1979 continued
A Bent-Nail Puzzle
June 4
Susan Rethorst’s brief but thoughtful evening of dancing, Long Sleepless Afternoons, didn’t seem to be a single piece, but a continuity of material she’s been working on. At first, she was involved with letting herself be pulled off balance by one part of the body and coming back to rest. Letting her whole body tilt, she staggers, catches, then rights herself walking in a small circle and holding her arms in a soft, chest-high port de bras. She reaches one arm, and then the opposite leg, far forward: at the limit of her each, her buttocks, jutting out, pull her backward. She sticks her bosom out and lets it pull her into a run. As she runs, she flexes her chest vigorously back and forth, and finally settles into a sitting position. Then, maybe, she slips into a squat and falls over.
One thing that seems to interest Rethorst is the effect of using parts of the body piecemeal, then allowing one movement to flood the whole. The early phrases she does are short; subsequent ones rather longer. Some seem to grow by a few gestural increments. But most of them tend to evolve into relatively long, calm preparations that unexpectedly, but quite naturally, climax in a dynamic surge. Like once, when she bursts into a leaping arc, her chest flung high. (Almost simultaneously, I replay in my mind’s eye her earlier chest-flexing runs.) Most of her movements are modest and contained and these create the atmosphere of the evening. She builds a quiet code of arm and hand movements, making smooth, flat-palmed signals or suggesting some plain, sculptural shapes. Occasionally, she goes off into a sporadic series of sputtering doll walks, with heads and hands shaking.
The center of the evening was a relatively long, stringently conceived section in which Rethorst moves along the diagonal of the space close to the ground, never higher than her knees. She slowly proceeds in one direction - kneeling, sitting, twisting her knees, rolling sideways, crossing her legs, swiveling - rearranging the positions of her body, sometimes at what seem to be near-impossible, or at least strange, angles. She’ll fall on her elbow, splat out the forearm. shift her hand, drop her shoulder to the floor. The moves are separate, and flow with a kind of inevitability. No position can be seen as a peak; each is just one step. But I’m fascinated to watch, for example, the many ways she uses her hands for support - flat, bent under, limp, in fists...The whole process takes her forward, and back, and forward again, and the positions, although vaguely suggesting people who’ve been in violent accidents or badly crippled, have no pitiful or grotesque quality. They seem neutral, intriguing elements in a careful ritual. Or translations of a whole boxful of bent-nail puzzles. Afterward, Rethorst is lying curled and shuffles away like some cocooned creature, thumping along the floor like a frightened, but vertebrate, worm.
In an intellectual atmosphere engendered by her measured pace and so many short phrases, temporary conclusions, and new starts, what I liked most about Rethorst was the unpredictability of her movement and timing, the kinetic logic she finds for sequences of movements that might be quite arbitrary and don’t lead any particular place. The way she can suddenly give way, or make some big, apparently premeditated move. I think of one of her surprises in particular: she lies flat, stretches one arm to the side, but holds the forearm erect. She does the same with the other arm. Then, she twists and lifts her whole body aside and flips over in a most voluptuous curve.
At Washington Square Church (May 4 and 5).
Susan Rethorst’s brief but thoughtful evening of dancing, Long Sleepless Afternoons, didn’t seem to be a single piece, but a continuity of material she’s been working on. At first, she was involved with letting herself be pulled off balance by one part of the body and coming back to rest. Letting her whole body tilt, she staggers, catches, then rights herself walking in a small circle and holding her arms in a soft, chest-high port de bras. She reaches one arm, and then the opposite leg, far forward: at the limit of her each, her buttocks, jutting out, pull her backward. She sticks her bosom out and lets it pull her into a run. As she runs, she flexes her chest vigorously back and forth, and finally settles into a sitting position. Then, maybe, she slips into a squat and falls over.
One thing that seems to interest Rethorst is the effect of using parts of the body piecemeal, then allowing one movement to flood the whole. The early phrases she does are short; subsequent ones rather longer. Some seem to grow by a few gestural increments. But most of them tend to evolve into relatively long, calm preparations that unexpectedly, but quite naturally, climax in a dynamic surge. Like once, when she bursts into a leaping arc, her chest flung high. (Almost simultaneously, I replay in my mind’s eye her earlier chest-flexing runs.) Most of her movements are modest and contained and these create the atmosphere of the evening. She builds a quiet code of arm and hand movements, making smooth, flat-palmed signals or suggesting some plain, sculptural shapes. Occasionally, she goes off into a sporadic series of sputtering doll walks, with heads and hands shaking.
The center of the evening was a relatively long, stringently conceived section in which Rethorst moves along the diagonal of the space close to the ground, never higher than her knees. She slowly proceeds in one direction - kneeling, sitting, twisting her knees, rolling sideways, crossing her legs, swiveling - rearranging the positions of her body, sometimes at what seem to be near-impossible, or at least strange, angles. She’ll fall on her elbow, splat out the forearm. shift her hand, drop her shoulder to the floor. The moves are separate, and flow with a kind of inevitability. No position can be seen as a peak; each is just one step. But I’m fascinated to watch, for example, the many ways she uses her hands for support - flat, bent under, limp, in fists...The whole process takes her forward, and back, and forward again, and the positions, although vaguely suggesting people who’ve been in violent accidents or badly crippled, have no pitiful or grotesque quality. They seem neutral, intriguing elements in a careful ritual. Or translations of a whole boxful of bent-nail puzzles. Afterward, Rethorst is lying curled and shuffles away like some cocooned creature, thumping along the floor like a frightened, but vertebrate, worm.
In an intellectual atmosphere engendered by her measured pace and so many short phrases, temporary conclusions, and new starts, what I liked most about Rethorst was the unpredictability of her movement and timing, the kinetic logic she finds for sequences of movements that might be quite arbitrary and don’t lead any particular place. The way she can suddenly give way, or make some big, apparently premeditated move. I think of one of her surprises in particular: she lies flat, stretches one arm to the side, but holds the forearm erect. She does the same with the other arm. Then, she twists and lifts her whole body aside and flips over in a most voluptuous curve.
At Washington Square Church (May 4 and 5).
A Conversation with
July 9
A fair, slender man in corduroy jeans and an open shirt with no collar sits on a gold sofa.
Jiri Kylian, 32, is the artistic director of the Netherlands Dance Theatre which opens a two-week engagement at City Center July 9. He’s fresh from a both, I think, possibly from a nap as well, having arrived from Holland the previous day. Seated on the small sofa in the apartment of the company’s American producer, the Czech-born choreographer seems relaxed. Once settled against the back, he seems almost weightless. He doesn’t fidget; he hardly needs to move. He speaks unhurriedly in a mellow, smoky voice. Occasionally his hands come into play when he wants to make a point; otherwise, they rest in his lap.
Kylian was a member of the Stuttgart Ballet when he did his “first little thing” at John Cranko’s suggestion - “a duet for my girlfriend and myself, to my own music, with my own costumes, and very very much homemade.” Its success prompted Cranko to ask him to do a piece for the company and that opened doors to Kylian as a choreographer. In 1973, the directors of the Netherlands Dance Theatre asked him to come and do a ballet for them. He was invited back, and eventually was asked (in 1975) to become artistic co-director. He was named sole artistic director a year and a half ago. The Dutch clearly have faith in him. Their upcoming programs feature nine works: eight by Kylian. The 20-year-old Netherlands Dance Theatre was last here in 1972, but the company is much changed. “Not that I wanted it so,” says Kylian. “But, being what I am, going my way, it happened. The image of the company, which was very avant-garde, has gone.
I don’t see myself, and I don’t particularly want to see myself, as an avant-garde choreographer. I do what I have to do and it doesn’t matter to me if it’s up-to-date or old-fashioned. Our technique is more classical than before but using classical technique doesn’t prevent you from being contemporary or having something to say."
“You know,” he continues, “this being modern or not being modern, avant-garde or not avant-garde. I think it’s so bo-oring.” He drawls the vowel and slithers down a pitch. “What I find really interesting are the normal things, very normal movement, and normal feelings - absolutely very basic things. It’s interesting to put them together in such a way that they create - you konw? - a special atmosphere. Like Surrealism. The ordinary things in the paintings of Magritte or Dali or Delvaux or whoever are he basic things you see around. But their presence together is strange and makes you wonder. The end product of your feelings has not very much anymore to do with the things that have evoked them.”
Kylian lets me feel that we could sit here talking all year. He’s a thorough charmer, ad doesn’t appear to make any effort. His attentive and receptive air, his soothing, thoughtful voice speaking excellent but some time rearranged English, do it all. “So,” I ask, “what kind of dances have you been making, “expecting the sort of dead pause that comes when you ask someone to lump their entire working life into a couple of sentences. But Kylian doesn’t seem to mind, doesn’t think it’s such a dumb question, and sinks into it seriously.
“I think,” he says, “human feelings are the only common denominator. I really try for each piece to b as different from the others as possible. I’m trying to explore the extremities of my ability. Then, much later, I will put it all together and sort it out and see what I really want to do.” “I have no experience, you know. The experience of making...however many ballets I’ve made, maybe two dozen - that’s nothing! It’s absolutely nothing,” he say, and laughs. “Without being conceited, I really find it interesting to go outside myself and look inside. I try to spread my ways of choreographing to many different sides, and from these points I look toward the center to see what’s inside here.” He touches his chest. “I spend a lot of time thinking about my own feelings rather than going out and seeing different people’s works. I do something, and a year later I discover why I did it. It’s very curious. Do I make sense?”
Yes, he makes sense. You can do things because you have a clear vision. Or you can have a question or an inkling that begins to carry you in a certain direction. You may not even have the question - maybe you only arrive at the question through doing the work. “When I start, I have a basic idea which can be very vague. I may wind up with something completely different. It happened to me with Stoolgame. It kept changing from day to day and the final version was almost unrelated to the original idea. I wanted to do a piece on the Last Supper. And I ordered a table and a few chairs. There were too many people so I started he piece with a game of musical chairs. Then I realized that it’s a very big social problem. The possession of the stool could be a symbol of the Establishment. So, suddenly, when this man wound up without a chair, he had to either become something extraordinary or go under. And then it developed into another part of the Jesus story One figure is similar to Judith; another resembles Mary. Then the man is killed with the stools, and at the end the others recognize him as somebody who tries to bring a new idea. And all of these ideas, they were coming one after another. "
“But I don’t usually work that way. I really wanted to say that as I work the ideas change, and it all develops in connection with the dancers. Everybody has a personality and everybody has something to say. There must be give and take...I must get to know myself through working with them, and they must get to know themselves through working with me. There has to be this omelet. And if there’s not, then it’s boring. And it doesn’t work. And using them as human beings, not as machines, that is essential. To use human beings as machines - never ever.” Nut by nut, I’m decimating a small dish of Indian nuts on the coffee table between us. Cracking the shells with my teeth, popping the sweet meat into my mouth, I lose about every third kernel to the carpet. “You break your teeth,” says Kylian, trying one.
“I’m looking for a fresh source of inspiration at the moment, and I think I’ve found it. Right after the season in New York, I’ll go with a few people and a cameraman to the Northern Territory of Australia - Arnhem Land, the Gulf of Carpentaria, Groote Eylandt - to study with the aboriginal inhabitants They’re maybe the last people on this earth who take dance as something that is of vital importance to them. They live and die with dance. “You know, they don’t ca-are for civilization.” He stretches out the word in sleepy, ironic disdain. “They really don’t care. They base their whole culture on things that pass by, that you cannot keep. Dancing is number one, and storytelling. They don’t even build houses. I cannot understand the culture. I will never be able to understand it. But I want to know more about it and I want to learn."
“It’s not only dance steps I want to see, but the choreography - how it all fits together. For instance, I’ve seen one dance where there’s the hunter and the animal. They are always moving on the perimeter, at opposite ends of the diameter of a circle. And they’re constantly changing roles. You never know who will be the hunter and who the hunted one. And they do jumps, kind of kangaroo jumps. The way they come off the ground! A normal dancer, you know, has to bounce, go into the floor and out of the floor. But they go very slowly toward the ground and they sit there for a while. And then they go up in the air like a jac-in-the-box. You know, without...” He sets his body in a position of preparation, locking his muscles. I see. They don’t do it muscularly. They just think up.
Kylian has just come from the Dutch premiere of his newest work, Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, five days before. A huge piece, he says, 45 or 50 minutes, with a large orchestra, choir, soloists, organ. “I think it’s good,” he adds. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to think about it.” I’ve seen fragments of the work on film, excerpts fated to be part of a TV ad. Bold, fast, exuberant movement Long, modern-dance skirts on the women. Patterns like waves. Men and women coming in from either side of the stage and meeting in a surge in the center. Four people taking steps in a smooth, unbreaking sequence as if a wave were passing through them, as satisfying and seemingly inevitable as a slinky marching down stairs. Running lifts and leaps en masse, but with a sense of solidarity and groundedness. There was a party after the premiere, Kylian tells me. “and people told me they loved it, or they liked this part, and they didn’t like that...” He tuned out on their talk. “I realized...what I think is the only thing that matters.”
A fair, slender man in corduroy jeans and an open shirt with no collar sits on a gold sofa.
Jiri Kylian, 32, is the artistic director of the Netherlands Dance Theatre which opens a two-week engagement at City Center July 9. He’s fresh from a both, I think, possibly from a nap as well, having arrived from Holland the previous day. Seated on the small sofa in the apartment of the company’s American producer, the Czech-born choreographer seems relaxed. Once settled against the back, he seems almost weightless. He doesn’t fidget; he hardly needs to move. He speaks unhurriedly in a mellow, smoky voice. Occasionally his hands come into play when he wants to make a point; otherwise, they rest in his lap.
Kylian was a member of the Stuttgart Ballet when he did his “first little thing” at John Cranko’s suggestion - “a duet for my girlfriend and myself, to my own music, with my own costumes, and very very much homemade.” Its success prompted Cranko to ask him to do a piece for the company and that opened doors to Kylian as a choreographer. In 1973, the directors of the Netherlands Dance Theatre asked him to come and do a ballet for them. He was invited back, and eventually was asked (in 1975) to become artistic co-director. He was named sole artistic director a year and a half ago. The Dutch clearly have faith in him. Their upcoming programs feature nine works: eight by Kylian. The 20-year-old Netherlands Dance Theatre was last here in 1972, but the company is much changed. “Not that I wanted it so,” says Kylian. “But, being what I am, going my way, it happened. The image of the company, which was very avant-garde, has gone.
I don’t see myself, and I don’t particularly want to see myself, as an avant-garde choreographer. I do what I have to do and it doesn’t matter to me if it’s up-to-date or old-fashioned. Our technique is more classical than before but using classical technique doesn’t prevent you from being contemporary or having something to say."
“You know,” he continues, “this being modern or not being modern, avant-garde or not avant-garde. I think it’s so bo-oring.” He drawls the vowel and slithers down a pitch. “What I find really interesting are the normal things, very normal movement, and normal feelings - absolutely very basic things. It’s interesting to put them together in such a way that they create - you konw? - a special atmosphere. Like Surrealism. The ordinary things in the paintings of Magritte or Dali or Delvaux or whoever are he basic things you see around. But their presence together is strange and makes you wonder. The end product of your feelings has not very much anymore to do with the things that have evoked them.”
Kylian lets me feel that we could sit here talking all year. He’s a thorough charmer, ad doesn’t appear to make any effort. His attentive and receptive air, his soothing, thoughtful voice speaking excellent but some time rearranged English, do it all. “So,” I ask, “what kind of dances have you been making, “expecting the sort of dead pause that comes when you ask someone to lump their entire working life into a couple of sentences. But Kylian doesn’t seem to mind, doesn’t think it’s such a dumb question, and sinks into it seriously.
“I think,” he says, “human feelings are the only common denominator. I really try for each piece to b as different from the others as possible. I’m trying to explore the extremities of my ability. Then, much later, I will put it all together and sort it out and see what I really want to do.” “I have no experience, you know. The experience of making...however many ballets I’ve made, maybe two dozen - that’s nothing! It’s absolutely nothing,” he say, and laughs. “Without being conceited, I really find it interesting to go outside myself and look inside. I try to spread my ways of choreographing to many different sides, and from these points I look toward the center to see what’s inside here.” He touches his chest. “I spend a lot of time thinking about my own feelings rather than going out and seeing different people’s works. I do something, and a year later I discover why I did it. It’s very curious. Do I make sense?”
Yes, he makes sense. You can do things because you have a clear vision. Or you can have a question or an inkling that begins to carry you in a certain direction. You may not even have the question - maybe you only arrive at the question through doing the work. “When I start, I have a basic idea which can be very vague. I may wind up with something completely different. It happened to me with Stoolgame. It kept changing from day to day and the final version was almost unrelated to the original idea. I wanted to do a piece on the Last Supper. And I ordered a table and a few chairs. There were too many people so I started he piece with a game of musical chairs. Then I realized that it’s a very big social problem. The possession of the stool could be a symbol of the Establishment. So, suddenly, when this man wound up without a chair, he had to either become something extraordinary or go under. And then it developed into another part of the Jesus story One figure is similar to Judith; another resembles Mary. Then the man is killed with the stools, and at the end the others recognize him as somebody who tries to bring a new idea. And all of these ideas, they were coming one after another. "
“But I don’t usually work that way. I really wanted to say that as I work the ideas change, and it all develops in connection with the dancers. Everybody has a personality and everybody has something to say. There must be give and take...I must get to know myself through working with them, and they must get to know themselves through working with me. There has to be this omelet. And if there’s not, then it’s boring. And it doesn’t work. And using them as human beings, not as machines, that is essential. To use human beings as machines - never ever.” Nut by nut, I’m decimating a small dish of Indian nuts on the coffee table between us. Cracking the shells with my teeth, popping the sweet meat into my mouth, I lose about every third kernel to the carpet. “You break your teeth,” says Kylian, trying one.
“I’m looking for a fresh source of inspiration at the moment, and I think I’ve found it. Right after the season in New York, I’ll go with a few people and a cameraman to the Northern Territory of Australia - Arnhem Land, the Gulf of Carpentaria, Groote Eylandt - to study with the aboriginal inhabitants They’re maybe the last people on this earth who take dance as something that is of vital importance to them. They live and die with dance. “You know, they don’t ca-are for civilization.” He stretches out the word in sleepy, ironic disdain. “They really don’t care. They base their whole culture on things that pass by, that you cannot keep. Dancing is number one, and storytelling. They don’t even build houses. I cannot understand the culture. I will never be able to understand it. But I want to know more about it and I want to learn."
“It’s not only dance steps I want to see, but the choreography - how it all fits together. For instance, I’ve seen one dance where there’s the hunter and the animal. They are always moving on the perimeter, at opposite ends of the diameter of a circle. And they’re constantly changing roles. You never know who will be the hunter and who the hunted one. And they do jumps, kind of kangaroo jumps. The way they come off the ground! A normal dancer, you know, has to bounce, go into the floor and out of the floor. But they go very slowly toward the ground and they sit there for a while. And then they go up in the air like a jac-in-the-box. You know, without...” He sets his body in a position of preparation, locking his muscles. I see. They don’t do it muscularly. They just think up.
Kylian has just come from the Dutch premiere of his newest work, Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, five days before. A huge piece, he says, 45 or 50 minutes, with a large orchestra, choir, soloists, organ. “I think it’s good,” he adds. “I don’t know. It’s difficult to think about it.” I’ve seen fragments of the work on film, excerpts fated to be part of a TV ad. Bold, fast, exuberant movement Long, modern-dance skirts on the women. Patterns like waves. Men and women coming in from either side of the stage and meeting in a surge in the center. Four people taking steps in a smooth, unbreaking sequence as if a wave were passing through them, as satisfying and seemingly inevitable as a slinky marching down stairs. Running lifts and leaps en masse, but with a sense of solidarity and groundedness. There was a party after the premiere, Kylian tells me. “and people told me they loved it, or they liked this part, and they didn’t like that...” He tuned out on their talk. “I realized...what I think is the only thing that matters.”
Being Miss Right
July 16
The strongest immediate impression of Nureyev’s production of The Seeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Canada is not of the dancing. The curtain goes up on designer Nicholas Georgiadis’s ornate iron gates, really a curtain, behind which we discern servants with candelabra descending a large staircase. When the gate/curtain rises, and while the effete Master of Ceremonies fusses, the hall fills with bewigged French noblemen and ladies in long dresses dragging their trains. Surprisingly, the men don’t look foolish, but rather charming, in their elaborately curled headgear.
But what a lot of clothes! King Florestan and his Queen (she doesn’t have a name) enter, and various people pay homage to their new baby. The fairies come in in little knots that unravel nicely as each many fairy’s cavalier parades her. The tutus worn by the fairies, and later by various agglomerations of ladies-that-dance-in-bunches, seem to be stiff and floppy at the same time, and come down somewhere between mid-thigh and knee. The effect is rather Czarist; perhaps Kchessinska looked good in this sort of garment, but the effect today is to make many of the dancers look slightly short-legged.
The other dominating impression of these first minutes is of the music, conducted wearily and without imagination (and sometimes sloppily) by George Crum, as if to emphasize what a dull old warhorse this score is. The Lilac Fairy’s part, in this production, is divided in two: the Principal Fairy dances and the official Lilac Fairy wears a long dress and glides around doing good. She doesn’t turn up till Carabosse does her dirty work; Carabosse bursts through a decorative panel with a bunch of hunched, subhuman helpers with rather bony, insect-like heads who look like they could be members of Koschei’s horde of monsters in Firebird. Carabosse is a rather glamorous, if glitzy dame. After Carabosse curses the infant princess, the Lilac Fairy softens the curse, and Carabosse shrinks from her power The guests, made bold by the Lilac Fairy, march toward Carabosse, pointing accusing fingers at her as she retreats. In the first act, a trio of matted-hair slatterns (agents of Carabosse) dance fiendishly with spindles and wool, though what they do looks more like a parody of knitting than anything one would do with a spindle. The spindles are passed on to three respectable women (they appear to have husbands) who are fascinated by them. But when the King and his retinue arrive, the women are put in stocks for having the spindles. This brief, lurid and gloomy scene has a glimpse of the naturalism and overtones of oppression that Nureyev later used to dramatically in his panoramic Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival Ballet. The act moves into the airier garden, bathed in an apricot glow. After the waltz, in which the men seem particularly good, Aurora (Karin Kain) runs down the stairs, and when she dancers her phrasing is surprising, wit movements brightly attacked, playfully arrested. She’s high-spirited, modest, gracious, all those things she’s supposed to be. She seems like a real girl and she seems to be having fun. In the Rose Adagio, she poses in attitude with perfect assurance. On balance, with arms overhead, she has a wonderful way of pausing before giving the next suitor her hand. She manages to lighten her arm and hold another second that you didn’t think she had before accepting his support. Each pause becomes a special, rather gay, triumph. Kain confirms her graciousness and generosity in her solo, and when she pricks herself with the spindle (hidden in a bouquet), the moment is so well-timed that she seems really to have hurt herself.
Nureyev, Prince Florimund, doesn’t turn up till Act II, 100 years later, when, despite other changes in fashion, the men are still wearing Cuban heels Tired of the hunt, playing hide-and-seek with a bunch of duchesses, he’s much more sophisticated than Aurora. He cheats at the game, later broods. The less he does, the more interesting he is to watch. Nureyev doesn’t stint in performance, but you never know what to expect. His pirouettes seem better than ever; his leaps, for the most part, are strained. He tends to land heavily, and his line breaks. His Act II solo in the forest was erratic and jerky, with everything going into technical effort and nothing left to make these ragged and more-or-less successful feats into a coherent whole. I wish he’d re-choreograph those few sections that are quite beyond him and try to make some sense out of them, instead of exhausting himself trying to provide the virtuosic dazzle that is not longer reliably at his command. Anyway, the Prince’s companions have left him alone at his request. The Lilac Fairy comes and grants him a vision of Aurora, and in a duet Aurora waves him to her, then slips away, while the Lilac Fairy scoots around keeping them apart as best she can. As the Lilac Fairy and the Prince go to find Aurora in a clunky, shell-like boat, trees move in from the sides of the stage, a claustrophobic latticework of vines and branches descends. Smoke rolls in along the floor and pours off the stage like a waterfall into the orchestra pit. I loved it, especially the last. Pre-dawn in a mangrove swamp.
Act III is all celebration. But Georgiadis’s set seems too heavy and dark for the occasion, and his costumes are a fright - all black red and gold, in fabrics that advertise that they’re made of metallic polyester. Tomas Schramek seemed a little rushed in the Bluebird pas de deux, but Mary Jago, his partner, shaped her role beautifully. And the Pussycats, which I’ve always detested, were amusing and sexy. Gloria Luoma and David Roxander played it cozily and timed it masterfully, building up to the finish with their little clawings, pats, and smacks, mingled with the occasional willing or unwilling cuddle. Kain and Nureyev looked good together, perfect mates, in the final pas de deux and variations, though the fish dives seemed unsure and were scary for the audience. Kain has a lovely flair for playing off the music, retarding a step but arriving at its climax at exactly the right musical moment And in this spectacle of theatrical effect and voluptuous decor, her gracious portrayal was the element of greatest weight.
At the New York State Theatre (to July 15).
The strongest immediate impression of Nureyev’s production of The Seeping Beauty for the National Ballet of Canada is not of the dancing. The curtain goes up on designer Nicholas Georgiadis’s ornate iron gates, really a curtain, behind which we discern servants with candelabra descending a large staircase. When the gate/curtain rises, and while the effete Master of Ceremonies fusses, the hall fills with bewigged French noblemen and ladies in long dresses dragging their trains. Surprisingly, the men don’t look foolish, but rather charming, in their elaborately curled headgear.
But what a lot of clothes! King Florestan and his Queen (she doesn’t have a name) enter, and various people pay homage to their new baby. The fairies come in in little knots that unravel nicely as each many fairy’s cavalier parades her. The tutus worn by the fairies, and later by various agglomerations of ladies-that-dance-in-bunches, seem to be stiff and floppy at the same time, and come down somewhere between mid-thigh and knee. The effect is rather Czarist; perhaps Kchessinska looked good in this sort of garment, but the effect today is to make many of the dancers look slightly short-legged.
The other dominating impression of these first minutes is of the music, conducted wearily and without imagination (and sometimes sloppily) by George Crum, as if to emphasize what a dull old warhorse this score is. The Lilac Fairy’s part, in this production, is divided in two: the Principal Fairy dances and the official Lilac Fairy wears a long dress and glides around doing good. She doesn’t turn up till Carabosse does her dirty work; Carabosse bursts through a decorative panel with a bunch of hunched, subhuman helpers with rather bony, insect-like heads who look like they could be members of Koschei’s horde of monsters in Firebird. Carabosse is a rather glamorous, if glitzy dame. After Carabosse curses the infant princess, the Lilac Fairy softens the curse, and Carabosse shrinks from her power The guests, made bold by the Lilac Fairy, march toward Carabosse, pointing accusing fingers at her as she retreats. In the first act, a trio of matted-hair slatterns (agents of Carabosse) dance fiendishly with spindles and wool, though what they do looks more like a parody of knitting than anything one would do with a spindle. The spindles are passed on to three respectable women (they appear to have husbands) who are fascinated by them. But when the King and his retinue arrive, the women are put in stocks for having the spindles. This brief, lurid and gloomy scene has a glimpse of the naturalism and overtones of oppression that Nureyev later used to dramatically in his panoramic Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival Ballet. The act moves into the airier garden, bathed in an apricot glow. After the waltz, in which the men seem particularly good, Aurora (Karin Kain) runs down the stairs, and when she dancers her phrasing is surprising, wit movements brightly attacked, playfully arrested. She’s high-spirited, modest, gracious, all those things she’s supposed to be. She seems like a real girl and she seems to be having fun. In the Rose Adagio, she poses in attitude with perfect assurance. On balance, with arms overhead, she has a wonderful way of pausing before giving the next suitor her hand. She manages to lighten her arm and hold another second that you didn’t think she had before accepting his support. Each pause becomes a special, rather gay, triumph. Kain confirms her graciousness and generosity in her solo, and when she pricks herself with the spindle (hidden in a bouquet), the moment is so well-timed that she seems really to have hurt herself.
Nureyev, Prince Florimund, doesn’t turn up till Act II, 100 years later, when, despite other changes in fashion, the men are still wearing Cuban heels Tired of the hunt, playing hide-and-seek with a bunch of duchesses, he’s much more sophisticated than Aurora. He cheats at the game, later broods. The less he does, the more interesting he is to watch. Nureyev doesn’t stint in performance, but you never know what to expect. His pirouettes seem better than ever; his leaps, for the most part, are strained. He tends to land heavily, and his line breaks. His Act II solo in the forest was erratic and jerky, with everything going into technical effort and nothing left to make these ragged and more-or-less successful feats into a coherent whole. I wish he’d re-choreograph those few sections that are quite beyond him and try to make some sense out of them, instead of exhausting himself trying to provide the virtuosic dazzle that is not longer reliably at his command. Anyway, the Prince’s companions have left him alone at his request. The Lilac Fairy comes and grants him a vision of Aurora, and in a duet Aurora waves him to her, then slips away, while the Lilac Fairy scoots around keeping them apart as best she can. As the Lilac Fairy and the Prince go to find Aurora in a clunky, shell-like boat, trees move in from the sides of the stage, a claustrophobic latticework of vines and branches descends. Smoke rolls in along the floor and pours off the stage like a waterfall into the orchestra pit. I loved it, especially the last. Pre-dawn in a mangrove swamp.
Act III is all celebration. But Georgiadis’s set seems too heavy and dark for the occasion, and his costumes are a fright - all black red and gold, in fabrics that advertise that they’re made of metallic polyester. Tomas Schramek seemed a little rushed in the Bluebird pas de deux, but Mary Jago, his partner, shaped her role beautifully. And the Pussycats, which I’ve always detested, were amusing and sexy. Gloria Luoma and David Roxander played it cozily and timed it masterfully, building up to the finish with their little clawings, pats, and smacks, mingled with the occasional willing or unwilling cuddle. Kain and Nureyev looked good together, perfect mates, in the final pas de deux and variations, though the fish dives seemed unsure and were scary for the audience. Kain has a lovely flair for playing off the music, retarding a step but arriving at its climax at exactly the right musical moment And in this spectacle of theatrical effect and voluptuous decor, her gracious portrayal was the element of greatest weight.
At the New York State Theatre (to July 15).
Boy in Flight
February 5
The low prices - 25 cents for children, $1 for adults - keep the weekend “family” shows at the Henry Street Settlement Arts for Living Center packed. But I’d been avoiding them for a while because I disliked sitting on the floor with no room to squirm. Meanwhile, sometime before the summer, bleachers were installed in the theatre to make it reasonably comfortable and to increase its capacity.
What brought me back in December was Shauneille Perry’s excellent Mio, a musical play about a rather abstracted Hispanic boy, Mio, who won’t go to school and spends his days alone on a neighborhood rooftop training pigeons. Mio is the kind of youth anyone can love, sweet and a bit melancholy; he’s so hidden that there’s nothing not to like. He wants “to be free/ to do what please me/in a world that imprisons me.” Free as his pigeons, he thinks, as he watches them fly. But this undeveloped notion of freedom is one of the play’s serious weaknesses and one source of the sadness that underlies the action.
Mio’s idea of freedom is not to be hassled. He seems doomed to disappointment, as is anyone whose dreams are always vague. Mio wants to be free, but what he wants is only not this, not that, not here... No formula explanation or solution is provided for Mio’s disaffection: this helps to locate the main characters in a situation that feel honest and retains its full quota of ambiguity. And the family scenes are superb. Mrs. Rivera (played by Vicenta Aviles with warmth, compassion, pain, and enormous humor), worries, in English mixed with Espanish, about her son - maybe he would be happier in another school in a better neighborhood where there’s grass and “you can sit out.” She pleads with Mio to tell her where he goes when he’s not in school. Maybe he’s with evil companions. She worries that the educational machine will put Mio in an institution for incorrigibles. But Mio offers no explanations. At a loss to understand what’s bothering him, the mother decides to make a move they can’t afford to a new neighborhood. Mrs. Rivera doesn’t know what Mio is doing or why, but she picks up the feelings that are paralyzing him. She grasps his unwillingness to give in to the “practical” compromises of the daily world. But she knows that “in this country they ask ‘what is your schooling?’ for everything.” For Mio, there’s no escape if he wants to be somebody. He says, in anger, “I am somebody!” but he’s whistling in the dark Although training and caring for his pigeons gives him a sense of worth, how fragile it is! In stumbling silences, Mio’s unspoken thoughts freshen the dreams his mother had for herself before she married and bore children; the old memories make her blue, but she doesn’t regret her choice. She’s never so far from Mio as he seems to think she is.
The family scenes with Mio, his mother and his sister,with their shifting tensions and smart-aleck jokes, sudden flare-ups and forgiveness while dinner burns, are volatile and deeply funny and give the play authority. But a long scene in school is slick and dishonest. The teacher, Ms. Little, a pretentious, petty and thoroughly contradictory bitch, can’t even button her jacket properly. With “the best intentions”, she drills the students and rubs their faces n their inadequacies. (Mio turns up and finally runs out.) This caricature of a classroom with its cross section of kids who are troubled but not “bad” gets laughs from most of the audience, but infuriated me The scene is a red herring and undermines the play’s integrity. It explains away Mio’s refusal to go to school, as if the crudeness of the teacher were to blame. The teacher is vile enough to justify any behavior. But Mio’s school problem is symptomatic, it’s just the surface. His reasons are deeper: more private, less clear. The play ends on a rather muted, but upbeat note.
I left the theatre, however, with an image from the prologues, which, in time, occurs after the end. Two neighborhood women on a rooftop watch Mio’s pigeons wheeling over a building as if waiting for a signal from the missing boy. The pigeons seem bereft; the building they circle is burnt out. The neighborhood loses, everyone loses.
The low prices - 25 cents for children, $1 for adults - keep the weekend “family” shows at the Henry Street Settlement Arts for Living Center packed. But I’d been avoiding them for a while because I disliked sitting on the floor with no room to squirm. Meanwhile, sometime before the summer, bleachers were installed in the theatre to make it reasonably comfortable and to increase its capacity.
What brought me back in December was Shauneille Perry’s excellent Mio, a musical play about a rather abstracted Hispanic boy, Mio, who won’t go to school and spends his days alone on a neighborhood rooftop training pigeons. Mio is the kind of youth anyone can love, sweet and a bit melancholy; he’s so hidden that there’s nothing not to like. He wants “to be free/ to do what please me/in a world that imprisons me.” Free as his pigeons, he thinks, as he watches them fly. But this undeveloped notion of freedom is one of the play’s serious weaknesses and one source of the sadness that underlies the action.
Mio’s idea of freedom is not to be hassled. He seems doomed to disappointment, as is anyone whose dreams are always vague. Mio wants to be free, but what he wants is only not this, not that, not here... No formula explanation or solution is provided for Mio’s disaffection: this helps to locate the main characters in a situation that feel honest and retains its full quota of ambiguity. And the family scenes are superb. Mrs. Rivera (played by Vicenta Aviles with warmth, compassion, pain, and enormous humor), worries, in English mixed with Espanish, about her son - maybe he would be happier in another school in a better neighborhood where there’s grass and “you can sit out.” She pleads with Mio to tell her where he goes when he’s not in school. Maybe he’s with evil companions. She worries that the educational machine will put Mio in an institution for incorrigibles. But Mio offers no explanations. At a loss to understand what’s bothering him, the mother decides to make a move they can’t afford to a new neighborhood. Mrs. Rivera doesn’t know what Mio is doing or why, but she picks up the feelings that are paralyzing him. She grasps his unwillingness to give in to the “practical” compromises of the daily world. But she knows that “in this country they ask ‘what is your schooling?’ for everything.” For Mio, there’s no escape if he wants to be somebody. He says, in anger, “I am somebody!” but he’s whistling in the dark Although training and caring for his pigeons gives him a sense of worth, how fragile it is! In stumbling silences, Mio’s unspoken thoughts freshen the dreams his mother had for herself before she married and bore children; the old memories make her blue, but she doesn’t regret her choice. She’s never so far from Mio as he seems to think she is.
The family scenes with Mio, his mother and his sister,with their shifting tensions and smart-aleck jokes, sudden flare-ups and forgiveness while dinner burns, are volatile and deeply funny and give the play authority. But a long scene in school is slick and dishonest. The teacher, Ms. Little, a pretentious, petty and thoroughly contradictory bitch, can’t even button her jacket properly. With “the best intentions”, she drills the students and rubs their faces n their inadequacies. (Mio turns up and finally runs out.) This caricature of a classroom with its cross section of kids who are troubled but not “bad” gets laughs from most of the audience, but infuriated me The scene is a red herring and undermines the play’s integrity. It explains away Mio’s refusal to go to school, as if the crudeness of the teacher were to blame. The teacher is vile enough to justify any behavior. But Mio’s school problem is symptomatic, it’s just the surface. His reasons are deeper: more private, less clear. The play ends on a rather muted, but upbeat note.
I left the theatre, however, with an image from the prologues, which, in time, occurs after the end. Two neighborhood women on a rooftop watch Mio’s pigeons wheeling over a building as if waiting for a signal from the missing boy. The pigeons seem bereft; the building they circle is burnt out. The neighborhood loses, everyone loses.
Cardboard Camille
July 2
John Neumeier’s rancid and boring Lady of the Camellias eked out a couple of curtain calls from a begrudging audience at the Metropolitan Opera. The ballet is wrong from the first moment: we’re in Marguerite’s apartment, she’s already dead of consumption and her possessions are about to be auctioned. It’s silent. There’s a piano ready for transport, shrouded chairs, rolled-up rugs. Marguerite’s loyal, elderly maid mopes in; but the entrance is too slow, pompous and stiff. The emotion she stifles is already false. People wander in to inspect the furnishings. The maid sits and gazes at a portrait of her late mistress. Someone plinks a little Chopin on the piano. Rugs and mirrors, etc. are carried offstage while the audience coughs. Armand Duval’s father is already there when Armand, Marguerite’s lover, comes in and realizes she’s dead. Hand to head, he has a brief vision of her (we see her though a scrim, in happier days, against a Nile green background), and collapses. Afterwards, Armand tells his father the story of their love. So most of the ballet happens in flashbacks.
It should have taken Armand about three sentences to tell his father the whole story - they fell in love even though she was being kept by some duke. They were separated. She dies - but it takes Neumeier three hours, less intermissions. And, astonishingly, he hasn’t much to add to this coarse summation. Unable to deal with a single plot in a dramatic way, Neumeier stuffs in a second as a stand-in for Marguerite’s inner fears. The second time Armand (Richard Cragun) meets Marguerite (Birgit Keil), they watch a ballet of Manon Lescaut. Marguerite is obviously disturbed, and identifies to some degree with Manon, who’s being fondled and partnered by four different men. (In Neumeier’s sloppy choreography, there’s no way to tell that Christopher Boatwright - Des Grieux in the ballet-within-the-ballet - is her real lover and not just another cad pawing her.) Periodically, Manon and Des Grieux reappear to reinforce this needless, unrevealing parallel. But the structural sprawl of Lady of the Camellias is not the worst f it. There’s simply nothing about the characters and situations that has any conviction or dimension. There’s no dramatic sense to the choreography, which muddles posturing with pointless steps and gimmicky holds. Not one honest moment. Not one natural link from one idea to another.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 19; season to July 7).
John Neumeier’s rancid and boring Lady of the Camellias eked out a couple of curtain calls from a begrudging audience at the Metropolitan Opera. The ballet is wrong from the first moment: we’re in Marguerite’s apartment, she’s already dead of consumption and her possessions are about to be auctioned. It’s silent. There’s a piano ready for transport, shrouded chairs, rolled-up rugs. Marguerite’s loyal, elderly maid mopes in; but the entrance is too slow, pompous and stiff. The emotion she stifles is already false. People wander in to inspect the furnishings. The maid sits and gazes at a portrait of her late mistress. Someone plinks a little Chopin on the piano. Rugs and mirrors, etc. are carried offstage while the audience coughs. Armand Duval’s father is already there when Armand, Marguerite’s lover, comes in and realizes she’s dead. Hand to head, he has a brief vision of her (we see her though a scrim, in happier days, against a Nile green background), and collapses. Afterwards, Armand tells his father the story of their love. So most of the ballet happens in flashbacks.
It should have taken Armand about three sentences to tell his father the whole story - they fell in love even though she was being kept by some duke. They were separated. She dies - but it takes Neumeier three hours, less intermissions. And, astonishingly, he hasn’t much to add to this coarse summation. Unable to deal with a single plot in a dramatic way, Neumeier stuffs in a second as a stand-in for Marguerite’s inner fears. The second time Armand (Richard Cragun) meets Marguerite (Birgit Keil), they watch a ballet of Manon Lescaut. Marguerite is obviously disturbed, and identifies to some degree with Manon, who’s being fondled and partnered by four different men. (In Neumeier’s sloppy choreography, there’s no way to tell that Christopher Boatwright - Des Grieux in the ballet-within-the-ballet - is her real lover and not just another cad pawing her.) Periodically, Manon and Des Grieux reappear to reinforce this needless, unrevealing parallel. But the structural sprawl of Lady of the Camellias is not the worst f it. There’s simply nothing about the characters and situations that has any conviction or dimension. There’s no dramatic sense to the choreography, which muddles posturing with pointless steps and gimmicky holds. Not one honest moment. Not one natural link from one idea to another.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 19; season to July 7).
Flying High
July 23
Nothing is half-hearted in Jiri Kylian’s demanding works for the Netherlands Dance Theatre, and the company’s dancing is vital and intelligent, with a fearlessness and enthusiasm that seem perfectly controlled. Kylian’s dances have a grand shape, and are filled with many colors, tones, and disparate incidents that are tributaries to the main, unwavering flood of a piece. Gestures of wrath and tenderness, for example, follow and mingle without contradiction, linked through their own movement logic and a sense that there’s room for many concurrent emotional threads.
Symphony of Psalms, to the Stravinsky score, and Janacek’s Sinfonietta, are very different, but both use the space boldly, vertically as well as horizontally. Dancers are swept or spring into the air and are slung or collapse back, at home in all the elements. Symphony of Psalms is the darker work. On a stage hung with oriental carpets, which sometimes seem to assert the inspiration of their original meditative designs but more usually communicate the heaviness of dead weight overhead, a row of chairs lines half the back and another lines one side. Men and women are divided. The chairs, the Stravinsky music, and the stylized primitivism of some of the movement, especially at the beginning, occasionally suggest Les Noces (particularly Nijinska’s), but this is a minor distraction. As the lights come up, an inexplicable vertically striped scrim rises, the men slowly sit, and the women settle to the ground, crouching facing back. Their arms reach down, and their palms, turned in toward their bodies, are flat on the floor. They start to move in a sort of bowed walk, with arms swinging together forward and back, the hands accentuating and sharpening the shape like serifs in typeface. The women’s steps are sometimes flat-footed, sometimes tiny throbbing ones. Suddenly, the men join them. There is a strong, though not particularly agreeable, sense of community. The men face away; the women, on their knees, hobble after them. The women turn aside to the audience more than once, but return to their places in the shadow of the men. A line of the entire cast moves from one side of the stage to the other. As it moves, it drops out four women. As the line recrosses with exceeding slowness, it picks them back up. Each woman, when the line is just upon her, shoots up, leans against a man. First, he manipulates her with hands placed on her upper back and chest, but the tightness of the movement expands into outward leans, swings and enfoldings before the pair rejoin the group. In these four brief duets, and in others that follow, manipulation is a powerful, affecting element. Whenever anyone is outside the confines of the ensemble, he or she is explosive and vulnerable. Women allow the men to guide them or resist and then submit. Sometimes unwillingness is evident on both sides: men and women closing themselves to each other. What they do often feels combative, though what they accomplish is clearly mutual.
Rather early on, the men force the women backward by shoving against the top of their heads, but much later, a more sensitive version of the same movement has the quality of awakening and caring. At the beginning of the Laudate, the men lean on the women, who lunge gently to the floor, then slip out from under. And when a men’s line runs across the stage, several men drop rolling hard. Their movement is generally more muscular and pulsing than that of the women; their hands are often clenched. The women are sleeker, knifelike, but capable of great solidity, like when they walk forward into the men whose arms, outstretched and ending in fists, are very slightly lifted out of the horizontal. The women grab the men tightly around the waist, stomp into a deep and wide plie, and freeze there. As the dance goes on, a certain sense of resolution creeps in. Duets seem to contain softer, less tense material, and one gains a sense of matched power between men and women. Gestures that we have seen forceful are used more delicately. Instead of body shapes conforming and opposing, one sees a girl matching her body to her partners, curling her back against his.
Sinfonietta is exultant. With the opening brassy fanfare, men leap across the stage diagonally, whirling in the corners. They claim the stage space, touring it in circular and rectangular patterns, leaping through it in a cluster. Then they run, with arms wide, from one corner to the next, clasping their arms around their chests at each angle, embracing the space. The steps have something of Slavic flavor at times, sometimes seem faintly military. The women come in flashing and quick. The duets and multiples of duets twine, knot, slip under and over - they’re unstoppable. In a quartet with two men, the women are swept through in a rough sort of figure eight, passing from one pair of hands to another.
One rarely notes any sort of preparation in all this: one movement releases another and the complications and possibilities multiply. There rarely seems a need to rest, and any part of the body can be used to lift someone, or pivot round, or latch on to. The set, by Walter Nobbe, is a full partner. It’s a backdrop of a low, rolling landscape, mostly pale blue sky. At one point, when the light has dimmed it to gray, a large, vertical rectangle of pale azure gleams in the center, turning the scene abstract and ethereal. The white stage legs, masking the wings, light up sheer from behind, creating a sense of limitless horizontal space beyond the stage. On remembers this piece as all flying. Men’s leaps in which their bodies curl. A trio (a woman between the two men, typical of Kylian) in which she;’s swept through and under between them while they coil around, and flip over each other’s backs. Women are whipped from the floor into the air; couples leap through the gaps between other couples in crossing patterns (like at the end of Etudes). The end repeats the fanfares of the beginning, and the leaps recur, reversed and perhaps altered, though it all seems new. These people are greeting great space. Not just space on the planet, but space in the mind.
At City Center (to July 21).
Nothing is half-hearted in Jiri Kylian’s demanding works for the Netherlands Dance Theatre, and the company’s dancing is vital and intelligent, with a fearlessness and enthusiasm that seem perfectly controlled. Kylian’s dances have a grand shape, and are filled with many colors, tones, and disparate incidents that are tributaries to the main, unwavering flood of a piece. Gestures of wrath and tenderness, for example, follow and mingle without contradiction, linked through their own movement logic and a sense that there’s room for many concurrent emotional threads.
Symphony of Psalms, to the Stravinsky score, and Janacek’s Sinfonietta, are very different, but both use the space boldly, vertically as well as horizontally. Dancers are swept or spring into the air and are slung or collapse back, at home in all the elements. Symphony of Psalms is the darker work. On a stage hung with oriental carpets, which sometimes seem to assert the inspiration of their original meditative designs but more usually communicate the heaviness of dead weight overhead, a row of chairs lines half the back and another lines one side. Men and women are divided. The chairs, the Stravinsky music, and the stylized primitivism of some of the movement, especially at the beginning, occasionally suggest Les Noces (particularly Nijinska’s), but this is a minor distraction. As the lights come up, an inexplicable vertically striped scrim rises, the men slowly sit, and the women settle to the ground, crouching facing back. Their arms reach down, and their palms, turned in toward their bodies, are flat on the floor. They start to move in a sort of bowed walk, with arms swinging together forward and back, the hands accentuating and sharpening the shape like serifs in typeface. The women’s steps are sometimes flat-footed, sometimes tiny throbbing ones. Suddenly, the men join them. There is a strong, though not particularly agreeable, sense of community. The men face away; the women, on their knees, hobble after them. The women turn aside to the audience more than once, but return to their places in the shadow of the men. A line of the entire cast moves from one side of the stage to the other. As it moves, it drops out four women. As the line recrosses with exceeding slowness, it picks them back up. Each woman, when the line is just upon her, shoots up, leans against a man. First, he manipulates her with hands placed on her upper back and chest, but the tightness of the movement expands into outward leans, swings and enfoldings before the pair rejoin the group. In these four brief duets, and in others that follow, manipulation is a powerful, affecting element. Whenever anyone is outside the confines of the ensemble, he or she is explosive and vulnerable. Women allow the men to guide them or resist and then submit. Sometimes unwillingness is evident on both sides: men and women closing themselves to each other. What they do often feels combative, though what they accomplish is clearly mutual.
Rather early on, the men force the women backward by shoving against the top of their heads, but much later, a more sensitive version of the same movement has the quality of awakening and caring. At the beginning of the Laudate, the men lean on the women, who lunge gently to the floor, then slip out from under. And when a men’s line runs across the stage, several men drop rolling hard. Their movement is generally more muscular and pulsing than that of the women; their hands are often clenched. The women are sleeker, knifelike, but capable of great solidity, like when they walk forward into the men whose arms, outstretched and ending in fists, are very slightly lifted out of the horizontal. The women grab the men tightly around the waist, stomp into a deep and wide plie, and freeze there. As the dance goes on, a certain sense of resolution creeps in. Duets seem to contain softer, less tense material, and one gains a sense of matched power between men and women. Gestures that we have seen forceful are used more delicately. Instead of body shapes conforming and opposing, one sees a girl matching her body to her partners, curling her back against his.
Sinfonietta is exultant. With the opening brassy fanfare, men leap across the stage diagonally, whirling in the corners. They claim the stage space, touring it in circular and rectangular patterns, leaping through it in a cluster. Then they run, with arms wide, from one corner to the next, clasping their arms around their chests at each angle, embracing the space. The steps have something of Slavic flavor at times, sometimes seem faintly military. The women come in flashing and quick. The duets and multiples of duets twine, knot, slip under and over - they’re unstoppable. In a quartet with two men, the women are swept through in a rough sort of figure eight, passing from one pair of hands to another.
One rarely notes any sort of preparation in all this: one movement releases another and the complications and possibilities multiply. There rarely seems a need to rest, and any part of the body can be used to lift someone, or pivot round, or latch on to. The set, by Walter Nobbe, is a full partner. It’s a backdrop of a low, rolling landscape, mostly pale blue sky. At one point, when the light has dimmed it to gray, a large, vertical rectangle of pale azure gleams in the center, turning the scene abstract and ethereal. The white stage legs, masking the wings, light up sheer from behind, creating a sense of limitless horizontal space beyond the stage. On remembers this piece as all flying. Men’s leaps in which their bodies curl. A trio (a woman between the two men, typical of Kylian) in which she;’s swept through and under between them while they coil around, and flip over each other’s backs. Women are whipped from the floor into the air; couples leap through the gaps between other couples in crossing patterns (like at the end of Etudes). The end repeats the fanfares of the beginning, and the leaps recur, reversed and perhaps altered, though it all seems new. These people are greeting great space. Not just space on the planet, but space in the mind.
At City Center (to July 21).
Keeping the Engine Racing
June 18
Some particulars of Grethe Holby’s concert have blurred in my mind, and her pieces, so alike in intensity, have somewhat run together. Of the four she presented, the oldest, last June’s Steady State Turning Cycles, seemed most substantial. Working largely with an uninflected ballet vocabulary, Holby runs her pieces at a pretty constant energy level. There are occasional respites for some dancers (who may lie on the floor), but the remaining ones keep the energy steady.
Any work where the energy is constant, at any level, can easily go flat. No matter how demanding it may be, you grow accustomed to it, and neutral. Holby has been quoted as saying that she is “choreographing to a sensation, not to a structure,” but you’d never guess that since the expression is so controlled and her palette so flat. What you see is four or six dancers keeping their figurative peckers up, moving through repeating phrases of evident similarity and some complexity. They tough it out, but I wonder what the satisfactions are in an activity that’s this dry. The challenge is clear. But is this different from, say, serving the machines in the textile factory in Norma Rae, except that this aesthetic endeavor is classier?
In Holby’s new Ode (to a resonant score by Ted Kalmon, for two make voices, piano and vibraphone), she uses an unposing ballet vocabulary - nothing grand, mostly traveling steps - organized in boxy patterns that occur within the large rectangle of the overall floor pattern. Minor variations are introduced, and he pattern changes spatially, but the bulk of the steps remain pretty much the same. In last year’s Beta Hookup (the second part is new), along a narrow diagonal, fur dancers leap, turn, and plunge, take sliding dives and rolls, to the screeching of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (so good when it stops). The dancers aren’t wild, but clean and determined. Three of them rest while one continues, and after they all resume, there’s a sudden spread forward and into the corners of the space. The movement in this section is slower, more strictly balletic, with the dancers doing varied reflections of a phrase, dropping out, and shifting, towards the end, into arabesques the hard way - lifting the leg forward and holding it there, then adjusting the body bit by bit, 180 degrees.
String Out, another premiere, also happens on a diagonal. Three women fling their arms, do battements, roll on the floor or dive to it, run back to the corner. They tip forward, with the leg in arabesque, to touch the floor and pull achingly through. Occasionally, they’ll go into slow, soft slides. The moments of contact - where one woman will dive onto another prone dancer, then roll off; where they fall two-at-a-time in a sort of chain; where one yanks another up off the floor and then they fall down together - seemed like they should bring the piece into focus, but pleasing as they are, they don’t.
Steady State Turning Cycles, last on the program, was in self-explanatory sections called Canon, Unison, and Trio. The women (three, then four, then three), looking industrially chic in black unitards and black belts with silver buckles, start with twisting walks and turns. Their arms are composed but loose, sometimes dropped, sometimes floating upward. The movement, again, is mostly composed of transitional ballet steps (pique turns, gentle leaps, etc.) There’s no frontal presentation, and the general area of action shifts nicely from one part of the space to another. Richard Peaslee’s excellent new score for the piece supports STTC beautifully, lets it float like cream. The score ebbs and flows, sometimes thickens or increases in power, sometimes seems to swing its sounds toward the listener, and away. In the second section, the dancers cover the space in a body and for the first time all evening there’s a feeling of freshness, the sense that space can be alive The music begins to remind me of La Mer.
Eventually, the sense of space is nullified and the movement becomes distractingly predictable. In the third section, the women start in different places in the dance phrase, somehow come into unison briefly, moving forward and back. In the music, single threads rise out of a web of sound As the center woman, then another, reverses direction, the familiar dance phrase begins to break down, or change. But I’m submerged in the music now; it’s making me dream. I see it like a fabric, all warp, all the threads pulsing in the same direction, yet it holds.
At the Kitchen (May 23 to 26).
Some particulars of Grethe Holby’s concert have blurred in my mind, and her pieces, so alike in intensity, have somewhat run together. Of the four she presented, the oldest, last June’s Steady State Turning Cycles, seemed most substantial. Working largely with an uninflected ballet vocabulary, Holby runs her pieces at a pretty constant energy level. There are occasional respites for some dancers (who may lie on the floor), but the remaining ones keep the energy steady.
Any work where the energy is constant, at any level, can easily go flat. No matter how demanding it may be, you grow accustomed to it, and neutral. Holby has been quoted as saying that she is “choreographing to a sensation, not to a structure,” but you’d never guess that since the expression is so controlled and her palette so flat. What you see is four or six dancers keeping their figurative peckers up, moving through repeating phrases of evident similarity and some complexity. They tough it out, but I wonder what the satisfactions are in an activity that’s this dry. The challenge is clear. But is this different from, say, serving the machines in the textile factory in Norma Rae, except that this aesthetic endeavor is classier?
In Holby’s new Ode (to a resonant score by Ted Kalmon, for two make voices, piano and vibraphone), she uses an unposing ballet vocabulary - nothing grand, mostly traveling steps - organized in boxy patterns that occur within the large rectangle of the overall floor pattern. Minor variations are introduced, and he pattern changes spatially, but the bulk of the steps remain pretty much the same. In last year’s Beta Hookup (the second part is new), along a narrow diagonal, fur dancers leap, turn, and plunge, take sliding dives and rolls, to the screeching of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (so good when it stops). The dancers aren’t wild, but clean and determined. Three of them rest while one continues, and after they all resume, there’s a sudden spread forward and into the corners of the space. The movement in this section is slower, more strictly balletic, with the dancers doing varied reflections of a phrase, dropping out, and shifting, towards the end, into arabesques the hard way - lifting the leg forward and holding it there, then adjusting the body bit by bit, 180 degrees.
String Out, another premiere, also happens on a diagonal. Three women fling their arms, do battements, roll on the floor or dive to it, run back to the corner. They tip forward, with the leg in arabesque, to touch the floor and pull achingly through. Occasionally, they’ll go into slow, soft slides. The moments of contact - where one woman will dive onto another prone dancer, then roll off; where they fall two-at-a-time in a sort of chain; where one yanks another up off the floor and then they fall down together - seemed like they should bring the piece into focus, but pleasing as they are, they don’t.
Steady State Turning Cycles, last on the program, was in self-explanatory sections called Canon, Unison, and Trio. The women (three, then four, then three), looking industrially chic in black unitards and black belts with silver buckles, start with twisting walks and turns. Their arms are composed but loose, sometimes dropped, sometimes floating upward. The movement, again, is mostly composed of transitional ballet steps (pique turns, gentle leaps, etc.) There’s no frontal presentation, and the general area of action shifts nicely from one part of the space to another. Richard Peaslee’s excellent new score for the piece supports STTC beautifully, lets it float like cream. The score ebbs and flows, sometimes thickens or increases in power, sometimes seems to swing its sounds toward the listener, and away. In the second section, the dancers cover the space in a body and for the first time all evening there’s a feeling of freshness, the sense that space can be alive The music begins to remind me of La Mer.
Eventually, the sense of space is nullified and the movement becomes distractingly predictable. In the third section, the women start in different places in the dance phrase, somehow come into unison briefly, moving forward and back. In the music, single threads rise out of a web of sound As the center woman, then another, reverses direction, the familiar dance phrase begins to break down, or change. But I’m submerged in the music now; it’s making me dream. I see it like a fabric, all warp, all the threads pulsing in the same direction, yet it holds.
At the Kitchen (May 23 to 26).
Rinker on the Brink
March 19
Ken Rinker is leery of having me watch rehearsal for the piece he’s premiering at American Theatre Lab, March 15 to 18. “We’ve only started running through the piece this week,” he says. “it needs about five years of rehearsal.” But the dancers don’t mind, and he tells me to come ahead. He’s nervous. This may be the beginning of something new for him, so he doesn’t want to make too much of what may be a delicate thing. People already know him as a remarkable dancer, but choreographing is something else. And he’s not at all sure it’s a good idea for people to see you “while you’re being made up. You don’t show the bride walking down the aisle in her undies.”
Somebody lives in the other end of the steamy loft where Rinker’s rehearsing. Eleven men and women are twisting their bodies, swirling their arms around their heads, in the small studio floored with bouncing plywood sheets. Rinker’s on the side, tape recorder in his lap. starting the tape and stopping it. Each time he stops, the dancers drop what they’re doing and move into a new pattern, where they resume when Rinker starts the tape up again. What’s going on? Do the sections begin and end whenever he starts the music? The air is faintly dusty, and it’s too cold outside to open a window. The grimy, blue-green walls are marked with patches of fresh plaster. Rinker wears gray woolen leg warmers pulled over his pants and a very loose, oversize hockey shirt, almost the same color as the walls, with the sleeves rolled and shoved above his elbows. He introduces me to the dancers, whose names I instantly forget. But I relearn them as I watch through the morning.
The new piece, 40 Seconds/42nd Variations, is built on a 40-second phrase of dance material; the score, by Sergio Cervetti, is a set of variations of “42nd Street.” This is the first piece Rinker has made since 1977 during a teaching residency at Ohio State. But he’s wanted to choreograph since he starting dancing. “You go to colleges,” he says, “and they make you do it.” It was difficult to choreograph while he was dancing with Twyla Tharp from 1971 to 1976, because the company was his primary obligation, and they were getting more engagements. There was more rehearsing, more touring. He'd start work on his own, and stop. But, since leaving Tharp’s company, Rinker has been “Not dancing. Falling apart. Re-evaluating.” In 1977, he got a National Endowment for the Arts grant to make a piece, but wound up working with Tharp on the film of Hair, “which took triple the time it was supposed to,” and put off getting down to work again. Finally, he decided to set himself a deadline to perform at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery. Then, St. Mark’s burned.
“I was at a very low point,” he reflects. “Everything was very negative. I wanted to stop dancing. And I wasn’t much interested in choreographing. I had no momentum, no reason for continuing. No push. I guess I was just exhausted, mentally and physically, full of those blue feelings. I was asked to do something at The Public Theatre, and I was sorry I agreed. It was supposed to be done in six weeks! I was thrown into this thing, with people I never knew, they couldn’t dance...’What the hell am I doing here?’ I thought. Now I’m glad I worked on it. Like the movie Hair, I hated it, but I'm glad I did it. Like the house.” (Rinker has been occupied “mostly as a construction worker” for about a year renovating a Brooklyn brownstone with Cervetti.)
’Why the hell did we buy this house? It’s a dump! It’s falling apart!’...but we tore it apart. It needed to be torn apart - you can’t just paste it over. So it made me learn. And this piece grew out of all the business.” “Doing that work on the house helps you to think logically,” interrupts Cervetti. Rinker grunts agreement. “Step by step. You can’t plaster before you do the electricity because the cables go underneath. So it helps you to think logically about things, in what order they’re put together.”
Rinker began to work, as he puts it, “rather intellectually. I wanted to get back into shape. I needed a reason, so I decided to give a workshop, which I’d never done because I don’t like to teach very much. It would be a way to work on material and develop a piece. It would be a way to find dancers and give me the reason I needed to get in shape.” He gave the workshop for three weeks in September. Most of the dancers he’s using now came from it, though some are from Ohio State and were in the piece he did there. Most of the material, most of the movement, came out of the workshop. He planned to use a lot of people; that was one of the provisions of the original NEA grant. “I had 20 people in the workshop, and I realized that, just schedule-wise, 20 people would drive me crazy, so I decided to let them weed themselves out. I told them that I wanted to take my time - that the piece wouldn’t be done until March and that I intend to work every day. At the beginning I thought, oh, wow! Six months! All this time! Then November went by. I was saying to myself, ‘by the end of December this piece is going to be done! So we’ll have time to rehearse.’ Then came January. And by February it had to be done...I’d set up this situation where I’d have the freedom to play around. Finally, I played around so much that it ate up all the time."
“I was in a big fog.” There was all the music that Cervetti had composed, and all those months, and 12 dancers to be concerned about, and a thematic structure. “I tried to pull it together without making a packaged kind of thing. But the hard part was making sense of everything that we had. Like trying to put the house together... "
“Its all very clear,” says Rinker, “when you have the piece made. Then you can do all those fine little things that make the difference. But this piece didn’t come together until about a month ago. It became clear then what I had to do...Also, you have a chaotic element in collaboration, because you’re not doing it all yourself.”
“He has thrown out so much music,” says Cervetti, “that I could kill him. A musician has to be flexible because what counts here is the dance. I made 22 tapes, all about three-quarters of an hour long, which have been reduced to one tape. I let him take those things that he thought were useful for his purposes. Though I also let him see,” he adds with gravity, “that there were others that should not be discarded.”
“I was hoping that his music would give me a sense of organization,” says Rinker. “It didn’t. I heard this music and then I heard that music...it didn’t make sense to me.” “There were an enormous number of variations,” says Cervetti. “and I would say, ‘Would you like this one, or would you like the other one which is two seconds longer but has no synthesizer. Or do you want the one that has computer and live music.?”
“Finally,” continues Rinker, “I said, ‘You go do your own music and organize it any way you like.’ So he did, and then he plays it for me. It still didn’t make any sense to me, but I didn’t tell him that. I went off to rehearsal and, well, I recorded music from the radio and made a lot of the dance that way. Then I’d put on the music that he wrote and I would change it around. What could I do? Fourteen people were dancing in this one section and the music sounds, to me, like only one or two people. So I rearranged things. And then he come in, grouches at me. He’s horrified because I turn off the tape and I turn the radio on, then I turn the radio off, then there’s no music. He expected...”
“I expected order,” says Cervetti. Back in rehearsal, the dancers are getting into a crude sort of line that leads into a neater line for a canon of dipping, twisting torsos and arms. It’s too clean. “Let’s not be so good about it,” Rinker says. “I want it messy.” But not incoherent. “I don;t want to see you stepping,” he tells them, when their feet get too regular as they move into place. “I want to see you twisting.” They repeat the section a few times. Rinker, watching, leans back, arched against the wall. He holds his lips closed, pressed tightly against his teeth, lets his hands dangle, hooked in the neckline of his shirt. Finally, he likes the spacing.
“You can be that bad!” he says, clearly pleased. “Good. One more time.” Cervetti, sitting beside me, laughs. “It’s always one more time.” When I return to watch a run-through a week and a half later, the loft’s been painted white. The dancers are practicing a flat-footed, shuffling walk that’s coupled with slack arms and a wiggle in the torso. The music’s funny and grumbly here; the rhythm (in fours or eights) makes me think of a Polynesian war dance. Rinker checks the time, figures he can squeeze in a quick run of a short quartet for four women. The parts of it that happen on the floor suggest a revved up, thumping version of that kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley stuff you always see from above. Then, they run through it. The beginning, the statement of the movement material, is for Rinker. He warms up while Ruby Keeler sings on a scratchy recording, but when the taps start, he attacks a springy, swinging, wiggling solo. Then there’s a mob onstage. Soon, they’ve massed in a line that reforms as a snake (everyone with crossed, inked arms), turns into another line that folds into itself, then Zs around the space into an upstage corner. A sinuous solo for Rinker. Then the clump from the corner disperses with fidgety mosquito hands and busy movements that wind up in lunges. The floor empties and fills, often crowded with near traffic jams. Much of the material I’d expected to recognize has been submerged in larger patterns. Balanced on top of his chair back, Rinker watches a lazy, undulating section everyone is in. It looks to me like too-hot-to-sleep-at-night dancing. “Less, less, you guys,” Rinker cajoles. “More rhythm, less energy.” “Choreographically,” Rinker says, “I’ve begun very loose - and then it gets tighter and tighter. At first, the line-ups aren’t very good, some of the things that look like they’re supposed to be nice, like Balanchine - unwrapping and going around the stage - don’t happen at all. But, by the end, the stuff gets all together and everybody’s all here on this count. The progression is sort of related to the movie. 42nd Street is about making the show Pretty Ladies, which you never see until the very end when Ruby Keeler gets told that she’s going to be the star if she goes out there and hoofs it, and you see the final number, “42nd Street.”
"In a way, that’s how this piece works. I’m presenting the material all along, and I don’t really use it until the end.” “The piece I that did in Ohio,” he says, “was like a Cunningham piece to some extent, because of the training there. And that was rather nice, because I don’t want the dancers to copy me. I want them to analyze things for themselves. That’s one way you get good. Figuring out what it is you have to do, how you do it, what’s you’re strong at, what you’re weak at. What you’re strong at you’re always going to do, what you’re weak at you have to work at. I’m strong at doing things I’ve done before, and I;m weak a doing things the way I want to do them.” With this in mind. he’s trying not to be overly conscious of comparisons people will make between his work and Tharp’s. How it’s like hers, and how it isn’t, and isn’t that nice, or too bad.
“Choreographically,” he says, “I’ve taken things all along. Every person does that - it’s part of the continuity. It’s one of the wonderful things. Everyone looks like the people they came from. I expect Bertram Ross to look like Martha Graham, but I don’t expect Merce Cunningham to look like Martha anymore. “I’ve never wanted to dance anything I’ve made before. I want to be able to see what I’ve done without that hysterical oh-my-god-I’ve-got-to-warm-up-and-perform feeling I’m probably going to have since I haven’t been dancing all that much lately and I haven’t been performing at all.” He refuses to worry about whether he looks like he’s dancing one right out of one of Tharp’s pieces. That can’t be helped. “I am going to look like that. Probably."
Ken Rinker is leery of having me watch rehearsal for the piece he’s premiering at American Theatre Lab, March 15 to 18. “We’ve only started running through the piece this week,” he says. “it needs about five years of rehearsal.” But the dancers don’t mind, and he tells me to come ahead. He’s nervous. This may be the beginning of something new for him, so he doesn’t want to make too much of what may be a delicate thing. People already know him as a remarkable dancer, but choreographing is something else. And he’s not at all sure it’s a good idea for people to see you “while you’re being made up. You don’t show the bride walking down the aisle in her undies.”
Somebody lives in the other end of the steamy loft where Rinker’s rehearsing. Eleven men and women are twisting their bodies, swirling their arms around their heads, in the small studio floored with bouncing plywood sheets. Rinker’s on the side, tape recorder in his lap. starting the tape and stopping it. Each time he stops, the dancers drop what they’re doing and move into a new pattern, where they resume when Rinker starts the tape up again. What’s going on? Do the sections begin and end whenever he starts the music? The air is faintly dusty, and it’s too cold outside to open a window. The grimy, blue-green walls are marked with patches of fresh plaster. Rinker wears gray woolen leg warmers pulled over his pants and a very loose, oversize hockey shirt, almost the same color as the walls, with the sleeves rolled and shoved above his elbows. He introduces me to the dancers, whose names I instantly forget. But I relearn them as I watch through the morning.
The new piece, 40 Seconds/42nd Variations, is built on a 40-second phrase of dance material; the score, by Sergio Cervetti, is a set of variations of “42nd Street.” This is the first piece Rinker has made since 1977 during a teaching residency at Ohio State. But he’s wanted to choreograph since he starting dancing. “You go to colleges,” he says, “and they make you do it.” It was difficult to choreograph while he was dancing with Twyla Tharp from 1971 to 1976, because the company was his primary obligation, and they were getting more engagements. There was more rehearsing, more touring. He'd start work on his own, and stop. But, since leaving Tharp’s company, Rinker has been “Not dancing. Falling apart. Re-evaluating.” In 1977, he got a National Endowment for the Arts grant to make a piece, but wound up working with Tharp on the film of Hair, “which took triple the time it was supposed to,” and put off getting down to work again. Finally, he decided to set himself a deadline to perform at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery. Then, St. Mark’s burned.
“I was at a very low point,” he reflects. “Everything was very negative. I wanted to stop dancing. And I wasn’t much interested in choreographing. I had no momentum, no reason for continuing. No push. I guess I was just exhausted, mentally and physically, full of those blue feelings. I was asked to do something at The Public Theatre, and I was sorry I agreed. It was supposed to be done in six weeks! I was thrown into this thing, with people I never knew, they couldn’t dance...’What the hell am I doing here?’ I thought. Now I’m glad I worked on it. Like the movie Hair, I hated it, but I'm glad I did it. Like the house.” (Rinker has been occupied “mostly as a construction worker” for about a year renovating a Brooklyn brownstone with Cervetti.)
’Why the hell did we buy this house? It’s a dump! It’s falling apart!’...but we tore it apart. It needed to be torn apart - you can’t just paste it over. So it made me learn. And this piece grew out of all the business.” “Doing that work on the house helps you to think logically,” interrupts Cervetti. Rinker grunts agreement. “Step by step. You can’t plaster before you do the electricity because the cables go underneath. So it helps you to think logically about things, in what order they’re put together.”
Rinker began to work, as he puts it, “rather intellectually. I wanted to get back into shape. I needed a reason, so I decided to give a workshop, which I’d never done because I don’t like to teach very much. It would be a way to work on material and develop a piece. It would be a way to find dancers and give me the reason I needed to get in shape.” He gave the workshop for three weeks in September. Most of the dancers he’s using now came from it, though some are from Ohio State and were in the piece he did there. Most of the material, most of the movement, came out of the workshop. He planned to use a lot of people; that was one of the provisions of the original NEA grant. “I had 20 people in the workshop, and I realized that, just schedule-wise, 20 people would drive me crazy, so I decided to let them weed themselves out. I told them that I wanted to take my time - that the piece wouldn’t be done until March and that I intend to work every day. At the beginning I thought, oh, wow! Six months! All this time! Then November went by. I was saying to myself, ‘by the end of December this piece is going to be done! So we’ll have time to rehearse.’ Then came January. And by February it had to be done...I’d set up this situation where I’d have the freedom to play around. Finally, I played around so much that it ate up all the time."
“I was in a big fog.” There was all the music that Cervetti had composed, and all those months, and 12 dancers to be concerned about, and a thematic structure. “I tried to pull it together without making a packaged kind of thing. But the hard part was making sense of everything that we had. Like trying to put the house together... "
“Its all very clear,” says Rinker, “when you have the piece made. Then you can do all those fine little things that make the difference. But this piece didn’t come together until about a month ago. It became clear then what I had to do...Also, you have a chaotic element in collaboration, because you’re not doing it all yourself.”
“He has thrown out so much music,” says Cervetti, “that I could kill him. A musician has to be flexible because what counts here is the dance. I made 22 tapes, all about three-quarters of an hour long, which have been reduced to one tape. I let him take those things that he thought were useful for his purposes. Though I also let him see,” he adds with gravity, “that there were others that should not be discarded.”
“I was hoping that his music would give me a sense of organization,” says Rinker. “It didn’t. I heard this music and then I heard that music...it didn’t make sense to me.” “There were an enormous number of variations,” says Cervetti. “and I would say, ‘Would you like this one, or would you like the other one which is two seconds longer but has no synthesizer. Or do you want the one that has computer and live music.?”
“Finally,” continues Rinker, “I said, ‘You go do your own music and organize it any way you like.’ So he did, and then he plays it for me. It still didn’t make any sense to me, but I didn’t tell him that. I went off to rehearsal and, well, I recorded music from the radio and made a lot of the dance that way. Then I’d put on the music that he wrote and I would change it around. What could I do? Fourteen people were dancing in this one section and the music sounds, to me, like only one or two people. So I rearranged things. And then he come in, grouches at me. He’s horrified because I turn off the tape and I turn the radio on, then I turn the radio off, then there’s no music. He expected...”
“I expected order,” says Cervetti. Back in rehearsal, the dancers are getting into a crude sort of line that leads into a neater line for a canon of dipping, twisting torsos and arms. It’s too clean. “Let’s not be so good about it,” Rinker says. “I want it messy.” But not incoherent. “I don;t want to see you stepping,” he tells them, when their feet get too regular as they move into place. “I want to see you twisting.” They repeat the section a few times. Rinker, watching, leans back, arched against the wall. He holds his lips closed, pressed tightly against his teeth, lets his hands dangle, hooked in the neckline of his shirt. Finally, he likes the spacing.
“You can be that bad!” he says, clearly pleased. “Good. One more time.” Cervetti, sitting beside me, laughs. “It’s always one more time.” When I return to watch a run-through a week and a half later, the loft’s been painted white. The dancers are practicing a flat-footed, shuffling walk that’s coupled with slack arms and a wiggle in the torso. The music’s funny and grumbly here; the rhythm (in fours or eights) makes me think of a Polynesian war dance. Rinker checks the time, figures he can squeeze in a quick run of a short quartet for four women. The parts of it that happen on the floor suggest a revved up, thumping version of that kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley stuff you always see from above. Then, they run through it. The beginning, the statement of the movement material, is for Rinker. He warms up while Ruby Keeler sings on a scratchy recording, but when the taps start, he attacks a springy, swinging, wiggling solo. Then there’s a mob onstage. Soon, they’ve massed in a line that reforms as a snake (everyone with crossed, inked arms), turns into another line that folds into itself, then Zs around the space into an upstage corner. A sinuous solo for Rinker. Then the clump from the corner disperses with fidgety mosquito hands and busy movements that wind up in lunges. The floor empties and fills, often crowded with near traffic jams. Much of the material I’d expected to recognize has been submerged in larger patterns. Balanced on top of his chair back, Rinker watches a lazy, undulating section everyone is in. It looks to me like too-hot-to-sleep-at-night dancing. “Less, less, you guys,” Rinker cajoles. “More rhythm, less energy.” “Choreographically,” Rinker says, “I’ve begun very loose - and then it gets tighter and tighter. At first, the line-ups aren’t very good, some of the things that look like they’re supposed to be nice, like Balanchine - unwrapping and going around the stage - don’t happen at all. But, by the end, the stuff gets all together and everybody’s all here on this count. The progression is sort of related to the movie. 42nd Street is about making the show Pretty Ladies, which you never see until the very end when Ruby Keeler gets told that she’s going to be the star if she goes out there and hoofs it, and you see the final number, “42nd Street.”
"In a way, that’s how this piece works. I’m presenting the material all along, and I don’t really use it until the end.” “The piece I that did in Ohio,” he says, “was like a Cunningham piece to some extent, because of the training there. And that was rather nice, because I don’t want the dancers to copy me. I want them to analyze things for themselves. That’s one way you get good. Figuring out what it is you have to do, how you do it, what’s you’re strong at, what you’re weak at. What you’re strong at you’re always going to do, what you’re weak at you have to work at. I’m strong at doing things I’ve done before, and I;m weak a doing things the way I want to do them.” With this in mind. he’s trying not to be overly conscious of comparisons people will make between his work and Tharp’s. How it’s like hers, and how it isn’t, and isn’t that nice, or too bad.
“Choreographically,” he says, “I’ve taken things all along. Every person does that - it’s part of the continuity. It’s one of the wonderful things. Everyone looks like the people they came from. I expect Bertram Ross to look like Martha Graham, but I don’t expect Merce Cunningham to look like Martha anymore. “I’ve never wanted to dance anything I’ve made before. I want to be able to see what I’ve done without that hysterical oh-my-god-I’ve-got-to-warm-up-and-perform feeling I’m probably going to have since I haven’t been dancing all that much lately and I haven’t been performing at all.” He refuses to worry about whether he looks like he’s dancing one right out of one of Tharp’s pieces. That can’t be helped. “I am going to look like that. Probably."
Technical Ecstasy
February 5
The audience at the Theatre of the Riverside Church was loud in its appreciation of Sara Sugihara and Leigh Warren’s concert, an evening of clean, dynamic dancing of very high calibre. The fast, pulled-up movement, which varied little from piece to piece, was at an ecstatic pitch, but without the ecstasy. Characteristically, a contracting movement to one side would spring into a stretched-out balance reaching in the opposite direction. Or, just when you’d think the flow of a phrase (and the sheer effort required) must begin to turn the movement downward, or soften it, it would thrust slightly further up, or be tipped to show an even more delicate line, a more precarious balance.
All four dances were choreographed by Sugihara. The first, Intentional Veer, was a solo for Warren (a principal with Ballet Rambert). With a headful of dark curls, Warren comes sulleny onstage, stands, walks to the back where he poses, back to the audiences. He strips of a leather jacket, ballet slippers, sun glasses. Underneath, he’s n gray tights and top, dotted with occasional spangles. When he begins to “dance,” the insolent manner drops; holding his arms belled downwards, he speeds into turns that recoil into tilted, poised extensions of the whole body, ducks down to one side then leaps off in the opposite direction. Periodically, he stops and saunters around, stands posing, or, once, sits on stage with his legs spread in second, a suggestion of a leer, and lazily wiggles his feet at us. The dance is broken with these little pauses.
In Window, a venetian blind with the slats tipped closed hangs in front of the stage. John Malashock, in baseball cap, sits, reads a newspaper, and sips beer in a spotlit chair at one side. On the other side of the dimly lit stage, Sugihara enters, carrying her own chair, sits, and slouches back. She drops over frontward, then swings her torso into a sideways reach, and returns to her slouch. She repeats this to the other side, then wheels her chair a quarter-turn. Her forward arch carries her to the floor this time. Her movements are deliberate; their weight focused, contained. When Malashock gets up and opens the blind, the lights brighten and so does Sugihara’s dancing. (And later, when he closes it again, it turns slow and morose.) She moves with a light, tight bounce, a measured tension. Moving fast, her feet seem to make as little contact with the floor as possible; you expect the stage to crackle when they touch. In all four works, the dancing is set against, or includes, a static element. Like Malashock reading in Window.
In Inertia, Warren emerges from sleep or some sluggish state. He exposes the long curve of his torso with a sense of momentary vulnerability, when, as he extends his leg in arabesque, he opens the same arm extravagantly wide. He surges into whipping spins, scissors leaps, and lunges while Sugihara and Cornelius Fischer-Credo, a quiet couple, walk in and out, or stand around. In Sleeping Birds, a group work, the first woman on stage stands on on leg, pulls up the other into a casual turned-in, pique position, rests one arm across her bosom with the hand on the opposite shoulder. Another woman stands in the corner diagonally opposite for much of the piece, and other dancers, streaming on and off, pause for a respite from time to time in this position. At one point, six or seven of them are loosely bunched on one side. In Intentional Veer, Warren interrupts his dancing to be his own static counterpoint. For the most part (Sleeping Birds is the exception), I don’t see how the contrary, non-dancing element (whether expressed as pauses or as a separate presence) augments Sugihara’s choreography. It provides an occasional reprieve for the dancer, and sometimes breaks the continuity, without making any clear point or relation.
In Intentional Veer, Window, and Inertia, Sugihara shows us two kinds of movement (or two ways of being on stage, or two kinds of energy), but they don’t seem to have anything to do with one another As a result, the dances, despite their frequent brilliance, seem patchy, and don’t fully gel. I was perplexed, too, by the theatrical texts or devices Sugihara used. What did Warren’s smug, leather-jacketed persona in Intentional Veer have to do with what he did when he danced? And in Window, isn’t the adjustment of a venetian blind an overly elaborate cue for getting the lights up and the music faster...? Among the other excellent dancers were Nina Kedroff, Sara Pettitt and Margalit Rubin-Beery.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (January 4 to 7).
The audience at the Theatre of the Riverside Church was loud in its appreciation of Sara Sugihara and Leigh Warren’s concert, an evening of clean, dynamic dancing of very high calibre. The fast, pulled-up movement, which varied little from piece to piece, was at an ecstatic pitch, but without the ecstasy. Characteristically, a contracting movement to one side would spring into a stretched-out balance reaching in the opposite direction. Or, just when you’d think the flow of a phrase (and the sheer effort required) must begin to turn the movement downward, or soften it, it would thrust slightly further up, or be tipped to show an even more delicate line, a more precarious balance.
All four dances were choreographed by Sugihara. The first, Intentional Veer, was a solo for Warren (a principal with Ballet Rambert). With a headful of dark curls, Warren comes sulleny onstage, stands, walks to the back where he poses, back to the audiences. He strips of a leather jacket, ballet slippers, sun glasses. Underneath, he’s n gray tights and top, dotted with occasional spangles. When he begins to “dance,” the insolent manner drops; holding his arms belled downwards, he speeds into turns that recoil into tilted, poised extensions of the whole body, ducks down to one side then leaps off in the opposite direction. Periodically, he stops and saunters around, stands posing, or, once, sits on stage with his legs spread in second, a suggestion of a leer, and lazily wiggles his feet at us. The dance is broken with these little pauses.
In Window, a venetian blind with the slats tipped closed hangs in front of the stage. John Malashock, in baseball cap, sits, reads a newspaper, and sips beer in a spotlit chair at one side. On the other side of the dimly lit stage, Sugihara enters, carrying her own chair, sits, and slouches back. She drops over frontward, then swings her torso into a sideways reach, and returns to her slouch. She repeats this to the other side, then wheels her chair a quarter-turn. Her forward arch carries her to the floor this time. Her movements are deliberate; their weight focused, contained. When Malashock gets up and opens the blind, the lights brighten and so does Sugihara’s dancing. (And later, when he closes it again, it turns slow and morose.) She moves with a light, tight bounce, a measured tension. Moving fast, her feet seem to make as little contact with the floor as possible; you expect the stage to crackle when they touch. In all four works, the dancing is set against, or includes, a static element. Like Malashock reading in Window.
In Inertia, Warren emerges from sleep or some sluggish state. He exposes the long curve of his torso with a sense of momentary vulnerability, when, as he extends his leg in arabesque, he opens the same arm extravagantly wide. He surges into whipping spins, scissors leaps, and lunges while Sugihara and Cornelius Fischer-Credo, a quiet couple, walk in and out, or stand around. In Sleeping Birds, a group work, the first woman on stage stands on on leg, pulls up the other into a casual turned-in, pique position, rests one arm across her bosom with the hand on the opposite shoulder. Another woman stands in the corner diagonally opposite for much of the piece, and other dancers, streaming on and off, pause for a respite from time to time in this position. At one point, six or seven of them are loosely bunched on one side. In Intentional Veer, Warren interrupts his dancing to be his own static counterpoint. For the most part (Sleeping Birds is the exception), I don’t see how the contrary, non-dancing element (whether expressed as pauses or as a separate presence) augments Sugihara’s choreography. It provides an occasional reprieve for the dancer, and sometimes breaks the continuity, without making any clear point or relation.
In Intentional Veer, Window, and Inertia, Sugihara shows us two kinds of movement (or two ways of being on stage, or two kinds of energy), but they don’t seem to have anything to do with one another As a result, the dances, despite their frequent brilliance, seem patchy, and don’t fully gel. I was perplexed, too, by the theatrical texts or devices Sugihara used. What did Warren’s smug, leather-jacketed persona in Intentional Veer have to do with what he did when he danced? And in Window, isn’t the adjustment of a venetian blind an overly elaborate cue for getting the lights up and the music faster...? Among the other excellent dancers were Nina Kedroff, Sara Pettitt and Margalit Rubin-Beery.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (January 4 to 7).
Three for the Road
February 12
Trying to account for the special flavor of Fitzgerald, Kramer and Bean’s program at ATL, realized that they reminded me of an old-time sister act. There was a general feeling of congeniality and affability, and the sense of dancing just because it feels good. Kathy Kramer’s works particularly seemed almost like club routines, cheerful arrangements of movement without any serious dramatic or intellectual emphasis. Violinist Ross Levinson, who warmed up the audience, and played interludes, added immeasurably to the good-time feeling. Opening the program, he played abrupt chords that rose and fell off, mixed with snippets of recognizable melody, and occasionally scat-sang syllables in a sort of falsetto. His spirit was sweetly crafty. In the third interlude, he played swing fiddle (remember Florian Zabach?) with rambunctious zest that got the audience stomping.
In Kramer’s Hit or Miss, the three seated women, in clumsy black overalls bunched at the knee, stamp their feet in rhythm; they swivel around and off, move in interlacing squirrelly clusters on different levels, and slip back onto their chairs. From time to time, they speak the words of the title in isolation and with varying inflections (for musical interest?): when they all say or or or, they sound just like sea lions. Sometimes later, they’re ho-skipping in a line, forward and back, like in some Balkan kolo. Peculiarly, it all winds up in a long, rather cramped Lindy sequence, with the leftover woman always cutting in when the partners pause.
Karen Bean’s Joanna is a lyric, slightly sinuous solo, often motivated by spidering fingers or fascination with a hand. In Kramer’s Cool Your Jets, she and Bean, in black pants and white shirts, run through a jiggling, sliding routine twice: the second time to a tune and soft-shoe of Baby Laurence. It seems the kind of number you’d expect to see sold with the pretense of spontaneity. Kramer and Bean did it with shining faces and practiced diligence.
Pike Lake, a new, collaborative work, uses a tape collage, with music by Fleetwood Mac, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Vivaldi, along with sounds of bugs, rain, and an automobile engine. You can tell right away that the women are off on a camping trip. There’s the sound of a van starting up; F, K and B face sideways on camp stools. They slump back; sometimes they seem to be lightly jolted. In a chain reaction, Bean yawns, shakes Fitzgerald, who butts Kramer, and they all switch seats. There’s a sense of expectancy combined with drowsiness. They wind down the window, shake out their hair in the breeze. When you hear the rain start, they’re facing back and do windshield wipers with their arms, varied with the occasional flick of a finger, pausing and resuming in a pattern that’s irregular enough to provide surprises. They manage to keep the comedy understated and unpredictable. It never gets too literal, or literal for too long at a time. The three stand and their stools are pulled offstage. They pivot in a clump, scatter and regroup. They make waves with their arms: we’ve arrived at Pike Lake, I guess.
There are the sounds of nighttime insects buzzing and clicking: each woman seems slightly on edge. Now and then, the narrative yields, as it does here, to lyrical interludes that balance the piece with a certain moody, introspective dimension. The three roll on in sleeping bags when the Vivaldi comes on. They bump together and apart and together exact as patty cake. Their muffled bodies become partly discernible in the bags as they neatly, all together now flex their feet, lift their knees, squirm, flatten out, cross their legs...Eventually, they stand up, wearing floral bra tops and short slips that might be playsuits or bathing suits or sleeping attire. The sleeping bags are bunched around their ankles. Scooting around they dance with one foot still in the bag - looks like skating - and go for a swim in Pike Lake.
At American Theatre Lab (January 11 to 14).
Trying to account for the special flavor of Fitzgerald, Kramer and Bean’s program at ATL, realized that they reminded me of an old-time sister act. There was a general feeling of congeniality and affability, and the sense of dancing just because it feels good. Kathy Kramer’s works particularly seemed almost like club routines, cheerful arrangements of movement without any serious dramatic or intellectual emphasis. Violinist Ross Levinson, who warmed up the audience, and played interludes, added immeasurably to the good-time feeling. Opening the program, he played abrupt chords that rose and fell off, mixed with snippets of recognizable melody, and occasionally scat-sang syllables in a sort of falsetto. His spirit was sweetly crafty. In the third interlude, he played swing fiddle (remember Florian Zabach?) with rambunctious zest that got the audience stomping.
In Kramer’s Hit or Miss, the three seated women, in clumsy black overalls bunched at the knee, stamp their feet in rhythm; they swivel around and off, move in interlacing squirrelly clusters on different levels, and slip back onto their chairs. From time to time, they speak the words of the title in isolation and with varying inflections (for musical interest?): when they all say or or or, they sound just like sea lions. Sometimes later, they’re ho-skipping in a line, forward and back, like in some Balkan kolo. Peculiarly, it all winds up in a long, rather cramped Lindy sequence, with the leftover woman always cutting in when the partners pause.
Karen Bean’s Joanna is a lyric, slightly sinuous solo, often motivated by spidering fingers or fascination with a hand. In Kramer’s Cool Your Jets, she and Bean, in black pants and white shirts, run through a jiggling, sliding routine twice: the second time to a tune and soft-shoe of Baby Laurence. It seems the kind of number you’d expect to see sold with the pretense of spontaneity. Kramer and Bean did it with shining faces and practiced diligence.
Pike Lake, a new, collaborative work, uses a tape collage, with music by Fleetwood Mac, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Vivaldi, along with sounds of bugs, rain, and an automobile engine. You can tell right away that the women are off on a camping trip. There’s the sound of a van starting up; F, K and B face sideways on camp stools. They slump back; sometimes they seem to be lightly jolted. In a chain reaction, Bean yawns, shakes Fitzgerald, who butts Kramer, and they all switch seats. There’s a sense of expectancy combined with drowsiness. They wind down the window, shake out their hair in the breeze. When you hear the rain start, they’re facing back and do windshield wipers with their arms, varied with the occasional flick of a finger, pausing and resuming in a pattern that’s irregular enough to provide surprises. They manage to keep the comedy understated and unpredictable. It never gets too literal, or literal for too long at a time. The three stand and their stools are pulled offstage. They pivot in a clump, scatter and regroup. They make waves with their arms: we’ve arrived at Pike Lake, I guess.
There are the sounds of nighttime insects buzzing and clicking: each woman seems slightly on edge. Now and then, the narrative yields, as it does here, to lyrical interludes that balance the piece with a certain moody, introspective dimension. The three roll on in sleeping bags when the Vivaldi comes on. They bump together and apart and together exact as patty cake. Their muffled bodies become partly discernible in the bags as they neatly, all together now flex their feet, lift their knees, squirm, flatten out, cross their legs...Eventually, they stand up, wearing floral bra tops and short slips that might be playsuits or bathing suits or sleeping attire. The sleeping bags are bunched around their ankles. Scooting around they dance with one foot still in the bag - looks like skating - and go for a swim in Pike Lake.
At American Theatre Lab (January 11 to 14).
Time for a Cuban Revolution
July 30
The Met has done the Ballet Nacional no service by allowing it to bring a ballet like Night of the Guitar that is frankly inept. And much too much of the repertoire is embarrassing. The dancers are well-trained, obviously work hard and many of them are very talented. I don’t know how they feel about the fourth rate works they get to perform, but they have every right to be furious. If they have had a chance to reflect deeply on much of what they’re doing, then no matter how efficiently they manage to keep smiling in public, a good many of them must be unhappy.
Dance has grown beyond director Alicia Alonso’s understanding, and beyond revolutionary rhetoric, but the company seems to be clamped into a shockingly naive popular aesthetic. The dancers get to do a lot of fancy stunts, and though they may become more expert showmen and more technically adept, with few exceptions - mostly classical - they are not doing works that will help them to grow as artists. The waste is cruel. Another word for it is exploitation. Alonso’s hold on the company has become a stranglehold.
Night of the Guitar consists of a large group work by Alerto Mendez - Estirpes Cubanas (Cuban Origins) - followed by a group of undistinguished solos, duets, trios, etc. by Gustavo Herrera, Ivan Tenorio, Roland Petit, Gladys Gonzales and Mendez, and a final ludicrous finale with Alonso soundlessly strumming a guitar and supported triumphantly overhead. In Estirpes Cubanas, “Indians” wander across the stag tootling on flutes. The men cross, stamping. The women cross, then the men with the women on their backs, scissored around their waists, etc...The Indians wind up lying on the floor when the “Spanish” enter, wearing red-and gold-trimmed ponchos like two towels attached at the shoulders. (Does this mean that the Spanish came to Cuba because they heard about the beaches?) The Spanish do courtly steps to courtly music amid the bodies of the Indians, who are crouching now, and the lead woman stops to pose on each of their backs. The Indians tactfully evaporate and the Spanish back off as the “Africans” come on with stereotypical showbiz uggabugga movement - stomping fee, snaky arms, wobbling heads - punctuated by occasional pirouettes and battements. The women flex their torsos and wiggle their pelvises.
Since Mendez does not trouble to suggest the extermination of the aboriginal Arawak population, you’d expect some faint indication that Africans came to Cuba not to spread a rhythmic message, but as slaves - but there’s none. At the end, he Spanish join the Africans - African men with Spanish women, Spanish men with African women - and they all do some slow social dancing with their partners in a big clump. Antonio Gades’s Blood Wedding, which concluded that program seems a masterpiece by comparison. It’s too stretched out, and a choppy score makes it appear disjointed, but it’s clear and direct in its depiction of Lorca’s tragedy.
Mendez’s Tarde en la Siesta shows four sisters at home at the turn of the century. It’s thin, but it also gives you a chance to see that the dancers can do more than show off. Mirta Garcia, the youngest, twirls in a perky, slightly coy and gawky solo. Amparo Brito exhibits a sunny nature. Aurora Bosch shows her authority as the eldest with impressive battements in a duet with the youngest. In her solo, she caresses herself and seems to be comforted by her own hands. She turns, with belling arms, then is tipped and impelled forward by her straight legs thrusting out to one side and the other. She staggers back, her arms weakly imploring. Then she composes herself. Marta Garcia is wonderfully expressive as the next-to-the-eldest. She stands, moony, during the duet. Then leans back in extreme but private anguish. Her arms come down along her body in frustration. Her reaches and steps are abruptly cut off; she knows her desires must be curtailed. The ballet closes with a picture of family strength in unity, but beyond that there is a sense of disappointment and waste amid comfort. The younger sisters just haven’t yet come in to the testament of suffering borne by the older pair.
Watching the Cubans’ Les Sylphides, I realized I’ve never seen a first-rate performance of it. I’ve either seen dancers who I suppose the-powers-that-determine-who-dances-what hope will grow into the roles (although, when they’re good enough, they’ll be doing something else instead), or dancers who’ve passed their prime. This limp performance was no exception. The corps was beautifully round and united, but the pace was slow, and the soloists lumpy and earthbound. Alonso’s Grand Pas de Quatre is a doll-like, mannered parody; a Pas de Quatre of affectation without much affection. The Trocks would have done it with more love.
Mirta Pla managed to dance with lyricism and spirit as Cerrito, and Marta Garcia was substantial and formal as Grisi. But Josefina Mendez was rather stiff, forbidding, and disturbingly masculine as Taglioni. In Brian MacDonald’s Remembranza, Alonso, fortunately, doesn’t attempt much - a few light runs, promenades in arabesque. Jorge Esquivel, her partner, looks soft and powerful as a lion and about 14 feet tall. It can be quite beautiful to observe the care and adoration with which he treats her: she runs slowly toward him, almost pausing at the end of a run instead of jumping to him. He catches and lifts her nearly dead weight, and carries her overhead. Then he lowers her with extreme tenderness and reverence. But touching as it may be to watch him nurse Alonso, it doesn’t make a dance. Mendez’s Song for the Strange Flower, also danced by Alonso and Esquivel, is another swampy, indistinct duet. Alberto Alonso’s El Guije is a story of a rural goblin who avenges a woman
At the Metropolitan Opera House (to July 26).
The Met has done the Ballet Nacional no service by allowing it to bring a ballet like Night of the Guitar that is frankly inept. And much too much of the repertoire is embarrassing. The dancers are well-trained, obviously work hard and many of them are very talented. I don’t know how they feel about the fourth rate works they get to perform, but they have every right to be furious. If they have had a chance to reflect deeply on much of what they’re doing, then no matter how efficiently they manage to keep smiling in public, a good many of them must be unhappy.
Dance has grown beyond director Alicia Alonso’s understanding, and beyond revolutionary rhetoric, but the company seems to be clamped into a shockingly naive popular aesthetic. The dancers get to do a lot of fancy stunts, and though they may become more expert showmen and more technically adept, with few exceptions - mostly classical - they are not doing works that will help them to grow as artists. The waste is cruel. Another word for it is exploitation. Alonso’s hold on the company has become a stranglehold.
Night of the Guitar consists of a large group work by Alerto Mendez - Estirpes Cubanas (Cuban Origins) - followed by a group of undistinguished solos, duets, trios, etc. by Gustavo Herrera, Ivan Tenorio, Roland Petit, Gladys Gonzales and Mendez, and a final ludicrous finale with Alonso soundlessly strumming a guitar and supported triumphantly overhead. In Estirpes Cubanas, “Indians” wander across the stag tootling on flutes. The men cross, stamping. The women cross, then the men with the women on their backs, scissored around their waists, etc...The Indians wind up lying on the floor when the “Spanish” enter, wearing red-and gold-trimmed ponchos like two towels attached at the shoulders. (Does this mean that the Spanish came to Cuba because they heard about the beaches?) The Spanish do courtly steps to courtly music amid the bodies of the Indians, who are crouching now, and the lead woman stops to pose on each of their backs. The Indians tactfully evaporate and the Spanish back off as the “Africans” come on with stereotypical showbiz uggabugga movement - stomping fee, snaky arms, wobbling heads - punctuated by occasional pirouettes and battements. The women flex their torsos and wiggle their pelvises.
Since Mendez does not trouble to suggest the extermination of the aboriginal Arawak population, you’d expect some faint indication that Africans came to Cuba not to spread a rhythmic message, but as slaves - but there’s none. At the end, he Spanish join the Africans - African men with Spanish women, Spanish men with African women - and they all do some slow social dancing with their partners in a big clump. Antonio Gades’s Blood Wedding, which concluded that program seems a masterpiece by comparison. It’s too stretched out, and a choppy score makes it appear disjointed, but it’s clear and direct in its depiction of Lorca’s tragedy.
Mendez’s Tarde en la Siesta shows four sisters at home at the turn of the century. It’s thin, but it also gives you a chance to see that the dancers can do more than show off. Mirta Garcia, the youngest, twirls in a perky, slightly coy and gawky solo. Amparo Brito exhibits a sunny nature. Aurora Bosch shows her authority as the eldest with impressive battements in a duet with the youngest. In her solo, she caresses herself and seems to be comforted by her own hands. She turns, with belling arms, then is tipped and impelled forward by her straight legs thrusting out to one side and the other. She staggers back, her arms weakly imploring. Then she composes herself. Marta Garcia is wonderfully expressive as the next-to-the-eldest. She stands, moony, during the duet. Then leans back in extreme but private anguish. Her arms come down along her body in frustration. Her reaches and steps are abruptly cut off; she knows her desires must be curtailed. The ballet closes with a picture of family strength in unity, but beyond that there is a sense of disappointment and waste amid comfort. The younger sisters just haven’t yet come in to the testament of suffering borne by the older pair.
Watching the Cubans’ Les Sylphides, I realized I’ve never seen a first-rate performance of it. I’ve either seen dancers who I suppose the-powers-that-determine-who-dances-what hope will grow into the roles (although, when they’re good enough, they’ll be doing something else instead), or dancers who’ve passed their prime. This limp performance was no exception. The corps was beautifully round and united, but the pace was slow, and the soloists lumpy and earthbound. Alonso’s Grand Pas de Quatre is a doll-like, mannered parody; a Pas de Quatre of affectation without much affection. The Trocks would have done it with more love.
Mirta Pla managed to dance with lyricism and spirit as Cerrito, and Marta Garcia was substantial and formal as Grisi. But Josefina Mendez was rather stiff, forbidding, and disturbingly masculine as Taglioni. In Brian MacDonald’s Remembranza, Alonso, fortunately, doesn’t attempt much - a few light runs, promenades in arabesque. Jorge Esquivel, her partner, looks soft and powerful as a lion and about 14 feet tall. It can be quite beautiful to observe the care and adoration with which he treats her: she runs slowly toward him, almost pausing at the end of a run instead of jumping to him. He catches and lifts her nearly dead weight, and carries her overhead. Then he lowers her with extreme tenderness and reverence. But touching as it may be to watch him nurse Alonso, it doesn’t make a dance. Mendez’s Song for the Strange Flower, also danced by Alonso and Esquivel, is another swampy, indistinct duet. Alberto Alonso’s El Guije is a story of a rural goblin who avenges a woman
At the Metropolitan Opera House (to July 26).
Viola Farber Makes a Dance by Subtraction
March 12
Viola Farber hasn’t has a studio of her own since the company lost its glorious eighth floor loft on Broadway. Since then, she’s been teaching and rehearsing at Larry Richardson’s basement Dance Gallery on East 14th Street, where the company is performing March 13 to 18. It’s a rare, sunny afternoon, and through a window about 10 feet above the floor, containing two obviously hard-to-water plants, the sun pours into a tiny rectangle on the black linoleum. Jeff Slayton, Viola’s husband, is in California - doing more teaching and choreographing on his own.
“We’re doing a new duet,” Viola tells me. “But we’re rehearsing it separately. It’s just walking, but it’s so difficult.” The piece the company’s rehearsing now is a new one, full of floods of frenetic activity that suddenly abate. “Alan!” calls Viola when composer Alan Evans (who also plays for her classes) comes in. “There are too many fives, we’ve discovered.” “Okay,” says Evans, unflustered. “I’ve brought my score and my eraser.” They focus on those places where the timing has to be clarified and measures pared. Sections are repeated and repeated as the musical problems are ironed out. “You don’t have to fall down every time,” Viola tells the dancers, but the next time most do anyway. The dancers’ main concerns at this point are to get absolutely clear about the counts and cues and to solve the spacing problems that crop up. In one place, Michael Cichetti and Susan Matheke try to figure out how to do some turns without hitting each other. In another, Ann Koren runs around Michael in a curve so sharp she almost always slips. Viola fixes it so Ann can grab him at the waist and realign herself as she starts to veer.
When I speak to Viola a few days later, I ask if she’s named that dance yet. “Yes,” she says, “I called it Local.” Amused, but poker-faced, she says after a careful pause, “I was going to call it Express. But it does have a few stops in it. She reminds me of a sequence in Yellow Submarine where the cartoon Beatles are in a hallway and they keep opening doors. “They open one door and a train is about to come roaring out and they close the door on it. I want that dance to be like that train - only you can’t close the door.
Private Relations is new: the company premiered it in Minnesota at the end of January. Many of Viola’s dances are lonely, headlong bouts in the face of desperation. Endurance tests. But this one is more tender, graver, more held in. “Are you exhausted?” Viola asks the dancers before they run through it, rather hoping the answer will be yes. (“My idea is they ought to run around the block 10 times before they do it.”) It starts slowly, builds tension gradually. Viola is in it, but the dancers do it without her: she’s running the cassette. Much of the dance is in silence; some parts are accompanied by the shining a cappella voices of a Finnish children’s choir.
“I wanted something,” she says, strangling an embarrassed laugh, “that sounded like the ghosts of children singing.” Ande Peck enters first, protectively circling his head with his arms. Ann comes in next holding one hand vertically in front of her, about the level of her throat. The gesture seems cautious, as if intended to hold things down, to keep anything jarring from occurring. If she moved the hand to her lips, it would be to quiet some particular noise, but held slightly away as it is, it would blanket everything with stillness. Michael walks in holding his elbow. At last, two people enter together, Larry Clark and Jumay Chu, slowly, in plie. He holds the sides of her head, guiding her with tender care. One arm slips around her shoulder. “I was in Nancy,” Viola says, of the dance’s origins. “It was October. There tended to be a lot of rain. I didn’t have a great deal to do, but I had to work every day so I couldn’t go traveling off. I went to museums a lot. One was a regional museum of Lorraine, and there was a print of three women who were together, yet not together, doing very simple gestures. I was impressed by that. And also I was very alone. And I thought about that print. I didn’t think much abut being alone, I just was alone. And I thought about the dance, about specific gestures that had to do with...privacy, and with aloneness.”
Occasionally, there are periods of intense activity: the dancers flip and shake their hands close to their bodies, scrape their feet in little steps along the floor. Susan Matheke enters with solemn, stiff leaps, seems to send a shock through the other dancers. They freeze, watching her, until she’s gone. Their next gestures are quick expressions of despair and frustration; striking, fist-shaking, slicing, clasping, nervous twisting. They make some moves toward one another, but these seem incomplete. When Susan next crosses, she seems like some powerful angel: something they can’t look at and can’t resist. Her passage turns each one away from her, and, when she’s gone, they’re all left dragging hands to their mouths, in what looks to me like doubt, or vague guilt.
“Susan was not there,” says Viola, “when I started working with the dancers. And I didn’t want to backtrack and teach everything all over again. So I decided to give her a special part - which makes her the one who’s always left out. And then I wanted to change that - so she has that meeting with Ed [Henry] where he finally is nice to her and takes care of her a little bit.” Ed shifts his hand from Susan’s shoulder, enfolds her head and brings her in to his chest. After a moment, he carries her off in one of the piece’s very few lifts. She sits erect on his shoulder, the inside of her knee locked against the back of his neck. The pairings are all fragile and brief. I realize that I associate all the tender, smothered feelings of the dance with a Ghislebertus carving of the just-risen Christ. He almost floats. His head bends toward Mary Magdalene and his upraised hands, with their open palms, both bless and deny her, while his body angles away and refuses to be touched.
“I really knew what I wanted it to look like,” Viola says. “Quiet and contained But suddenly everybody would be starting to dance, and I'd think, ‘No, no, no, I’ve got to change that.’ I kept taking things away and making things smaller, less obviously energetic. The dancers have to keep holding back, toning things down. Often, I add material and I pul things out and I want things bigger and stronger. This is the opposite. I kept reducing it, like simmering something on the stove so the extraneous boils away.”
Viola Farber hasn’t has a studio of her own since the company lost its glorious eighth floor loft on Broadway. Since then, she’s been teaching and rehearsing at Larry Richardson’s basement Dance Gallery on East 14th Street, where the company is performing March 13 to 18. It’s a rare, sunny afternoon, and through a window about 10 feet above the floor, containing two obviously hard-to-water plants, the sun pours into a tiny rectangle on the black linoleum. Jeff Slayton, Viola’s husband, is in California - doing more teaching and choreographing on his own.
“We’re doing a new duet,” Viola tells me. “But we’re rehearsing it separately. It’s just walking, but it’s so difficult.” The piece the company’s rehearsing now is a new one, full of floods of frenetic activity that suddenly abate. “Alan!” calls Viola when composer Alan Evans (who also plays for her classes) comes in. “There are too many fives, we’ve discovered.” “Okay,” says Evans, unflustered. “I’ve brought my score and my eraser.” They focus on those places where the timing has to be clarified and measures pared. Sections are repeated and repeated as the musical problems are ironed out. “You don’t have to fall down every time,” Viola tells the dancers, but the next time most do anyway. The dancers’ main concerns at this point are to get absolutely clear about the counts and cues and to solve the spacing problems that crop up. In one place, Michael Cichetti and Susan Matheke try to figure out how to do some turns without hitting each other. In another, Ann Koren runs around Michael in a curve so sharp she almost always slips. Viola fixes it so Ann can grab him at the waist and realign herself as she starts to veer.
When I speak to Viola a few days later, I ask if she’s named that dance yet. “Yes,” she says, “I called it Local.” Amused, but poker-faced, she says after a careful pause, “I was going to call it Express. But it does have a few stops in it. She reminds me of a sequence in Yellow Submarine where the cartoon Beatles are in a hallway and they keep opening doors. “They open one door and a train is about to come roaring out and they close the door on it. I want that dance to be like that train - only you can’t close the door.
Private Relations is new: the company premiered it in Minnesota at the end of January. Many of Viola’s dances are lonely, headlong bouts in the face of desperation. Endurance tests. But this one is more tender, graver, more held in. “Are you exhausted?” Viola asks the dancers before they run through it, rather hoping the answer will be yes. (“My idea is they ought to run around the block 10 times before they do it.”) It starts slowly, builds tension gradually. Viola is in it, but the dancers do it without her: she’s running the cassette. Much of the dance is in silence; some parts are accompanied by the shining a cappella voices of a Finnish children’s choir.
“I wanted something,” she says, strangling an embarrassed laugh, “that sounded like the ghosts of children singing.” Ande Peck enters first, protectively circling his head with his arms. Ann comes in next holding one hand vertically in front of her, about the level of her throat. The gesture seems cautious, as if intended to hold things down, to keep anything jarring from occurring. If she moved the hand to her lips, it would be to quiet some particular noise, but held slightly away as it is, it would blanket everything with stillness. Michael walks in holding his elbow. At last, two people enter together, Larry Clark and Jumay Chu, slowly, in plie. He holds the sides of her head, guiding her with tender care. One arm slips around her shoulder. “I was in Nancy,” Viola says, of the dance’s origins. “It was October. There tended to be a lot of rain. I didn’t have a great deal to do, but I had to work every day so I couldn’t go traveling off. I went to museums a lot. One was a regional museum of Lorraine, and there was a print of three women who were together, yet not together, doing very simple gestures. I was impressed by that. And also I was very alone. And I thought about that print. I didn’t think much abut being alone, I just was alone. And I thought about the dance, about specific gestures that had to do with...privacy, and with aloneness.”
Occasionally, there are periods of intense activity: the dancers flip and shake their hands close to their bodies, scrape their feet in little steps along the floor. Susan Matheke enters with solemn, stiff leaps, seems to send a shock through the other dancers. They freeze, watching her, until she’s gone. Their next gestures are quick expressions of despair and frustration; striking, fist-shaking, slicing, clasping, nervous twisting. They make some moves toward one another, but these seem incomplete. When Susan next crosses, she seems like some powerful angel: something they can’t look at and can’t resist. Her passage turns each one away from her, and, when she’s gone, they’re all left dragging hands to their mouths, in what looks to me like doubt, or vague guilt.
“Susan was not there,” says Viola, “when I started working with the dancers. And I didn’t want to backtrack and teach everything all over again. So I decided to give her a special part - which makes her the one who’s always left out. And then I wanted to change that - so she has that meeting with Ed [Henry] where he finally is nice to her and takes care of her a little bit.” Ed shifts his hand from Susan’s shoulder, enfolds her head and brings her in to his chest. After a moment, he carries her off in one of the piece’s very few lifts. She sits erect on his shoulder, the inside of her knee locked against the back of his neck. The pairings are all fragile and brief. I realize that I associate all the tender, smothered feelings of the dance with a Ghislebertus carving of the just-risen Christ. He almost floats. His head bends toward Mary Magdalene and his upraised hands, with their open palms, both bless and deny her, while his body angles away and refuses to be touched.
“I really knew what I wanted it to look like,” Viola says. “Quiet and contained But suddenly everybody would be starting to dance, and I'd think, ‘No, no, no, I’ve got to change that.’ I kept taking things away and making things smaller, less obviously energetic. The dancers have to keep holding back, toning things down. Often, I add material and I pul things out and I want things bigger and stronger. This is the opposite. I kept reducing it, like simmering something on the stove so the extraneous boils away.”