in the “old technique”, physically, Primitive Mysteries can be painful for today’s dancers - trained for lightness - to sustain. “I think we had stronger bodies,” Mehlman tells me. “Maybe we weren’t as beautiful as the kids today with their long legs.” “It was a strange company at that time,” says Mehlman. There was Ailes Gilmour. Ailes is Irish-Japanese, She had one of the most beautiful faces, but a square body, like a peasant’s. Then there was Louise Creston. She was Italian. She had a face that could have been Indian. It was big and she had tremendous eyes and flashing white teeth. Her complexion was somewhat sallow, and she had a square, stolid body. So you looked at these two, and they were American Indian women. No two ways about it. Of course, the rest of us weren’t anything like that. Oh, then there was Mary Rivoire - she looked like a Renoir; she had the coloring, the most beautiful face in the world, and a glorious dancer.”
“None of the people of this young generation are about to - I don’t think - capture that quality we had in those days. I don’t know what it was. The feeling of the group, from sitting position rolling onto their knees...it was almost childlike in its simplicity and purity. It had religious overtones, but you never felt it that way...There’s a jump in the air - you beat the ground and from there you come into a jump - it seems that the young crop have a hard time with it.” (Maslow says of this same jump, “I still don’t know why it’s difficult for them.”) And in “Crucifixus”, the heads are tilted up through the whole dance - there’s no relief.
“The whole technique,” continues Mehlman, “was more rigorous, but in a different sense. I suppose ours was a different kind of instrument. Our thighs, for instance - we’re old ladies, after all - our thighs are stronger than kids working today. Jane Dudley and I were reconstructing another great dance, Celebration. We called in 10 old timers, and at first no one remembered anything. Then we managed to piece some parts together. There we were - after all, we’re senior citizens - and we could jump and sustain it, and the kids would jump along with us, and they’d be panting as though they'd been running 100 miles. Ethel Butler came up from Washington and demonstrated some of the falls. The kids got it after a while, but they didn’t come up with the quality, the finish, the completeness of the movement that Ethel did.”
“When Martha comes to rehearsal,” says Maslow, “she talks a great deal.” She brought in pictures of the Grunewald altarpiece at Colmar, which shows the Crucifixion and also Christ descended from the cross with his mother and Mary Magdalene. It’s not idealized, it’s grisly - he’s completely human. In “Crucifixus,” Maslow tells me, “I remember looking up at Christ on the cross.”
This time, Graham says they’re looking up at the Star of Bethlehem. In 1964, when Graham returned from Israel, the metaphors took on a Jewish connotation. But “it really doesn’t matter what she says,” asserts Maslow. “When she says it, it improves the dance.”
Graham has also been tempted to “fix” things. Originally, there were 12 women besides the Virgin; now there are 13, and 14 in the “Crucifixus.” In ’64, Graham added white ruffles to the severe blue dresses of the chorus of what she may have thought as a softer generation. Maslow suggests that Graham became more appreciative of their femininity. “A lot of people objected to the ruffle,” she says. “I think it’s fine. It slightly augments the movement of the legs, and it helps the strength and earthiness that’s almost impossible to achieve."
“I came to Martha when I was 16,” recalls Mehlman. “Working with her was like being in the presence of a goddess.” Mehlman describes a hush falling on the group when Graham came to rehearsal during recent work on Celebration. “I was as nervous and frightened as when I first came to Martha,” she confesses. She goes on with a laugh and a shrug, “’You’re an old lady now,’ I said to myself. ‘You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’”
“There was a surge. People were practically shrieking,” says Lily Mehlman, describing the first performance of Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries, in 1931. “The kind of thing you don’t forget, ever.” And the movement? “Well, it sang.”
Primitive Mysteries, inspired by a visit to the Southwest, is a starkly formal, worshipful dance for 13 women - a central figure clad in an angelic white dress and a chorus in dark blue. It’s in three parts, “Hymn to the Virgin,” “Crucifixus,” and “Hosannah.” In 1964, the dance was revived as a memorial to the late composer and teacher, Louis Horst, who had been Graham’s longtime adviser and friend. “Everyone who’d ever been in it was called back,” said Sophie Maslow, who, though not one of the original cast, became responsible for that reconstruction and this season’s revival at the Lunt-Fontanne as well.
“Some of them came. There were no notes on the music, no cues, no tempo markings. But we got photos together...For some reason, “ she continues, “I remembered almost all of the dance. And Martha had once said that she wanted me to learn her part. She never taught it to me. I just watched. She never saw me do it, she never asked me to do it. But that stuck, too.”
Mehlman remembers the work’s genesis. “Martha had received her first Guggenheim. I guess she went to New Mexico...and there she saw Indian dances and ceremonies no one else could see. She came back and talked about it. We were big-eyed, open-mouthed, listening . It was a revelation. Martha’s feeling was so rich. I’d been in the group six, seven years; I can’t remember any time when Martha was creating a dance (she always worked right there with us, she never did things on paper) when I was more entranced. It was like being mesmerized. Listening...the way she climbed up those steps...someplace, a terrible name...I can’t begin to pronounce it....millions of steps, absolutely vertical. The way the Indian women walked up those steps - that, she told us, that was the quality she wanted in our backs when we did this dance. And in her talking she gave us that feeling.”
“Martha worked so hard all day on her own things, and then she’d sit, curled up in blankets on her chaise longue, and never demonstrated. She said, ‘I want you to walk with your bodies slightly forward (Mehlman’s sweetly precise voice becomes breathy, dramatically accented) and take one large step, and then bring the other leg up sharply.’ And that was the walk across the stage from Primitive Mysteries. It was the way she told it - the way she talked to us about any dance she choreographed. You were spellbound. You couldn’t help but do what she wanted.”
“I remember one part there were three of us waiting off in the corner. And then she suddenly said, ‘And you three little ones, fall flat on your face.’ Without thinking. Boom. Flat on the face. Without a break in the back, down you went. We were disciplined. Real Spartans. No thought. You just did it.”
In 1931, Maslow says, the technique was in a fairly early stage. Training was very different. Graham was not concerned with a well-rounded class every day; she was interested in developing the aspects of her own work that were different from other people’s. “The movement was very earthy, strong, simple, weighted. Technique was simply part of whatever was in the dances. The makeup of our bodies was different, too,” she says. Most dancers today are pretty much stripped of whatever they don’t need.”
Though they’ve been given some classes in the “old technique”, physically, Primitive Mysteries can be painful for today’s dancers - trained for lightness - to sustain. “I think we had stronger bodies,” Mehlman tells me. “Maybe we weren’t as beautiful as the kids today with their long legs.” “It was a strange company at that time,” says Mehlman. There was Ailes Gilmour. Ailes is Irish-Japanese, She had one of the most beautiful faces, but a square body, like a peasant’s. Then there was Louise Creston. She was Italian. She had a face that could have been Indian. It was big and she had tremendous eyes and flashing white teeth. Her complexion was somewhat sallow, and she had a square, stolid body. So you looked at these two, and they were American Indian women. No two ways about it. Of course, the rest of us weren’t anything like that. Oh, then there was Mary Rivoire - she looked like a Renoir; she had the coloring, the most beautiful face in the world, and a glorious dancer.”
“None of the people of this young generation are about to - I don’t think - capture that quality we had in those days. I don’t know what it was. The feeling of the group, from sitting position rolling onto their knees...it was almost childlike in its simplicity and purity. It had religious overtones, but you never felt it that way...There’s a jump in the air - you beat the ground and from there you come into a jump - it seems that the young crop have a hard time with it.” (Maslow says of this same jump, “I still don’t know why it’s difficult for them.”) And in “Crucifixus”, the heads are tilted up through the whole dance - there’s no relief.
“The whole technique,” continues Mehlman, “was more rigorous, but in a different sense. I suppose ours was a different kind of instrument. Our thighs, for instance - we’re old ladies, after all - our thighs are stronger than kids working today. Jane Dudley and I were reconstructing another great dance, Celebration. We called in 10 old timers, and at first no one remembered anything. Then we managed to piece some parts together. There we were - after all, we’re senior citizens - and we could jump and sustain it, and the kids would jump along with us, and they’d be panting as though they'd been running 100 miles. Ethel Butler came up from Washington and demonstrated some of the falls. The kids got it after a while, but they didn’t come up with the quality, the finish, the completeness of the movement that Ethel did.”
“When Martha comes to rehearsal,” says Maslow, “she talks a great deal.” She brought in pictures of the Grunewald altarpiece at Colmar, which shows the Crucifixion and also Christ descended from the cross with his mother and Mary Magdalene. It’s not idealized, it’s grisly - he’s completely human. In “Crucifixus,” Maslow tells me, “I remember looking up at Christ on the cross.”
This time, Graham says they’re looking up at the Star of Bethlehem. In 1964, when Graham returned from Israel, the metaphors took on a Jewish connotation. But “it really doesn’t matter what she says,” asserts Maslow. “When she says it, it improves the dance.”
Graham has also been tempted to “fix” things. Originally, there were 12 women besides the Virgin; now there are 13, and 14 in the “Crucifixus.” In ’64, Graham added white ruffles to the severe blue dresses of the chorus of what she may have thought as a softer generation. Maslow suggests that Graham became more appreciative of their femininity. “A lot of people objected to the ruffle,” she says. “I think it’s fine. It slightly augments the movement of the legs, and it helps the strength and earthiness that’s almost impossible to achieve."
“I came to Martha when I was 16,” recalls Mehlman. “Working with her was like being in the presence of a goddess.” Mehlman describes a hush falling on the group when Graham came to rehearsal during recent work on Celebration. “I was as nervous and frightened as when I first came to Martha,” she confesses. She goes on with a laugh and a shrug, “’You’re an old lady now,’ I said to myself. ‘You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’”
The Raggedys Run Ragged
April 25
You learn right away in Johnny Gruelle’s very first Raggedy Ann book, that Raggedy Ann is indestructible. She hangs on a line, gets tied to the tail of a kite. She’s tossed in the air, dropped off a bridge by a puppy, washed and put through a mangle, dropped in a bucket of paint. She and Raggedy Andy, separately, can be left in an old trunk for 50 years and still remain in good spirits. They can be battered, get new yarn hair, have their faces repainted, have an eye sewn back on, be restuffed and resewn. They’re totally replaceable, totally good-hearted and can not be hurt. What a fantasy!
Gruelle’s illustrations are wonderful, full of action and character, with the dolls never losing their doll quality, the sense that they might have been placed in position. You can read thoughts and feelings into their all-purpose grins. The other odd characters have a full rang of feelings. I remember being indelibly impressed - I don’t know why - by a picture of Snoopwiggly (a blue-green creature with four legs, a tubular head, a long red nose, red ringlets, and red buckle shoes) and he Wiggysnoop (a pot-bellied, beruffled and bewigged sort of George Washington, with knickers and gaiters and round green sunglasses) both howling to scare a hunter, their mouths open in big Os. And, in fact no matter how bad or bad-tempered a character may start out, he or she is always converted to good by the end of the book.
The new musical animated film, Raggedy Ann and Andy, which introduces a number of new characters, starts off as sweet and safe as can be. As soon as the real Marcella leaves her real playroom, the realistic set transforms into a cartoon and the dolls come alive. They’re a various and cooperative bunch - Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy (buried under a carton), a floppy beanbag doll, Maxi-Fixit (a free-wheeling four-armed doll complete with tool kit), Susie Pincushion (a Jewish lady quick with the scissors) a cornhusk Grandpa doll, a pair of black penny dolls (backups for a 50’s rock group). Up on a bookshelf in a plastic globe is the Captain (“marooned for 37 years in a plastic snowstorm”) and his parrot, Queasy. The Captain’s got stupendous mustachios, snakelike and useful as a monkey’s tail. When Marcella comes back, the dolls quickly fling themselves around the floor, the beanbag stops its dangling button nose from swinging. (Back to realism.) Marcella opens the carton and finds an elegant, morose French doll, Babette. (Back to cartoon.) The Captain is lovestruck, gets the dolls to help him out of the globe, and kidnaps Babette. His ship hops on its oars and out the window. Fearless Raggedy Ann is ready to go after them and leads her brother out the window into the woods. Andy, who’s been bragging in the playroom about his manliness, seems leery, but when Raggedy Ann gets nervous in the woods (like girls are supposed to, right?) Raggedy Andy shows what he’s made of. They sing a soupy song on the “Whistle a Happy Tune” principle, and meet the lonesome, dotty, shambling patched-together Camel with the Wrinkled Knees. With the Camel inspired by a vision of that great camel caravan in the sky, they zoom off on his back and plummet into a taffy pit, where lurks the Greedy. The Greedy’s a fabulous, moody monster. His shape constantly changes (his nose switches from maraschino cherry to pig snout); he bubbles up from any part of the taffy swamp. Actually, the Greedy seems to be the entire taffy pit. Candles and ice cream sundaes and cupcakes and what all bobble and he slurps it all in. The Greedy can never be satisfied. He thinks if he had a sweetheart he might be, but he doesn’t know what a sweetheart is. But when Raggedy Ann mentions that she’s just a rag doll with a little candy heart, you know she’s in big trouble.
But for all Gruelle’s emphasis on desserts as the source of nearly ultimate satisfaction (ultimate satisfaction is the joy of making others happy), he would never have created a character like the fascinating, amoebic, incorrigible Greedy. And from here, the movie moves into a more bitter, shriller sort of adventure. The Raggedys and the Camel find themselves in Loonieland, a dreadful place filled with freaky, semi-mechanical people-crittters who are cruel practical jokers, and a tiny, nasty king, obsessed with his size, who can only get bigger when he’s got something to laugh at. Loonieland is nerve-wrackingly noisy, disagreeable, relentless and frustrating. And when they finally escape and find the ship, the Captain’s in the brig and Babette, now a flashy tart with a bullwhip, has taken over and is headed for Paris. Though the end returns to sweetness and the playroom, the shift in temper in the second half of the film is discomfiting. It seems to be making a grab for an older,more cynical audience with the raucous Loonieland jokers, and the sprawling, octopoid Gazooks, a fiendish tickler, who are shallow and absolutely malicious. THis is a new world for the Raggedys and it doesn’t suit them. What good is their warmth and good nature here? There’s nothing to do with King Koo Koo - swollen up with laughter like a huge red planet - but do him in: he gets popped like a balloon by the parrot.
You learn right away in Johnny Gruelle’s very first Raggedy Ann book, that Raggedy Ann is indestructible. She hangs on a line, gets tied to the tail of a kite. She’s tossed in the air, dropped off a bridge by a puppy, washed and put through a mangle, dropped in a bucket of paint. She and Raggedy Andy, separately, can be left in an old trunk for 50 years and still remain in good spirits. They can be battered, get new yarn hair, have their faces repainted, have an eye sewn back on, be restuffed and resewn. They’re totally replaceable, totally good-hearted and can not be hurt. What a fantasy!
Gruelle’s illustrations are wonderful, full of action and character, with the dolls never losing their doll quality, the sense that they might have been placed in position. You can read thoughts and feelings into their all-purpose grins. The other odd characters have a full rang of feelings. I remember being indelibly impressed - I don’t know why - by a picture of Snoopwiggly (a blue-green creature with four legs, a tubular head, a long red nose, red ringlets, and red buckle shoes) and he Wiggysnoop (a pot-bellied, beruffled and bewigged sort of George Washington, with knickers and gaiters and round green sunglasses) both howling to scare a hunter, their mouths open in big Os. And, in fact no matter how bad or bad-tempered a character may start out, he or she is always converted to good by the end of the book.
The new musical animated film, Raggedy Ann and Andy, which introduces a number of new characters, starts off as sweet and safe as can be. As soon as the real Marcella leaves her real playroom, the realistic set transforms into a cartoon and the dolls come alive. They’re a various and cooperative bunch - Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy (buried under a carton), a floppy beanbag doll, Maxi-Fixit (a free-wheeling four-armed doll complete with tool kit), Susie Pincushion (a Jewish lady quick with the scissors) a cornhusk Grandpa doll, a pair of black penny dolls (backups for a 50’s rock group). Up on a bookshelf in a plastic globe is the Captain (“marooned for 37 years in a plastic snowstorm”) and his parrot, Queasy. The Captain’s got stupendous mustachios, snakelike and useful as a monkey’s tail. When Marcella comes back, the dolls quickly fling themselves around the floor, the beanbag stops its dangling button nose from swinging. (Back to realism.) Marcella opens the carton and finds an elegant, morose French doll, Babette. (Back to cartoon.) The Captain is lovestruck, gets the dolls to help him out of the globe, and kidnaps Babette. His ship hops on its oars and out the window. Fearless Raggedy Ann is ready to go after them and leads her brother out the window into the woods. Andy, who’s been bragging in the playroom about his manliness, seems leery, but when Raggedy Ann gets nervous in the woods (like girls are supposed to, right?) Raggedy Andy shows what he’s made of. They sing a soupy song on the “Whistle a Happy Tune” principle, and meet the lonesome, dotty, shambling patched-together Camel with the Wrinkled Knees. With the Camel inspired by a vision of that great camel caravan in the sky, they zoom off on his back and plummet into a taffy pit, where lurks the Greedy. The Greedy’s a fabulous, moody monster. His shape constantly changes (his nose switches from maraschino cherry to pig snout); he bubbles up from any part of the taffy swamp. Actually, the Greedy seems to be the entire taffy pit. Candles and ice cream sundaes and cupcakes and what all bobble and he slurps it all in. The Greedy can never be satisfied. He thinks if he had a sweetheart he might be, but he doesn’t know what a sweetheart is. But when Raggedy Ann mentions that she’s just a rag doll with a little candy heart, you know she’s in big trouble.
But for all Gruelle’s emphasis on desserts as the source of nearly ultimate satisfaction (ultimate satisfaction is the joy of making others happy), he would never have created a character like the fascinating, amoebic, incorrigible Greedy. And from here, the movie moves into a more bitter, shriller sort of adventure. The Raggedys and the Camel find themselves in Loonieland, a dreadful place filled with freaky, semi-mechanical people-crittters who are cruel practical jokers, and a tiny, nasty king, obsessed with his size, who can only get bigger when he’s got something to laugh at. Loonieland is nerve-wrackingly noisy, disagreeable, relentless and frustrating. And when they finally escape and find the ship, the Captain’s in the brig and Babette, now a flashy tart with a bullwhip, has taken over and is headed for Paris. Though the end returns to sweetness and the playroom, the shift in temper in the second half of the film is discomfiting. It seems to be making a grab for an older,more cynical audience with the raucous Loonieland jokers, and the sprawling, octopoid Gazooks, a fiendish tickler, who are shallow and absolutely malicious. THis is a new world for the Raggedys and it doesn’t suit them. What good is their warmth and good nature here? There’s nothing to do with King Koo Koo - swollen up with laughter like a huge red planet - but do him in: he gets popped like a balloon by the parrot.
Wingding for Bards
May 2
Burling MacAllester’s The Pump Parable incorporates a bardic symbology that’s generalized and sometimes hard to take seriously. Its didactic meanings are confusing, and even printed texts of songs tend to burden the piece rather than illuminate what happens. Nonetheless , the piece is immediate and uncomplicated in many of its nine sections, and frequently communicates beautifully, in a ritualistic way, with no need of a gloss or of any literal interpretation.
Many of the particular elements - like the dominance of the image of the circle of the isolation of spots of light in darkness or a flashing, language-related use of hands - echo and link as the piece rounds on itself. In the second section, a sort of opening to external influences, a chorus of five dancers spin in loose pants that fill with air. The spinning repeats throughout the piece - sometimes, apparently, as an image of integration, and other times of isolation - and is completed in the final section, where dancers spin on, holding flashlights beaming downward. In the dim and lovely opening, two white-clad dancers swing a round Japanese lantern containing firefly-like points of light to gentle, twittering sounds. Eventually, the lantern is lifted in a steady whirl - and is carried off.
Confusion enters the piece with the two oppositional figures: the Man from the Mountain (John Bernd) - who we first see meditative and quietly serious, hoisting or testing a pair of tubular weights on a string that passes under his foot - and the bestial Man from the Plain (Robert Marinaccio) - in purple cape and brown fur pants, who snarls and growls and wields a pair of birdwings on sticks. Each of these men has a weaker counterpart (McAllester and Marta Renzi) whose puppet-master he seems to be. But who or what thee four are to each other, how we’re meant to think of them, and what happens to them, if anything, is never clear. And occasional comic shifts in mood or style produce further confusion.
The Pump Parable’s strength is the many connected, mysterious images that we can respond to without asking any questions: A huge mask of a bison with flickering red eyes dances with a group of masked dancers who are hardly visible except for the eyes which light up simultaneously in their unseen masks. You feel the dancers more surely than you see them. They clump together, tramp together, occasionally jump as a group, powerful and strange, impersonal and motiveless, in the darkness.
Burling MacAllester’s The Pump Parable incorporates a bardic symbology that’s generalized and sometimes hard to take seriously. Its didactic meanings are confusing, and even printed texts of songs tend to burden the piece rather than illuminate what happens. Nonetheless , the piece is immediate and uncomplicated in many of its nine sections, and frequently communicates beautifully, in a ritualistic way, with no need of a gloss or of any literal interpretation.
Many of the particular elements - like the dominance of the image of the circle of the isolation of spots of light in darkness or a flashing, language-related use of hands - echo and link as the piece rounds on itself. In the second section, a sort of opening to external influences, a chorus of five dancers spin in loose pants that fill with air. The spinning repeats throughout the piece - sometimes, apparently, as an image of integration, and other times of isolation - and is completed in the final section, where dancers spin on, holding flashlights beaming downward. In the dim and lovely opening, two white-clad dancers swing a round Japanese lantern containing firefly-like points of light to gentle, twittering sounds. Eventually, the lantern is lifted in a steady whirl - and is carried off.
Confusion enters the piece with the two oppositional figures: the Man from the Mountain (John Bernd) - who we first see meditative and quietly serious, hoisting or testing a pair of tubular weights on a string that passes under his foot - and the bestial Man from the Plain (Robert Marinaccio) - in purple cape and brown fur pants, who snarls and growls and wields a pair of birdwings on sticks. Each of these men has a weaker counterpart (McAllester and Marta Renzi) whose puppet-master he seems to be. But who or what thee four are to each other, how we’re meant to think of them, and what happens to them, if anything, is never clear. And occasional comic shifts in mood or style produce further confusion.
The Pump Parable’s strength is the many connected, mysterious images that we can respond to without asking any questions: A huge mask of a bison with flickering red eyes dances with a group of masked dancers who are hardly visible except for the eyes which light up simultaneously in their unseen masks. You feel the dancers more surely than you see them. They clump together, tramp together, occasionally jump as a group, powerful and strange, impersonal and motiveless, in the darkness.
Alice Down the Hobbithole
June 20
In Fourth Wall’s Alice in Wonderland, which combines several elements of both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice saunters almost idly through encounters with characters in each of eight chessboard squares, It’s surprisingly placid - without conflict or urgency. But the sets (by Elliot Kreloff) and costumes (by Jackie Gordon, Sue Peters, Christie Washburn) are extraordinarily beautiful and elaborate. (The huge cast - 24 - in the small Provincetown Playhouse is pretty amazing, too.) A dreamily pastoral curtain frames the opening and closing scenes with Alice, her older sister, and the hopped-up White Rabbit. For “Wonderland”, center stage is occupied by a large (eight foot?) cube -a sort of magic box - which rotates for each square or scene. Sometimes it simply provides a new background; sometimes it flips open horizontally to become, for example, the wall Humpty Dumpty sits on. In square one, a side opens to reveal three snooty and hard-pruning lady flowers whose richly painted petals frame their faces. In square two a freckled blue caterpillar sits atop the cube, sipping on his hubble-bubble. Eight rather dopey, semi-automatic cards change scenes, set props, and clean up.
Much of this Alice is excessively nice and rather weak. During the first four squares nothing much happens - there isn’t much inner - or external - action. Alice is merely passed along from one flat character to another, She meets the Caterpillar, gets a bit of info from the Red Queen, is amused by the Cheshire Cat, and is slightly perplexed by the tea party. There’s no real zaniness. Alice is neither seriously thwarted nor even engaged. Even the behavior of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter isn’t enough to rile her.
But at the fifth square things liven up, simply because the characters become intriguing. Humpty Dumpty is a great, wry, stuffed egg with dancing doll feet, who several times seems sure to topple. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in square six, match the backdrop exactly - from their beanies and red bow ties down to their green knickers and red-and-white-striped socks. For their battle they struggle into quilts, don pot-holder gloves, grip baking-tin shields and soft plastic bats and throw themselves on the floor, bump behinds, flop onto their bellies and backs. “That was a good fight, Dum,” says Dee, very sensibly when it's over. “Now let’s have dinner.” In square seven, Alice meets the slightly disheveled, slightly helpless, bemused White Queen. Laurie Sammeth, in a wonderful characterization, reminded me so much of Jeanette MacDonald’s princess in The Love Parade. But her gown dangles the odd price tag; she suggests the most delicate of shopping-bag ladies.
If the all-too-literal and simplistic characters in the initial scenes can develop the subtlety and suggestiveness of those we encounter later on, Alice will be a fine show. For their year-end show, children at the Montessori Elementary School in Brooklyn did a version of parts of Tolkein’s The Hobbit. The audience - mostly parents and relatives - loved pot-bellied Bilbo having to lift open his round, green door again and again to admit the dwarfs (18 in all). Wearing, pointy-hooded caps (made by the children themselves, as were all the costumes ) with their names sewn on the backs, they arrived singly, then in pairs, then in bunches. Each time they tumbled in, picked themselves up, ad politely introduced themselves. After refreshments but before getting down to business, an adult narrator announced, “Now the dwarfs are going to sing a French song. Thorin will count to three.” They sang several songs in French and Spanish. Of course, with such young kids, it was all pretty informal. They felt free to ask and give advice; broke up when their partners took off in the wrong direction. I particularly liked the dwarfs’ procession through the dark forest (around the audience) with swinging flashlights; the dwarfs shoving Bilbo forward to investigate the dragon’s cave. The dragon was a wonderful three-boy beast made of cardboard boxes painted orange with spiky dorsal scales, flapping shield-like wings, and batting eyelids. It was too bad, I thought, when three bowmen - bowpersons, rather - in flannel shirts and tricorn hats bounced their paper arrows off the dragon’s impenetrable cardboard hide, found its weak spot, and did the creature in.
Successful Graft
July 18
I was able to see only the first of two programs the London Contemporary Dance Theatre gave in its American debut at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. The company, roughly 10 years old, arose out of the school grounded in Graham technique and established in London a year earlier (1966) with the help of Robert Cohan - former leading dancer of the Graham company - and under the aegis of Robin Howard. Cohan has built a distinctive company - not a copy of the Graham company - a strong and beautiful ensemble of superb dancers. And though initially the company performed mostly works by Americans (Graham, Sokolow, Taylor, Charlip, Wagoner, Cohan) now LDT takes into its repertory only dances by its own members or people connected with its school, such as Siobhan Davies, Richard Alston, Robert North and, of course, Cohan.
Davies’ surprising Diary 2 (1975) opened the program. A beautiful, plotless work, Diary 2 is perfectly abstract but establishes a continuing personal sense of relatedness throughout. The dancers, excepting Davies, work mostly in couples. There’s a Cunningham coolness to the initial duet for Linda Gibbs and Tom Jobe. The arms are lightly carried, but there’s a juiciness to the deep plies and the way the ams scoop the ground. A quartet follows, brisk and exact. But with Davies’ own solo a kind of caution evaporates and the piece springs into action: a keener time sense is awakened. Davies enters almost like a cautious animal, insinuating her pointing legs sideways, or forwards. Introspective, she circles her head with soft, curling hands, or presents a sudden Egyptian profile, her torso thrust forward on a slight diagonal. Spinning, she;s wary of setting a flexed foot upon the ground. A partner comes for her, holds her by the back of the neck; a second couple duplicates this at the rear of the stage. There follows a more gymnastic duet of astral leaps and swinging lifts for Cathy Lewis and Namron. Later, I recall some wonderfully sharp, slanty lifts for Gibbs. In a moment of particular beauty, Lewis, held upside down, her arms in a deep arc, suddenly lengthens them downward in a brief melt, totally altering the dynamic of what we’re watching, the quality of tension and control. In the same revelatory way, within a bold design, Davies’ choreography plays with delicacy and assurance with details of rhythm and phrasing. Speeds subtly ease up or quicken; movements brighten, nearly turn spiky, or soften and, for an instant, threaten to dissolve.
Cohan’s Cell (1969), the company’s first popular success, is a sort of No Exit doubled (for six people), taking place in a box of oddly angled walls and tilted floor (designed by Norberto Chiesa). Each of the dancers (in street clothes, mostly browns and grays), enters the space only to collapse as if the air were poison. When they recover they back up to the walls. Each becomes wrought to the same pitch. They grab hold of each other stiffly, push off or pull away in stylized contorted attitudes of stress. Whatever happens, each repels the other; they form a circle of mutual hate and contempt. Sometimes in pairs, they seem possessive, but when they cling together, it is to obliterate each other. At the end of the section, they back out one at a time. So they’re free to leave, eh?
So this is the place where they come to be ugly. In the second section, the dancers are in leotards and tights. The “cell” is lit blue. Shadows of what may be an enormous fence are cast on the walls. At one point I think of the women as “snaky claw ladies”, the men as Simon Legrees. There’s a collage of what may be not sounds in the music. Robert North tries to climb the back wall. He’s spotlit, fails, and spirals slowly down the ramped floor. The others pose as they snap photographs of his defeat; they freeze and he backs out of the space. In the final section, they’re wearing briefs and halters. The light is green. There’s an atmosphere of sexual excess anyway. Anthony van Laast drags a girl on. sliding backward, clasped between his knees. The couples knot together. Later, North’s left alone. Two other men are seen as shadows through the side walls; their arms are hooked over the crossbars as if they're crucified. Then, as a strobe flashes, North flings himself about as white boxes fly in over the back wall. He struggles to evade them, tries madly to build a wall between himself and us, fails, continues to thrash around frantically. Cell seemed endlessly long to me, the sort of work you’re supposed to take seriously because it’s so “serious” and disagreeable. But although parts of it are very demanding and very effective theatrically, it just clobbers you with a single misanthropic idea again and again and again. You know you’re in trouble when you see the word “doom” in the program. The final work on the program, Cohan’s Class (1975), is a crowd-pleasing, show-off dance, somewhere between (and better than) Martha Graham’s smug Adorations and the whorish first section of Bejart’s Golestan. It builds serially, through group and solo sections, to more and more throbbing and thumping percussion, to fancier, trickier leaps, like an old Hollywood quasi-Roman or quasi-oriental court entertainment minus the veils and bangles.
Still, this is an excellent and special company, and hopefully one of these days we’ll be able to see more of their repertory. Nice, too, to see the Graham technique/mystique - which became a dead end for so many dancers and choreographers here - helping to foster the development of an English modern dance.
I was able to see only the first of two programs the London Contemporary Dance Theatre gave in its American debut at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. The company, roughly 10 years old, arose out of the school grounded in Graham technique and established in London a year earlier (1966) with the help of Robert Cohan - former leading dancer of the Graham company - and under the aegis of Robin Howard. Cohan has built a distinctive company - not a copy of the Graham company - a strong and beautiful ensemble of superb dancers. And though initially the company performed mostly works by Americans (Graham, Sokolow, Taylor, Charlip, Wagoner, Cohan) now LDT takes into its repertory only dances by its own members or people connected with its school, such as Siobhan Davies, Richard Alston, Robert North and, of course, Cohan.
Davies’ surprising Diary 2 (1975) opened the program. A beautiful, plotless work, Diary 2 is perfectly abstract but establishes a continuing personal sense of relatedness throughout. The dancers, excepting Davies, work mostly in couples. There’s a Cunningham coolness to the initial duet for Linda Gibbs and Tom Jobe. The arms are lightly carried, but there’s a juiciness to the deep plies and the way the ams scoop the ground. A quartet follows, brisk and exact. But with Davies’ own solo a kind of caution evaporates and the piece springs into action: a keener time sense is awakened. Davies enters almost like a cautious animal, insinuating her pointing legs sideways, or forwards. Introspective, she circles her head with soft, curling hands, or presents a sudden Egyptian profile, her torso thrust forward on a slight diagonal. Spinning, she;s wary of setting a flexed foot upon the ground. A partner comes for her, holds her by the back of the neck; a second couple duplicates this at the rear of the stage. There follows a more gymnastic duet of astral leaps and swinging lifts for Cathy Lewis and Namron. Later, I recall some wonderfully sharp, slanty lifts for Gibbs. In a moment of particular beauty, Lewis, held upside down, her arms in a deep arc, suddenly lengthens them downward in a brief melt, totally altering the dynamic of what we’re watching, the quality of tension and control. In the same revelatory way, within a bold design, Davies’ choreography plays with delicacy and assurance with details of rhythm and phrasing. Speeds subtly ease up or quicken; movements brighten, nearly turn spiky, or soften and, for an instant, threaten to dissolve.
Cohan’s Cell (1969), the company’s first popular success, is a sort of No Exit doubled (for six people), taking place in a box of oddly angled walls and tilted floor (designed by Norberto Chiesa). Each of the dancers (in street clothes, mostly browns and grays), enters the space only to collapse as if the air were poison. When they recover they back up to the walls. Each becomes wrought to the same pitch. They grab hold of each other stiffly, push off or pull away in stylized contorted attitudes of stress. Whatever happens, each repels the other; they form a circle of mutual hate and contempt. Sometimes in pairs, they seem possessive, but when they cling together, it is to obliterate each other. At the end of the section, they back out one at a time. So they’re free to leave, eh?
So this is the place where they come to be ugly. In the second section, the dancers are in leotards and tights. The “cell” is lit blue. Shadows of what may be an enormous fence are cast on the walls. At one point I think of the women as “snaky claw ladies”, the men as Simon Legrees. There’s a collage of what may be not sounds in the music. Robert North tries to climb the back wall. He’s spotlit, fails, and spirals slowly down the ramped floor. The others pose as they snap photographs of his defeat; they freeze and he backs out of the space. In the final section, they’re wearing briefs and halters. The light is green. There’s an atmosphere of sexual excess anyway. Anthony van Laast drags a girl on. sliding backward, clasped between his knees. The couples knot together. Later, North’s left alone. Two other men are seen as shadows through the side walls; their arms are hooked over the crossbars as if they're crucified. Then, as a strobe flashes, North flings himself about as white boxes fly in over the back wall. He struggles to evade them, tries madly to build a wall between himself and us, fails, continues to thrash around frantically. Cell seemed endlessly long to me, the sort of work you’re supposed to take seriously because it’s so “serious” and disagreeable. But although parts of it are very demanding and very effective theatrically, it just clobbers you with a single misanthropic idea again and again and again. You know you’re in trouble when you see the word “doom” in the program. The final work on the program, Cohan’s Class (1975), is a crowd-pleasing, show-off dance, somewhere between (and better than) Martha Graham’s smug Adorations and the whorish first section of Bejart’s Golestan. It builds serially, through group and solo sections, to more and more throbbing and thumping percussion, to fancier, trickier leaps, like an old Hollywood quasi-Roman or quasi-oriental court entertainment minus the veils and bangles.
Still, this is an excellent and special company, and hopefully one of these days we’ll be able to see more of their repertory. Nice, too, to see the Graham technique/mystique - which became a dead end for so many dancers and choreographers here - helping to foster the development of an English modern dance.
A Night at the Fights
October 17
Clarice Marshall and Debra Wanner are pretty well matched in their joint work Draw shown at the Cunningham Studio. Marshall radiates a fierce but cool intensity; Wanner seems more self-absorbed. To lush piano music, the dance opens lyrically and abstractly. Marshall and Wanner take only occasional notice of each other, but they do many things that are similar. The tempo varies, sometimes sharply, while individually they arch, run, stare at the audience, spin, wind down quickly for a sudden direction change, slide across the floor, burst into what might be a moment of skipping games.
In the second section, they dance increasingly in unison, with more interweaving and intimacy, and end standing with hands clasped, facing in opposite directions. The lights are red at the start of the third section. Wanner and Marshall are fixing themselves up and deciding what to do. The pair begin an ambivalent journey that moves diagonally across the studio. They enter the space, retreat, then continue, as the piano meanders. Strings of little small steps alternate with heavy-footed tramping, sleek arabesques, skips and celebratory spins. As the music grows louder, more and more images become particular. Wanner shakes something from the leg of her jumpsuit. The ends of her hair are dripping so with sweat that I keep imagining she’s in the rain. She crawls; Marshall whirls, reverses direction, comes down to the floor, and for a moment they look like two primitive women bargaining together in a marker. They’re up again, moving in a more aggressive, driving rhythm. They handle each other more forcefully, bearing each other’s weight, pushing each other into changes of direction, provoking a kind of anger.
But I didn’t fully understand this anger, which developed into battle in the next section. It seemed manufactured, unnecessary. I saw two women enjoying their mutuality, enjoying the feeling of their own physical power pitted against “a worthy opponent.” Anger seemed a veneer, a shield for pleasure. They face each other from opposite ends of the studio, with towels draped around their necks. Mirroring each other, they go through the formalities - they pace, brush their hands through their hair, pluck the towels off and toss them aside. They grab hands, spin to the floor, then slowly pull each other up. One is lifted across the other’s torso, then heaved off. Marshall decks Wanner, then looks at her quizzically, paces and angry circle around her. They lean on each other - repeatedly return to some sort of dependence - swivel and grapple and spin. Marshall dives on Wanner, locking her body across her waist, gets thrown to the floor. Wanner helps her up. They hurl themselves over each other. But throughout, the force of their movements, or attacks, tends to be slightly held back: they teeter on an uncomfortable edge between controlling the design of their encounters, and flowing with the potential wildness of their energy and strength. As the title says, it turns out to be a “draw.” They don’t seem “reconciled,” but “satisfied”, and they relax, in the last section, into a lovely loping run together. From time to time, they slip together like social dance partners doing the Peabody.
Clarice Marshall and Debra Wanner are pretty well matched in their joint work Draw shown at the Cunningham Studio. Marshall radiates a fierce but cool intensity; Wanner seems more self-absorbed. To lush piano music, the dance opens lyrically and abstractly. Marshall and Wanner take only occasional notice of each other, but they do many things that are similar. The tempo varies, sometimes sharply, while individually they arch, run, stare at the audience, spin, wind down quickly for a sudden direction change, slide across the floor, burst into what might be a moment of skipping games.
In the second section, they dance increasingly in unison, with more interweaving and intimacy, and end standing with hands clasped, facing in opposite directions. The lights are red at the start of the third section. Wanner and Marshall are fixing themselves up and deciding what to do. The pair begin an ambivalent journey that moves diagonally across the studio. They enter the space, retreat, then continue, as the piano meanders. Strings of little small steps alternate with heavy-footed tramping, sleek arabesques, skips and celebratory spins. As the music grows louder, more and more images become particular. Wanner shakes something from the leg of her jumpsuit. The ends of her hair are dripping so with sweat that I keep imagining she’s in the rain. She crawls; Marshall whirls, reverses direction, comes down to the floor, and for a moment they look like two primitive women bargaining together in a marker. They’re up again, moving in a more aggressive, driving rhythm. They handle each other more forcefully, bearing each other’s weight, pushing each other into changes of direction, provoking a kind of anger.
But I didn’t fully understand this anger, which developed into battle in the next section. It seemed manufactured, unnecessary. I saw two women enjoying their mutuality, enjoying the feeling of their own physical power pitted against “a worthy opponent.” Anger seemed a veneer, a shield for pleasure. They face each other from opposite ends of the studio, with towels draped around their necks. Mirroring each other, they go through the formalities - they pace, brush their hands through their hair, pluck the towels off and toss them aside. They grab hands, spin to the floor, then slowly pull each other up. One is lifted across the other’s torso, then heaved off. Marshall decks Wanner, then looks at her quizzically, paces and angry circle around her. They lean on each other - repeatedly return to some sort of dependence - swivel and grapple and spin. Marshall dives on Wanner, locking her body across her waist, gets thrown to the floor. Wanner helps her up. They hurl themselves over each other. But throughout, the force of their movements, or attacks, tends to be slightly held back: they teeter on an uncomfortable edge between controlling the design of their encounters, and flowing with the potential wildness of their energy and strength. As the title says, it turns out to be a “draw.” They don’t seem “reconciled,” but “satisfied”, and they relax, in the last section, into a lovely loping run together. From time to time, they slip together like social dance partners doing the Peabody.
Bronx Zoo
October 10
“This isn’t the Bronx River, it’s the Irrawaddy,” says the driver as the monorail that takes you through the Bronx Zoo’s new 38-acre “Wild Asia” exhibit makes the first of two crossings of the river. This new zoographic exhibit area, mainly on the hilly, wooded east side of the Bronx River, is divided into eight separate habitats. The animals it contains are mostly endangered species that the zoo is already breeding or hoping to - like the Siberian tiger, the barasingha deer (there are fewer than 3500 in Southeast Asia) and the gaur. It’s starting to drizzle and some of the animals have ducked out of the wet. We see the large blue-gray saurus.crane of India, marked with deep red on its head and upper neck, stalking through a meadow. A small bunch of spotted axis deer cluster under a tree.
Jim Doherty, the zoo’s curator of mammals, who’s riding with me, says that there are about 45 deer in this exhibit. There doesn’t seem to be much cover, but as he notes, “We can see about five.” Formosan sika deer, no extinct in the wild, browse the grass. These are among the 200 descendants of deer that arrived at the zoo in 1940. We see the massive gaur, the largest of wild cattle, never domesticated, grazing under the trees in the exhibit called “Angkor Forest.” Of course, it doesn’t really look like a Cambodian forest - the vegetation is quite different. But the animals’ habitats here are as similar as possible to their natural ones, though very little has been changed on these hillsides. Only some cherry trees have been chopped down where grazing deer and antelope might eat the leaves, which are poisonous to them.
“Last year in India,” says Doherty with pleasure, “I saw a herd of gaur, looking just like this.” This is my first time through on the monorail, but earlier Doherty took me around to see the corrals and shelter building where the animals are kept at night. n the monorail, you sit sideways, facing in one direction, to look into the exhibit. You don’t see the cars on the Bronx River Parkway, the elevated trains, or the huge shelter. Originally, the zoo thought to set up this exhibit with the usual pedestrian access, but the expense of paths, bridges over the river, access roads, security police, and the problems of how best to enclose the animals, made the monorail an economical solution. It’s quiet - the animals don’t seem to pay it any attention - and the drivers are able to pass along information about the animals and about the zoo’s efforts in wildlife preservation, to stop the train when something’s up (like the tiger cubs playing), and to point out the animals when you can’t find them.
As Doherty says, “Deer and antelope can be 15 feet from the train and quite well hidden.” With the monorail designed to cross the river twice, there was some thought of having islands for arboreal gibbons, but no one could figure out an aesthetic and effective way of keeping the gibbons from drinking the polluted river water. Driving along a road running behind the monorail, Doherty points out a nilghai antelope: a rather big horsey looking female. “I believe there are more in Texas than in India,” he says, “imported by sportsmen.” The elephants are splashing around in their “monstrously big pool” when we get there. And loving it.
“It's the first thing they do every morning...for an hour or so.” The male (Groucho) is lying on his side. The three females (Patti, Maxine and Laverne) soon flop over, too. We watch them for a long time, till they get out and start heaving clouds of dirt over their backs. The male butts against one of the trees, but most of the trees have been protected against this by wire. In the huge “barn”, Doherty shows me the enormous empty stalls for the rhinos and the elephants, with doors that operate on remote control and a central floor grate that manure can be shoveled through, to be carried away on a conveyor. (The manure is taken to the New York Botanical Gardens nearby.) With these cage facilities the Bronx Zoo can now keep male Indian elephants, which, when full grown, go through a “musth” period at irregular intervals, during which they’re unpredictable and dangerous. Across a corridor, several tigers are in their indoor cages. One rubs her jaw against the bars and makes a heavy, breathy sound that Doherty tells me is the way they can take the air. Tigers aren’t social cats, and the tiger exhibit now holds only mother tiger and her two male cubs - getting rather large. Born during the inauguration ceremony, they were named Jimmy and Fritz. Sometimes, Doherty says, you’ll see them stalking gaur and brow-antlered antelope n the other side of the fence.
I want to know how they get the animals inside the corrals (I’m thinking of the tigers). “They’re all different,” Doherty says. “In the evening, the gaur are waiting at the gate. You just walk behind the barasingha and they’ll come right in. The tigers are trained to a whistle. You take a bucket of feed to the nilghai, and they’ll follow you.” In the plaza where you wait to board the monorail there’s a place for live-animal talks and performances, a lovely pool with water lilies and papyrus. I read an exhibition panel that says that 74,000 acres of Asian hardwood forest are cut every day, 27 million a year. In 25 years, at this rate, there’ll be no forest. Rhinos and elephants, for example, are being displaced (and decimated) by farming as well as by poaching.
“Wild Asia,” close to the Bronxdale Parking Field off the Bronx River Parkway, is open through October 16, then weekends through November 13 weather permitting. Fare for the monorail is $1 for adults, 50 cents for children. General zoo admission is free Tuesday to Thursday, 50 cents for children, $1.50 for adults from Friday to Monday.
“This isn’t the Bronx River, it’s the Irrawaddy,” says the driver as the monorail that takes you through the Bronx Zoo’s new 38-acre “Wild Asia” exhibit makes the first of two crossings of the river. This new zoographic exhibit area, mainly on the hilly, wooded east side of the Bronx River, is divided into eight separate habitats. The animals it contains are mostly endangered species that the zoo is already breeding or hoping to - like the Siberian tiger, the barasingha deer (there are fewer than 3500 in Southeast Asia) and the gaur. It’s starting to drizzle and some of the animals have ducked out of the wet. We see the large blue-gray saurus.crane of India, marked with deep red on its head and upper neck, stalking through a meadow. A small bunch of spotted axis deer cluster under a tree.
Jim Doherty, the zoo’s curator of mammals, who’s riding with me, says that there are about 45 deer in this exhibit. There doesn’t seem to be much cover, but as he notes, “We can see about five.” Formosan sika deer, no extinct in the wild, browse the grass. These are among the 200 descendants of deer that arrived at the zoo in 1940. We see the massive gaur, the largest of wild cattle, never domesticated, grazing under the trees in the exhibit called “Angkor Forest.” Of course, it doesn’t really look like a Cambodian forest - the vegetation is quite different. But the animals’ habitats here are as similar as possible to their natural ones, though very little has been changed on these hillsides. Only some cherry trees have been chopped down where grazing deer and antelope might eat the leaves, which are poisonous to them.
“Last year in India,” says Doherty with pleasure, “I saw a herd of gaur, looking just like this.” This is my first time through on the monorail, but earlier Doherty took me around to see the corrals and shelter building where the animals are kept at night. n the monorail, you sit sideways, facing in one direction, to look into the exhibit. You don’t see the cars on the Bronx River Parkway, the elevated trains, or the huge shelter. Originally, the zoo thought to set up this exhibit with the usual pedestrian access, but the expense of paths, bridges over the river, access roads, security police, and the problems of how best to enclose the animals, made the monorail an economical solution. It’s quiet - the animals don’t seem to pay it any attention - and the drivers are able to pass along information about the animals and about the zoo’s efforts in wildlife preservation, to stop the train when something’s up (like the tiger cubs playing), and to point out the animals when you can’t find them.
As Doherty says, “Deer and antelope can be 15 feet from the train and quite well hidden.” With the monorail designed to cross the river twice, there was some thought of having islands for arboreal gibbons, but no one could figure out an aesthetic and effective way of keeping the gibbons from drinking the polluted river water. Driving along a road running behind the monorail, Doherty points out a nilghai antelope: a rather big horsey looking female. “I believe there are more in Texas than in India,” he says, “imported by sportsmen.” The elephants are splashing around in their “monstrously big pool” when we get there. And loving it.
“It's the first thing they do every morning...for an hour or so.” The male (Groucho) is lying on his side. The three females (Patti, Maxine and Laverne) soon flop over, too. We watch them for a long time, till they get out and start heaving clouds of dirt over their backs. The male butts against one of the trees, but most of the trees have been protected against this by wire. In the huge “barn”, Doherty shows me the enormous empty stalls for the rhinos and the elephants, with doors that operate on remote control and a central floor grate that manure can be shoveled through, to be carried away on a conveyor. (The manure is taken to the New York Botanical Gardens nearby.) With these cage facilities the Bronx Zoo can now keep male Indian elephants, which, when full grown, go through a “musth” period at irregular intervals, during which they’re unpredictable and dangerous. Across a corridor, several tigers are in their indoor cages. One rubs her jaw against the bars and makes a heavy, breathy sound that Doherty tells me is the way they can take the air. Tigers aren’t social cats, and the tiger exhibit now holds only mother tiger and her two male cubs - getting rather large. Born during the inauguration ceremony, they were named Jimmy and Fritz. Sometimes, Doherty says, you’ll see them stalking gaur and brow-antlered antelope n the other side of the fence.
I want to know how they get the animals inside the corrals (I’m thinking of the tigers). “They’re all different,” Doherty says. “In the evening, the gaur are waiting at the gate. You just walk behind the barasingha and they’ll come right in. The tigers are trained to a whistle. You take a bucket of feed to the nilghai, and they’ll follow you.” In the plaza where you wait to board the monorail there’s a place for live-animal talks and performances, a lovely pool with water lilies and papyrus. I read an exhibition panel that says that 74,000 acres of Asian hardwood forest are cut every day, 27 million a year. In 25 years, at this rate, there’ll be no forest. Rhinos and elephants, for example, are being displaced (and decimated) by farming as well as by poaching.
“Wild Asia,” close to the Bronxdale Parking Field off the Bronx River Parkway, is open through October 16, then weekends through November 13 weather permitting. Fare for the monorail is $1 for adults, 50 cents for children. General zoo admission is free Tuesday to Thursday, 50 cents for children, $1.50 for adults from Friday to Monday.
Ennosuke Meets the Press
September 12
Ichikawa Ennosuke III and I look at each other with what I imagine to be the same kind of discomfort. Ennosuke sits well forward in the armchair of his hotel suite, one hand on his knee, waiting. He speaks no English: I know about eight words of Japanese. Kazuko Hillyer, who’s producing the kabuki here, is acting as his translator, but she’s on the phone. I plunk myself down on the couch in direct line with the air conditioner. Tokyo, I think, has the same lousy summer weather. Ennosuke is quiet, almost immobile. He and Hillyer have been here all day; they’ve done nine interviews and they’re starving. “Where can I get the best steak around here?” Hillyer is asking. But she’s obviously getting wishy-washy answers from the hotel staff. “Pork chop? she says. “That’s not a steak.”
In Japan, Ennosuke is a top star, doing every kind of role - ogres, samurai, princesses, hags...Born in 1939, he made his formal debut at age eight. In what spirit, I wonder, do young actors now submit themselves to a traditional training regimen? Aren’t they impatient? Restless? He explains. Hilllyer chops his answer into a couple of words. “Many people want to become big stars.” Of course. But what if they find themselves stuck at a low rank, doing minor roles time after time? Do they leave? “Nobody quits!” blurts Hillyer. “They do other things too, like television.”
The pieces the kabuki will be performing here are both jidai-mono, historical, or period pieces. Kurozuko, in a 1939 version (and based on an earlier Noh drama), was a favorite of Ennosuke’s grandfather, Ennosuke II. In it, a cannibal demon appears disguised as a harmless old woman. In the “Kawazura Hogen Mansion Scene”, from the fourth act of Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura, Ennosuke appears as a fox who has taken the form of the warrior Tadanobu. Both involve startling and spectacular transformation, action and acrobatics.
“These plays,” Hillyer translates, “are the most liked by the Japanese public unfamiliar with Kabuki.” Ennosuke goes into a long explanation. His hands move in blunt, flattened gestures as if he were demonstrating the location of certain objects in relation to others. His eyes move quickly, inquisitively. I think I recognize a single word, “popular.” These roles are favorites of Ennosuke’s as well. The fox scene is “a beautiful drama, a dream. He loves that role.” And in the dual role of the old woman/demon, “there are deep emotional things to show, not just anger. You have to understand the psychology of style. The symbolism of Kabuki is extreme - the old woman is not a monster, not a real demon. It’s a way of expressing the elements in the human character, the evil inside you...”
For over a century, there has been an actor named Ennosuke in kabuki. Such continuity is rare, despite the existence of some family lines going back to the mid-17th century. But Ennosuke doesn’t want to pass his name on to anyone else during his own lifetime (as his grandfather gave his name to this Ennosuke in 1963.) How does he characterize the particular style that does with the name, his own special gifts? Hillyer says something about frontier spirit, always searching for something new - then hits the word she wants. “Passionate!”
Ichikawa Ennosuke III and I look at each other with what I imagine to be the same kind of discomfort. Ennosuke sits well forward in the armchair of his hotel suite, one hand on his knee, waiting. He speaks no English: I know about eight words of Japanese. Kazuko Hillyer, who’s producing the kabuki here, is acting as his translator, but she’s on the phone. I plunk myself down on the couch in direct line with the air conditioner. Tokyo, I think, has the same lousy summer weather. Ennosuke is quiet, almost immobile. He and Hillyer have been here all day; they’ve done nine interviews and they’re starving. “Where can I get the best steak around here?” Hillyer is asking. But she’s obviously getting wishy-washy answers from the hotel staff. “Pork chop? she says. “That’s not a steak.”
In Japan, Ennosuke is a top star, doing every kind of role - ogres, samurai, princesses, hags...Born in 1939, he made his formal debut at age eight. In what spirit, I wonder, do young actors now submit themselves to a traditional training regimen? Aren’t they impatient? Restless? He explains. Hilllyer chops his answer into a couple of words. “Many people want to become big stars.” Of course. But what if they find themselves stuck at a low rank, doing minor roles time after time? Do they leave? “Nobody quits!” blurts Hillyer. “They do other things too, like television.”
The pieces the kabuki will be performing here are both jidai-mono, historical, or period pieces. Kurozuko, in a 1939 version (and based on an earlier Noh drama), was a favorite of Ennosuke’s grandfather, Ennosuke II. In it, a cannibal demon appears disguised as a harmless old woman. In the “Kawazura Hogen Mansion Scene”, from the fourth act of Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura, Ennosuke appears as a fox who has taken the form of the warrior Tadanobu. Both involve startling and spectacular transformation, action and acrobatics.
“These plays,” Hillyer translates, “are the most liked by the Japanese public unfamiliar with Kabuki.” Ennosuke goes into a long explanation. His hands move in blunt, flattened gestures as if he were demonstrating the location of certain objects in relation to others. His eyes move quickly, inquisitively. I think I recognize a single word, “popular.” These roles are favorites of Ennosuke’s as well. The fox scene is “a beautiful drama, a dream. He loves that role.” And in the dual role of the old woman/demon, “there are deep emotional things to show, not just anger. You have to understand the psychology of style. The symbolism of Kabuki is extreme - the old woman is not a monster, not a real demon. It’s a way of expressing the elements in the human character, the evil inside you...”
For over a century, there has been an actor named Ennosuke in kabuki. Such continuity is rare, despite the existence of some family lines going back to the mid-17th century. But Ennosuke doesn’t want to pass his name on to anyone else during his own lifetime (as his grandfather gave his name to this Ennosuke in 1963.) How does he characterize the particular style that does with the name, his own special gifts? Hillyer says something about frontier spirit, always searching for something new - then hits the word she wants. “Passionate!”
Solos of the Outdoors, Indoors
October 24
Watching Liz Pasquale in her solo Black Horse (one of the events of the SoHo Loft Dance Festival), I find myself thinking at first of the nomad horsemen of the Asian steppes. Don’t know why. There’s nothing savage or wild about what she’s doing. She stands under a cold, pale blue light. Tassels of what might be horsehair are tied to the sleeves and hang from the breast of her muslin shirt. In the corner of the loft lean a group of “spears,” long, tasseled poles. Pasquale paws the ground, jumps solidly, she establishes an unhurried, regular rhythm, a feeling of reliability, as Michael Galasso weaves rich,loops of sound with his violin. The few horse-derived movements Pasquale has chosen - like the pawing, or a repeated sort of quiet, linear gallop - don’t for a moment suggest that she’s imitating a horse, but establish an almost timeless but earthen space/place. The mood is pastoral and evocative. The quality of her presence is right: neither wrought up nor blank, but concentrated and full. Her arms sweep calmly through the air and her activities become more literal. She looks upward, turning her hands before her face as if looking at sunlight through them. She kneels and scoops imagined water, bathes he arms and face. She musses and twists her dark hair. With her arms wide, she turns gently and briefly one way and then another. In all this there’s a strong sense of truth, an inner “story” of some kind no matter how nondramatic and unpresentational.
A second, more complex solo, Cat’s Eye, moves directly into the country with a film by Andy Gurian of woods moving quickly past. Pasquale runs irregularly with the film flickering over her, carrying a tail of hair aloft like a pennant. In the film she gets out of a truck, runs in another direction; then she’s moving flatly along a barnside, balancing on the foundation stones that just slightly jut. Galasso’s accompaniment is richly repetitive and lilting. Pasquale moves away from the screening wall into the room and her image is abruptly triple: she carries one of the “spears” horizontally and casts a sharp silhouette on the film where she holds a similar pole which we have just seen her scrape of its bark. On film, she takes off her clothes, laves herself in a pond (like she did in Black Horse). In the loft, she holds the spear like a fishing pole, sweeps it over the floor. Galasso’s music has become as familiar as peepers or crickets or any persistent, natural sound. In the dark, Pasquale lashes around with a rope. As the film runs out and lights come up, she ties three of the spears together, close to the narrower end. I can see distinctly now how beautiful they are. Each smooth, blanched pole dangles and exquisite dark tassel of horsehair and feathers like an Ad Reinhardt bird of paradise. She erects the poles as a tripod; finally, I stop seeing them as spears but as lodge poles for a teepee. Centered underneath, Pasquale makes gestures of reverence. She takes the last poles, swivels with them, eye on the flying tassels. She becomes more self-consciously girlish, hops, skips, jumps in a loose, floppy way. Then she fits the new poles, one at a time, in the V’s of the tripod, and runs around the structure, winding the rope neatly around the joint. Done, she enters within it, stretches her arms up through the poles in a prayerful attitude, and sits.
The earlier part of Cat’s Eye seemed somewhat splintered to me. Filmic and live elements often draw attention from and interfere with each other when meant to complement and amplify. And since film tends to dominate so powerfully, I wonder why those images should be so important. But I liked the idea of the personal context evidenced by the film. I loved seeing Pasquale scrape those poles herself. And her choreographed assembly of the sculpture was deeply satisfying.
Watching Liz Pasquale in her solo Black Horse (one of the events of the SoHo Loft Dance Festival), I find myself thinking at first of the nomad horsemen of the Asian steppes. Don’t know why. There’s nothing savage or wild about what she’s doing. She stands under a cold, pale blue light. Tassels of what might be horsehair are tied to the sleeves and hang from the breast of her muslin shirt. In the corner of the loft lean a group of “spears,” long, tasseled poles. Pasquale paws the ground, jumps solidly, she establishes an unhurried, regular rhythm, a feeling of reliability, as Michael Galasso weaves rich,loops of sound with his violin. The few horse-derived movements Pasquale has chosen - like the pawing, or a repeated sort of quiet, linear gallop - don’t for a moment suggest that she’s imitating a horse, but establish an almost timeless but earthen space/place. The mood is pastoral and evocative. The quality of her presence is right: neither wrought up nor blank, but concentrated and full. Her arms sweep calmly through the air and her activities become more literal. She looks upward, turning her hands before her face as if looking at sunlight through them. She kneels and scoops imagined water, bathes he arms and face. She musses and twists her dark hair. With her arms wide, she turns gently and briefly one way and then another. In all this there’s a strong sense of truth, an inner “story” of some kind no matter how nondramatic and unpresentational.
A second, more complex solo, Cat’s Eye, moves directly into the country with a film by Andy Gurian of woods moving quickly past. Pasquale runs irregularly with the film flickering over her, carrying a tail of hair aloft like a pennant. In the film she gets out of a truck, runs in another direction; then she’s moving flatly along a barnside, balancing on the foundation stones that just slightly jut. Galasso’s accompaniment is richly repetitive and lilting. Pasquale moves away from the screening wall into the room and her image is abruptly triple: she carries one of the “spears” horizontally and casts a sharp silhouette on the film where she holds a similar pole which we have just seen her scrape of its bark. On film, she takes off her clothes, laves herself in a pond (like she did in Black Horse). In the loft, she holds the spear like a fishing pole, sweeps it over the floor. Galasso’s music has become as familiar as peepers or crickets or any persistent, natural sound. In the dark, Pasquale lashes around with a rope. As the film runs out and lights come up, she ties three of the spears together, close to the narrower end. I can see distinctly now how beautiful they are. Each smooth, blanched pole dangles and exquisite dark tassel of horsehair and feathers like an Ad Reinhardt bird of paradise. She erects the poles as a tripod; finally, I stop seeing them as spears but as lodge poles for a teepee. Centered underneath, Pasquale makes gestures of reverence. She takes the last poles, swivels with them, eye on the flying tassels. She becomes more self-consciously girlish, hops, skips, jumps in a loose, floppy way. Then she fits the new poles, one at a time, in the V’s of the tripod, and runs around the structure, winding the rope neatly around the joint. Done, she enters within it, stretches her arms up through the poles in a prayerful attitude, and sits.
The earlier part of Cat’s Eye seemed somewhat splintered to me. Filmic and live elements often draw attention from and interfere with each other when meant to complement and amplify. And since film tends to dominate so powerfully, I wonder why those images should be so important. But I liked the idea of the personal context evidenced by the film. I loved seeing Pasquale scrape those poles herself. And her choreographed assembly of the sculpture was deeply satisfying.
These Dancers Won’t Move
August 15
The only tenant listed on the lobby register of 644 Broadway (at the corner of Bleecker Street) is the Viola Farber Dance Company o the eighth floor. Every other floor is now empty, except the seventh, where the building's current owners have set up an office. A typed notice affixed to the lobby doors indicates that Martin R. Fine, Esq., the Broadway Bleecker Restoration Company, Southshine Realty, Glorious 84 Realty, Lustrous 81 Realty and a host of other companies can be found there. According to Cheryl Wall, the Farber company’s administrative director, since Broadway Bleecker Restoration took over the building last November, the dance company has been harassed to vacate the premises. The leases for most of the other tenants in the commercial building were up in early 1977; none was renewed.
The only tenant listed on the lobby register of 644 Broadway (at the corner of Bleecker Street) is the Viola Farber Dance Company o the eighth floor. Every other floor is now empty, except the seventh, where the building's current owners have set up an office. A typed notice affixed to the lobby doors indicates that Martin R. Fine, Esq., the Broadway Bleecker Restoration Company, Southshine Realty, Glorious 84 Realty, Lustrous 81 Realty and a host of other companies can be found there. According to Cheryl Wall, the Farber company’s administrative director, since Broadway Bleecker Restoration took over the building last November, the dance company has been harassed to vacate the premises. The leases for most of the other tenants in the commercial building were up in early 1977; none was renewed.