1980 CONTINUED
Don't Give Anything Away
April 14
Sally Bowden's solo, Essays, is one of those low-key works. Silent sections alternate with a tape of Bowden talking about the apparent anarchy of trying to make a dance. the advantages and disadvantages of deadlines, paying for studio time, the satisfactions of getting your flyers out, as well as some general philosophical notions. "I've always thought that everything boils down to simple things," she says.
Bowden starts Essays with an arm swing that takes her around; another swing lifts her up. Intermittently she drops her weight, makes a regular, soft thump with one foot. Her arms curve and windmill thoughtfully; her body sometimes settles heavily, then lightens; and Bowden explores increasingly subtle and patient turnings and relationships of te hands, elbows, knees, hips, head. She starts another section with an awkward bobbing motion, then combines it with the earlier swing through the torso, and gets her body going several ways at once - like the effect of simultaneous waves muddying and altering each other. Bowden is often occupied with shifts and alterations that seem muted and minor, in part because they're so largely interior. The tone is always the same, the focus close to the body, the delivery intentionally flat. Her face hardly varies in expression - she seems worried, sad, rather stern. She does nothing to mitigate that habitual, rather hard onstage look, and this augments a certain monotone effect, a kind of penurious attitude. You feel the dance is being doled out.
Bowden can be humorous, but her humor is mostly on tape. When the movement seems humorous, you can rarely be sure she intends it. Except, for example when she talks about her preference for Wigman over Graham. She goes into a squatty, bent-over position. Her movements become gnarled and her face particularly intense and even afflicted. She sickles her foot with determination. Her arms jerk, her balance wobbles. Gradually, these grotesqueries fade out, and she returns to amplifying the delicate coordinations and shifts that seem to be her main concern. In Morningdance, a solo to lieder by Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf, Venetia Chakos-Stifler wears a long black dress and robe that look like either elegant boudoir apparel or a formal evening outfit for one of those ladies who poses by large, expensive black cars, a gent in a tux in attendance. Chakos-Stifler walks back and forth musing, is arrested by a thought, then resumes her walk. As the song ends, she turns sideways, to extend her hands behind her flatly, palms down. She wasn't comfortable in this first part - she seemed to be play-acting too much But in the next part, she stands, swaying slightly, seeming vaguely exalted. She leans back somewhat, still swaying, arms opened as if to the merest breeze.
The third part starts with her head bent. She raises her hand and follows it with her gaze, extends the other arm, and sweeps both around her body. She holds a half-closed hand near her mouth, moves it away, lets whatever's supposed to be in it, if anything, drift away. We've all seen enough soft-focus of women like this (but they're usually wearing white). The "womanly" image, the poses she takes and passes through, are in an old-fashioned mode, complemented by the accompanying songs. But the songs are so much richer in sentiment and sensitivity. Morningdance's simple images can's contain them, don't resonate nearly enough. Bowden's Crescent, for a line of six women, tor perhaps chorines, uses five Israeli, Italian and Balkan folkdances. The rhythms are wonderful. And how I needed to hear them!
To the first, Israeli dance, the women sway, then step from side to side, and progress to step-together, step-together. They divide into two groups as their arms curve upwards, then turn and come back into line as they drop arms. In the second dance (a thrilling Serbian Cacak, I think), they rhythmically drop their weight onto one flat foot, then begin to move out (step-drag, step-drag). As their line moves, they pivot in series, then break apart briefly to follow six intercutting paths. Each dance starts with such simple moves in place a back and forth rocking motion s sort of mumbled batterie of unstretched tendus, etc) which is varied or developed just a little, then taken though the space. It's often quite pleasing, as accurate unison work can be, especially when the moves are broad and sometimes funny (like the batterie in the tarantella, done by the stiff, criss-crossing arms). But the moves are all moderate - at half-speed, or maybe slower - and the music wildly energetic. After two muted works, the irrepressible music made sitting in your seat maddening.
At American Theatre Lab. (April 3 to 6).
Sally Bowden's solo, Essays, is one of those low-key works. Silent sections alternate with a tape of Bowden talking about the apparent anarchy of trying to make a dance. the advantages and disadvantages of deadlines, paying for studio time, the satisfactions of getting your flyers out, as well as some general philosophical notions. "I've always thought that everything boils down to simple things," she says.
Bowden starts Essays with an arm swing that takes her around; another swing lifts her up. Intermittently she drops her weight, makes a regular, soft thump with one foot. Her arms curve and windmill thoughtfully; her body sometimes settles heavily, then lightens; and Bowden explores increasingly subtle and patient turnings and relationships of te hands, elbows, knees, hips, head. She starts another section with an awkward bobbing motion, then combines it with the earlier swing through the torso, and gets her body going several ways at once - like the effect of simultaneous waves muddying and altering each other. Bowden is often occupied with shifts and alterations that seem muted and minor, in part because they're so largely interior. The tone is always the same, the focus close to the body, the delivery intentionally flat. Her face hardly varies in expression - she seems worried, sad, rather stern. She does nothing to mitigate that habitual, rather hard onstage look, and this augments a certain monotone effect, a kind of penurious attitude. You feel the dance is being doled out.
Bowden can be humorous, but her humor is mostly on tape. When the movement seems humorous, you can rarely be sure she intends it. Except, for example when she talks about her preference for Wigman over Graham. She goes into a squatty, bent-over position. Her movements become gnarled and her face particularly intense and even afflicted. She sickles her foot with determination. Her arms jerk, her balance wobbles. Gradually, these grotesqueries fade out, and she returns to amplifying the delicate coordinations and shifts that seem to be her main concern. In Morningdance, a solo to lieder by Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf, Venetia Chakos-Stifler wears a long black dress and robe that look like either elegant boudoir apparel or a formal evening outfit for one of those ladies who poses by large, expensive black cars, a gent in a tux in attendance. Chakos-Stifler walks back and forth musing, is arrested by a thought, then resumes her walk. As the song ends, she turns sideways, to extend her hands behind her flatly, palms down. She wasn't comfortable in this first part - she seemed to be play-acting too much But in the next part, she stands, swaying slightly, seeming vaguely exalted. She leans back somewhat, still swaying, arms opened as if to the merest breeze.
The third part starts with her head bent. She raises her hand and follows it with her gaze, extends the other arm, and sweeps both around her body. She holds a half-closed hand near her mouth, moves it away, lets whatever's supposed to be in it, if anything, drift away. We've all seen enough soft-focus of women like this (but they're usually wearing white). The "womanly" image, the poses she takes and passes through, are in an old-fashioned mode, complemented by the accompanying songs. But the songs are so much richer in sentiment and sensitivity. Morningdance's simple images can's contain them, don't resonate nearly enough. Bowden's Crescent, for a line of six women, tor perhaps chorines, uses five Israeli, Italian and Balkan folkdances. The rhythms are wonderful. And how I needed to hear them!
To the first, Israeli dance, the women sway, then step from side to side, and progress to step-together, step-together. They divide into two groups as their arms curve upwards, then turn and come back into line as they drop arms. In the second dance (a thrilling Serbian Cacak, I think), they rhythmically drop their weight onto one flat foot, then begin to move out (step-drag, step-drag). As their line moves, they pivot in series, then break apart briefly to follow six intercutting paths. Each dance starts with such simple moves in place a back and forth rocking motion s sort of mumbled batterie of unstretched tendus, etc) which is varied or developed just a little, then taken though the space. It's often quite pleasing, as accurate unison work can be, especially when the moves are broad and sometimes funny (like the batterie in the tarantella, done by the stiff, criss-crossing arms). But the moves are all moderate - at half-speed, or maybe slower - and the music wildly energetic. After two muted works, the irrepressible music made sitting in your seat maddening.
At American Theatre Lab. (April 3 to 6).
Easy Does It
February 18
Jill Becker's concert at ATL was easy to take but puzzling. Her titles are enigmatic, if they are clues to the work at all. Stop, a new solo for Becker herself, was in some ways the most interesting piece. Maybe because more of its structure was bare. But maybe it just seemed undiluted, since all the action was contained in one body.
Becker's a clear, refined dancer. Her hair's boyishly cropped, her demeanor's serious and agreeable. The piece starts with an accumulation. Standing, she delicately tests several places for her foot around a rough half-circle on the floor. Repeats that, then twists back. Repeats those, and adds a sideways lean. Then a forward twist of her body, and, making several brief pauses and adjustments, angles her head forward to peer under a framing arm. This kind of adjusting is one theme of Stop. Becker aims for a position, goes deeper into it, defines and sets it. Then she abandons the sequence, and, in profile, stamps back and forth in place in a wide stance. Her pelvis rocks, a rippling wave drives through her body like through a traveling camel. Throughout the piece, she litters versions of the early movements. Sometimes she isolates the original impulses in limited areas of the body, like the lower torso, or forearm and wrist. Sometimes she breaks into more eccentric twitches and wobbles. Towards the end, she moves in a squatting walk, then sits in a squat pretending to play a harmonica. The literal image is very odd. The combination of a repeated pattern (varied and fragmented) with many sudden breaks and curious movements seems a mite arbitrary. But Becker's definition, her playful intensity and strong inner focus, bring it together. In the group pieces, the dancers work individually: their movements relate, but rarely do they use each other for balance or impetus or motivation, though a sense of communal well-being is generated. Design within the space doesn't seem to be one of Becker's concerns. Keeping the movement going, and keeping it changing is.
Lurch, for Becker, Susan Hogan and Michael Kuhling, was nice, and heavy on the footwork. Kuhling, in unison sections, was just a hair wilder and wider in his use of space than the women. No less accurate, and a pleasing contrast. The three reveled through some barefoot, countryish tapping/thumping dancing with occasional odd stops and poses. Overall, the piece had a 40's feeling, partly due to Michael Levine's swinging fiddle music. Towards the end, crooning sneaked in, then choking and sputtering, and all sorts of lavish visceral babble, while the dancers finally lurches and staggered, rolled over and collapsed in a heap.
I don't have a clear recollection of Swing, for Becker, Jan Brecht and Meg Jolley, but it seemed to be missing something, as if a large sculpture were meant to be set forward in the space, or some central figure or focus were absent. Screech was a self-conscious mishmash, with dancers standing on their heads, crawling around, bending, bumping, shaking themselves out like wet hounds, etc. as they sand, talked in squeaky or froggy voices or incomprehensible whispers, purred, cackled, snorted.
Down, first on the program, was a leggy, showy dance for five women, with lots of jumps, bounces, and swinging movements across the stage, to a rich jazz-baroque score by Levine (played by Levine and Hillel Dolgenas on violin and piano). The same movements kept cropping up in different facings, on different people and were sometimes picked up sequentially in a sort of round robin. Peculiar gestures, like touching the backs of the hands to the neck, appeared in a rather neutral way. In Down, the dancers seemed uncomfortable, selling it with a smiling stridency. Big movements were done for their individual impact, rather than being shaped into phrases. The effect was fragmenting, like a shopping dance: I'll take four of these, and six of these, and one of these, and three of these." And, the final piece, for four women and two men, in bright, mixed colors, was a rhythmic, driving piece, with a happy, casual air, which included some nice falls and some surprising vaults and catches. No music, but footfalls filled any gap.
At American Theater Lab (January 17 to 20).
Jill Becker's concert at ATL was easy to take but puzzling. Her titles are enigmatic, if they are clues to the work at all. Stop, a new solo for Becker herself, was in some ways the most interesting piece. Maybe because more of its structure was bare. But maybe it just seemed undiluted, since all the action was contained in one body.
Becker's a clear, refined dancer. Her hair's boyishly cropped, her demeanor's serious and agreeable. The piece starts with an accumulation. Standing, she delicately tests several places for her foot around a rough half-circle on the floor. Repeats that, then twists back. Repeats those, and adds a sideways lean. Then a forward twist of her body, and, making several brief pauses and adjustments, angles her head forward to peer under a framing arm. This kind of adjusting is one theme of Stop. Becker aims for a position, goes deeper into it, defines and sets it. Then she abandons the sequence, and, in profile, stamps back and forth in place in a wide stance. Her pelvis rocks, a rippling wave drives through her body like through a traveling camel. Throughout the piece, she litters versions of the early movements. Sometimes she isolates the original impulses in limited areas of the body, like the lower torso, or forearm and wrist. Sometimes she breaks into more eccentric twitches and wobbles. Towards the end, she moves in a squatting walk, then sits in a squat pretending to play a harmonica. The literal image is very odd. The combination of a repeated pattern (varied and fragmented) with many sudden breaks and curious movements seems a mite arbitrary. But Becker's definition, her playful intensity and strong inner focus, bring it together. In the group pieces, the dancers work individually: their movements relate, but rarely do they use each other for balance or impetus or motivation, though a sense of communal well-being is generated. Design within the space doesn't seem to be one of Becker's concerns. Keeping the movement going, and keeping it changing is.
Lurch, for Becker, Susan Hogan and Michael Kuhling, was nice, and heavy on the footwork. Kuhling, in unison sections, was just a hair wilder and wider in his use of space than the women. No less accurate, and a pleasing contrast. The three reveled through some barefoot, countryish tapping/thumping dancing with occasional odd stops and poses. Overall, the piece had a 40's feeling, partly due to Michael Levine's swinging fiddle music. Towards the end, crooning sneaked in, then choking and sputtering, and all sorts of lavish visceral babble, while the dancers finally lurches and staggered, rolled over and collapsed in a heap.
I don't have a clear recollection of Swing, for Becker, Jan Brecht and Meg Jolley, but it seemed to be missing something, as if a large sculpture were meant to be set forward in the space, or some central figure or focus were absent. Screech was a self-conscious mishmash, with dancers standing on their heads, crawling around, bending, bumping, shaking themselves out like wet hounds, etc. as they sand, talked in squeaky or froggy voices or incomprehensible whispers, purred, cackled, snorted.
Down, first on the program, was a leggy, showy dance for five women, with lots of jumps, bounces, and swinging movements across the stage, to a rich jazz-baroque score by Levine (played by Levine and Hillel Dolgenas on violin and piano). The same movements kept cropping up in different facings, on different people and were sometimes picked up sequentially in a sort of round robin. Peculiar gestures, like touching the backs of the hands to the neck, appeared in a rather neutral way. In Down, the dancers seemed uncomfortable, selling it with a smiling stridency. Big movements were done for their individual impact, rather than being shaped into phrases. The effect was fragmenting, like a shopping dance: I'll take four of these, and six of these, and one of these, and three of these." And, the final piece, for four women and two men, in bright, mixed colors, was a rhythmic, driving piece, with a happy, casual air, which included some nice falls and some surprising vaults and catches. No music, but footfalls filled any gap.
At American Theater Lab (January 17 to 20).
Final Blow
July 22
In The Idiot, Valery Panov has created a sprawling, operatic epic faithful to many of the incidents of Dostoevsky's great novel, but sacrificing the uniqueness of its characters, the insight and detail that justify the extremity of their behavior and the violent, hysterical pitch of events. This is perhaps its most serious flaw; the other is that Panov is not an expressive or subtle choreographer. Nothing is more irrelevant or ordinary in The Idiot than the dancing. But in the end, after a welter of episodic incidents and despite a lack of dramatic flow, the piece culminates in two scenes of real power.
This three hour marathon (three acts, 16 scenes) is a multimedia extravaganza, The score, compiled from about 16 Shostakovitch symphonies, ballet suites and quartets, is excellent. Sumptuous sets by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen) of 19th century rooms lurch and bump into place. There are projections - a bridge over the Neva, a train station and streets in St Petersburg. A second, raised stage is used just once, for a flashback. Lavish is the word. And in a more dreamlike, expressionistic style, Rogozhin chases Myshkin across an empty stage back and forth to a skeletal metal staircase with a vast black smear as its backdrop. There Rogozhin lurks at the top with a knife; Myshkin has an epileptic seizure at the bottom. We meet Myshkin (Rudolf Nureyev) as he wanders alone toward the train: Rogozhin, massive in a fur cape and bushy fur hat, brushes arrogantly past him, then returns and offers his hand. En route, Rogozhin (Panov) tells Myshkin about his obsession with Nastasya Filippovna and her amatory and financial liason with her guardian, Totsky. Arriving in St. Petersburg, Myshkin is overwhelmed. At the home of the Yepanchins, to whom he may be distantly related, we met the three daughters, including the self-willed Aglaja (Galina Panova) who comes to love Myshkin. Myshkin is dazzled. Nureyev plays him like a vulnerable, stumbling child, an innocent boob. He drops his hat; his cape falls around his ankles. He's drawn to Aglaja and she to him. In a brief trio of small leaps around the room, Nureyev, partnered by the other two sisters, seems practically a maiden. When, as the result of a game of blind-man's-buff, he finds the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, he reels into a solo of leaps, pirouettes, and near swoons. And this is only what the lady's picture can do!
Throughout, Nureyev is touching, boyish, tender (though his dancing is sadly distorted and weak). You might like to take care of him. But you don't get any sense of Myshkin's ability to penetrate through appearances, his candor, his humane judgment - the qualities that really attract people to him. At the boarding house, Ganya (Yepanchin's secretary, who Yepanchin and Totsky want to marry to Nastasya) is arguing with his mother and sister when Myshkin comes in. This sort of tight, unpleasant cluster of people twisting, pulling, clawing is something Panov does well. Then Nastasya (Eva Evdokimova) a[[ears in the glaring doorway. Rogozhin comes in with five of his cohorts through another door, and a bunch of lowlife boarders follow. In an argument, Myshkin intervenes between Ganya and his sister and is struck by mistake. Ganya calls him "Idiot!" then repents in shame, crawls on his knees, hangs on to his legs. At last he rises, shakes hands, and pulls himself together. (Igor Kosek is excellent as Ganya, the only person who goes through his whole story in one act).
At a party at Nastasya Filippovna's apartments, Nastasya has some queasy moments of weakness and indecision. When Myshkin comes in, she pulls the drapes to separate them from the company, and they are drawn into a duet i which she seeks him and he, shyly at first, evades her. She curves her neck into him in a moving, offering, yet inhuman way. The duet is all yearning and denial. In words, it might read: "Oh, please" OOh, no." Oh, God" etc. It'd be hard to tell that pity is what draws him to her. Regozhin comes in looking please with himself. He's brought her a pack of money. She throws it in the fire, taunting Ganya. It's all his if he'll take it out with his bare hands. He restrains himself, whirls, and falls backwards in a faint. Nastasya faces front, still, her chest heaving, with people scrabbling all over the floor behind her for money. Then she runs off with Rogozhin.
There's too much you have to know that's simply not in this ballet. That Nastasya Filippovna feels unworthy of Myshkin. That she is not some high-class, arrogant and fickle whore who's fatally attractive, but a woman who cannot escape a deep feeling of debasement and shame, and that her cruelty to and contempt for Rogozhin is a measure of it. Rogozhin's intensity is not illuminated. We see him proud and insolent, later slovenly and degraded. In the begining of the second act, he crawls all over Nastasya; with heavy-footed lunging steps, she drags him behind her. So you'd know that in some way done this to him, but it doesn't bear thinking about. Too many pieces are missing, Similarly, he is bound to Myshkin by an instinctive love and jealous hate. But one rarely feels the truth of these feelings though the generalizations of Rogozhin's character. In the end, everything comes together in an anguished denouement. Rogozhin has killed Nastasya. In his dark apartment, he drags her corpse and puts it on a bed in the corner. Myshkin comes in with a lit candle, and tentatively, creeps over to Rogozhin and lights his candle.
The duet that follows is like something for blind, helpless beings whose need for consolation is desperate. Myshkn climbs monkeylike on Rogozhin or is pulled onto his back, is carried in cradllng holds. They drag each other to the floor,pummel each other gently, roll together, lie clasped like there's no warmth in the world. Rogozhin pulls Myshkin over by Nastasya's body. He wraps her arm around their necks. Myshkin rolls, crawls away. It is unbearable. Rogozhin kneels there petting Nastasya's arm. The final scene is a vision: part ours, part Myshkin's. We see Myshkn/Nureyev through a scrim of golden flowers. Naked except for a jockstrap, he twists in a fit on the floor. Crouched forward, his body hardly moves at first, but his arms twist and flop. He's jelly-boned, a struggling infant. It's wonderful, a stunning contrast to the gruesome scene before. A rope descends, and above it, a huge bell. The scrim drops and Myshkin heaves and swings from the rope as the music tolls and rushes, and the world goes up in flames behind him. It goes on much too long, long enough to think of Tarzan, and long enough to erase that thought and watch again the naked, dangling, wounded soul.
Presented by the Berlin Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House (July 15 to 25).
In The Idiot, Valery Panov has created a sprawling, operatic epic faithful to many of the incidents of Dostoevsky's great novel, but sacrificing the uniqueness of its characters, the insight and detail that justify the extremity of their behavior and the violent, hysterical pitch of events. This is perhaps its most serious flaw; the other is that Panov is not an expressive or subtle choreographer. Nothing is more irrelevant or ordinary in The Idiot than the dancing. But in the end, after a welter of episodic incidents and despite a lack of dramatic flow, the piece culminates in two scenes of real power.
This three hour marathon (three acts, 16 scenes) is a multimedia extravaganza, The score, compiled from about 16 Shostakovitch symphonies, ballet suites and quartets, is excellent. Sumptuous sets by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen) of 19th century rooms lurch and bump into place. There are projections - a bridge over the Neva, a train station and streets in St Petersburg. A second, raised stage is used just once, for a flashback. Lavish is the word. And in a more dreamlike, expressionistic style, Rogozhin chases Myshkin across an empty stage back and forth to a skeletal metal staircase with a vast black smear as its backdrop. There Rogozhin lurks at the top with a knife; Myshkin has an epileptic seizure at the bottom. We meet Myshkin (Rudolf Nureyev) as he wanders alone toward the train: Rogozhin, massive in a fur cape and bushy fur hat, brushes arrogantly past him, then returns and offers his hand. En route, Rogozhin (Panov) tells Myshkin about his obsession with Nastasya Filippovna and her amatory and financial liason with her guardian, Totsky. Arriving in St. Petersburg, Myshkin is overwhelmed. At the home of the Yepanchins, to whom he may be distantly related, we met the three daughters, including the self-willed Aglaja (Galina Panova) who comes to love Myshkin. Myshkin is dazzled. Nureyev plays him like a vulnerable, stumbling child, an innocent boob. He drops his hat; his cape falls around his ankles. He's drawn to Aglaja and she to him. In a brief trio of small leaps around the room, Nureyev, partnered by the other two sisters, seems practically a maiden. When, as the result of a game of blind-man's-buff, he finds the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, he reels into a solo of leaps, pirouettes, and near swoons. And this is only what the lady's picture can do!
Throughout, Nureyev is touching, boyish, tender (though his dancing is sadly distorted and weak). You might like to take care of him. But you don't get any sense of Myshkin's ability to penetrate through appearances, his candor, his humane judgment - the qualities that really attract people to him. At the boarding house, Ganya (Yepanchin's secretary, who Yepanchin and Totsky want to marry to Nastasya) is arguing with his mother and sister when Myshkin comes in. This sort of tight, unpleasant cluster of people twisting, pulling, clawing is something Panov does well. Then Nastasya (Eva Evdokimova) a[[ears in the glaring doorway. Rogozhin comes in with five of his cohorts through another door, and a bunch of lowlife boarders follow. In an argument, Myshkin intervenes between Ganya and his sister and is struck by mistake. Ganya calls him "Idiot!" then repents in shame, crawls on his knees, hangs on to his legs. At last he rises, shakes hands, and pulls himself together. (Igor Kosek is excellent as Ganya, the only person who goes through his whole story in one act).
At a party at Nastasya Filippovna's apartments, Nastasya has some queasy moments of weakness and indecision. When Myshkin comes in, she pulls the drapes to separate them from the company, and they are drawn into a duet i which she seeks him and he, shyly at first, evades her. She curves her neck into him in a moving, offering, yet inhuman way. The duet is all yearning and denial. In words, it might read: "Oh, please" OOh, no." Oh, God" etc. It'd be hard to tell that pity is what draws him to her. Regozhin comes in looking please with himself. He's brought her a pack of money. She throws it in the fire, taunting Ganya. It's all his if he'll take it out with his bare hands. He restrains himself, whirls, and falls backwards in a faint. Nastasya faces front, still, her chest heaving, with people scrabbling all over the floor behind her for money. Then she runs off with Rogozhin.
There's too much you have to know that's simply not in this ballet. That Nastasya Filippovna feels unworthy of Myshkin. That she is not some high-class, arrogant and fickle whore who's fatally attractive, but a woman who cannot escape a deep feeling of debasement and shame, and that her cruelty to and contempt for Rogozhin is a measure of it. Rogozhin's intensity is not illuminated. We see him proud and insolent, later slovenly and degraded. In the begining of the second act, he crawls all over Nastasya; with heavy-footed lunging steps, she drags him behind her. So you'd know that in some way done this to him, but it doesn't bear thinking about. Too many pieces are missing, Similarly, he is bound to Myshkin by an instinctive love and jealous hate. But one rarely feels the truth of these feelings though the generalizations of Rogozhin's character. In the end, everything comes together in an anguished denouement. Rogozhin has killed Nastasya. In his dark apartment, he drags her corpse and puts it on a bed in the corner. Myshkin comes in with a lit candle, and tentatively, creeps over to Rogozhin and lights his candle.
The duet that follows is like something for blind, helpless beings whose need for consolation is desperate. Myshkn climbs monkeylike on Rogozhin or is pulled onto his back, is carried in cradllng holds. They drag each other to the floor,pummel each other gently, roll together, lie clasped like there's no warmth in the world. Rogozhin pulls Myshkin over by Nastasya's body. He wraps her arm around their necks. Myshkin rolls, crawls away. It is unbearable. Rogozhin kneels there petting Nastasya's arm. The final scene is a vision: part ours, part Myshkin's. We see Myshkn/Nureyev through a scrim of golden flowers. Naked except for a jockstrap, he twists in a fit on the floor. Crouched forward, his body hardly moves at first, but his arms twist and flop. He's jelly-boned, a struggling infant. It's wonderful, a stunning contrast to the gruesome scene before. A rope descends, and above it, a huge bell. The scrim drops and Myshkin heaves and swings from the rope as the music tolls and rushes, and the world goes up in flames behind him. It goes on much too long, long enough to think of Tarzan, and long enough to erase that thought and watch again the naked, dangling, wounded soul.
Presented by the Berlin Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House (July 15 to 25).
New Blood at the Pillow
I head up to Jacob's Pillow in Lee, Massachusetts for the "New Directions" program, with Trisha Brown and
Rosalind Newman and their companies. After Brown's Decoy, a large man walks out, angry with ballet (ballet?) without music. Two lades behind me are feeling quite superior, complaining and amusing themselves with wisecracks ("fifteen years of ballet training to do this?"). They finally work up the courage to boo briefly after Brown's second piece, Line-up.
Liz Thompson, the new artistic director of Jacob's Pillow, emerges through the curtain before the intermission house lights come up to declare her admiration for Brown's and Newman's work. She explains that they challenge the audience to look and think, and praises their inventiveness with movement, their experimentation with structure. She assures the audience that it's not a hoax, that there's something valuable there. Only look. Brown's been doing this for 20 years and it's still new dance. She must be getting pretty damn weary of being a groundbreaker.
I'm being unfair. Most of the audience is appreciative and interested. But Thompson has to talk to the audience like this every night this week. "Some of them glare at me," she says, but some also question her later, want to know more. Originally Newman's pole dance, /////, was to follow Line-up, since both use sticks, and Thompson thought the juxtaposition would point up how differently the choreographers utilize similar materials. But she realized that three dances in a row without music would drive the audience bats. So Newman's sharp new piece Juarato, with songs by Laurie Anderson, has moved up to the post-intermission spot.
Although the Pillow has always presented a broad range of dance, this is the first time people like Brown and Newman have been invited to perform. "I knew it would be a challenge," says Thompson. But she feels justified in the risk because "they're not walking out of the theatre in droves." In fact, very few people leave. Thompson is still offering the kind of variety - ballet, modern, ethnic - that the Pillow as been noted for for 48 years, but the flavor is slightly different, sometimes subtler. Less of the something-for-everybody principle in the mixed programs, perhaps. There's a little more room allowed for companies and choreographers still exploring their own material, developing their styles. And the school at the Pillow is now more integrated with the festival: people teaching there (like Brown, or Matthew Diamond, or Loremil Machado) are performing on the festival programs. Choo San Goh is choreographing a piece for the Jacob's Pillow Dancers; on the second week of the festival his home company, the Washington Ballet, danced his works there.
The Jacob's Pillow audience is not a "dance audience"; it's mainly made up of students and young people, and many older people vacationing in the Berkshires. Not, apparently, very many people in their thirties and forties. But things are going well. "We sold more tickets this week," says Thompson. "But it's hard to figure out why. I don't really believe that it's because people came to see the 'New Directions' week." Thompson owns to two responsibilities: as a producer with a particular audience constituency and a need to sell tickets, to present the best of the kinds of dance that will entertain and attract that audience; and she also feels a responsibility to the art form.
"We owe the audience entertainment and education," she says. "To expose them to things in such a way that they can accept them. Not to antagonize them. To open their minds."
Rosalind Newman and their companies. After Brown's Decoy, a large man walks out, angry with ballet (ballet?) without music. Two lades behind me are feeling quite superior, complaining and amusing themselves with wisecracks ("fifteen years of ballet training to do this?"). They finally work up the courage to boo briefly after Brown's second piece, Line-up.
Liz Thompson, the new artistic director of Jacob's Pillow, emerges through the curtain before the intermission house lights come up to declare her admiration for Brown's and Newman's work. She explains that they challenge the audience to look and think, and praises their inventiveness with movement, their experimentation with structure. She assures the audience that it's not a hoax, that there's something valuable there. Only look. Brown's been doing this for 20 years and it's still new dance. She must be getting pretty damn weary of being a groundbreaker.
I'm being unfair. Most of the audience is appreciative and interested. But Thompson has to talk to the audience like this every night this week. "Some of them glare at me," she says, but some also question her later, want to know more. Originally Newman's pole dance, /////, was to follow Line-up, since both use sticks, and Thompson thought the juxtaposition would point up how differently the choreographers utilize similar materials. But she realized that three dances in a row without music would drive the audience bats. So Newman's sharp new piece Juarato, with songs by Laurie Anderson, has moved up to the post-intermission spot.
Although the Pillow has always presented a broad range of dance, this is the first time people like Brown and Newman have been invited to perform. "I knew it would be a challenge," says Thompson. But she feels justified in the risk because "they're not walking out of the theatre in droves." In fact, very few people leave. Thompson is still offering the kind of variety - ballet, modern, ethnic - that the Pillow as been noted for for 48 years, but the flavor is slightly different, sometimes subtler. Less of the something-for-everybody principle in the mixed programs, perhaps. There's a little more room allowed for companies and choreographers still exploring their own material, developing their styles. And the school at the Pillow is now more integrated with the festival: people teaching there (like Brown, or Matthew Diamond, or Loremil Machado) are performing on the festival programs. Choo San Goh is choreographing a piece for the Jacob's Pillow Dancers; on the second week of the festival his home company, the Washington Ballet, danced his works there.
The Jacob's Pillow audience is not a "dance audience"; it's mainly made up of students and young people, and many older people vacationing in the Berkshires. Not, apparently, very many people in their thirties and forties. But things are going well. "We sold more tickets this week," says Thompson. "But it's hard to figure out why. I don't really believe that it's because people came to see the 'New Directions' week." Thompson owns to two responsibilities: as a producer with a particular audience constituency and a need to sell tickets, to present the best of the kinds of dance that will entertain and attract that audience; and she also feels a responsibility to the art form.
"We owe the audience entertainment and education," she says. "To expose them to things in such a way that they can accept them. Not to antagonize them. To open their minds."
Ladies in Limbo
November 19
Two of Muna Tseng's solos, from 1977 and 1978, have a kind of quickness and a way of bouncing along on the music's intricate rhythms that is quite pleasing and alert. In Theodora, set to trilling, nasal chants of a Bulgarian women's chorus, Paula Crane wears a red dress, a sort of long medieval sarong; the heavy piping that circles the hips later unravels as part of the skirt and is used, in a slow section, as a screen or shield of the body. Initially, several sequences of quick little diagonal running steps are brought to a halt with the flick of tilting arms. There are nice lilting hesitations, moments hen a tentative step in the middle of a phrase is repeated, toyed with before the phrase progresses. The dance is filled with the curving, reaching, "feminine" gestures that fill Tseng's other dances. Theodora shifts through a variety of moods, growing gradually less flighty. At the end, Crane stands in willowy profile, her belly slightly protuberant with procreative promise like a bride in one of those early Flemish paintings. She places her hand gently on its roundness, her head tilts up and way back in a kind of exaltation.
1000 Flowers, Tseng's glamorous 1977 solo set to the clangor of a gamelan,has a rhythmic sharpness. There's a ----- hesitancy ad a repetition of occasional steps and gestures, a strong quality of ebb and flow, a surprising abrupt decisiveness. There's elegance in the way Tseng carries her arms. The articulation of her fingers and the many specific shapes her hands take ornament the body's movement, but never seem forced or intrusive. The arms open, unfold, swish from side to side. A sudden spin devolves into a rush back and away. Tseng's arms whip close about her body once, twice, again and send her into a spin with one leg outflung. She achieves a strong, long line through the pull of the arms. And the movement ---- through a variety of impulses with a dramatic, carefully designed naturalness.
When Tseng strings things together quickly, they have a kind of vivacity. Small changes in weight, speed and intensity make her phrases delightful. But when the overall conception is larger, the movement is slowed and seems all broad strokes. The color of the movement becomes monochrome., and he sense that impels and informs the solos disappears. Tseng's wit and flair for details gets relegated to the sidelines. In the concert as a whole, an excess of "feminine" movement creates a numbing fog. Wafting, floating gestures, opening-and-closing body shapes, a wavelike ebb-and-flow in the use of weight and in the on-and off-stage transitions generate a contextual limbo. The dancers come to appear unfocused because there's no significant direction in their world. They don't seem to be going anywhere, even momentarily.
The group choreography also suffers from plainness, a lack of development and inflection; the variety of the earlier solos is missing from Bach Suite and Epochal Songs. In the first, a humorous element points exactly, if unintentionally, to the problem. Clare, Peggy Florin and Junko Kikuchi, unitard-clad, are doing formal, abstract, very balanced movements. Occasionally, a croquet ball rumbles across the floor. Then Tseng, dippy and apparently confused, with mallet in hand, skips through in white socks, white knickers and a stiff, see-through pinafore affair. One waits for the next interruption, because this bit has the intent and detail the choreography lacks. And because one is so much more interested in the interruption than in the body of the it doesn't even seem like part of the same piece. In another entrance, Tseng wanders in making little zigzagsa; the women are standing here and there, legs apart. Timidly and with secret glee, Tseng inspects their legs, their heels, those open, upside-down V's. You know she's seeing them as croquet hoops. Unfortunately, we're seeing them as croquet hoops too - or, as things that move around in patterns and ought to be put to better use.
Epochal Songs, for four women, has a similar weakness. Edgar Froesce's music starts out dire. (Later, it becomes percussive, throbbingly repetitive, very strong). The women are posed in relaxed shapes, with chiffony, tubular appendages (feathers? extra limbs?). Two shadow puppet ibises (by Eric Bass) fly across the back of the stage. A skeleton ibis passes. The dancing is formal, repetitive, not quite trance-inducing. The dances become foreground, background, Muzak. You wait (hope) for definition, for the next little shadow figure to sail across (two Egyptians rowing a papyrus-prowed boat, a man and an ox rowing a wagon, two astronauts or robots rowing a rocket with a sputtering sparkler tail), or for Tseng, who appears supporting a sculpture of wire figures, wearing a white Egyptian-style headdress, or, on her last cross, gowned in a gauzy, stiff, white structure that turns her into an orchid. It is only these distinct images, these sharp-etched figures - the woman-orchid, the skeleton bird on the wing - that read clear, that have any effect. The dancing itself is an arduous blur.
At American Theatre Lab (November 3 to 16).
Two of Muna Tseng's solos, from 1977 and 1978, have a kind of quickness and a way of bouncing along on the music's intricate rhythms that is quite pleasing and alert. In Theodora, set to trilling, nasal chants of a Bulgarian women's chorus, Paula Crane wears a red dress, a sort of long medieval sarong; the heavy piping that circles the hips later unravels as part of the skirt and is used, in a slow section, as a screen or shield of the body. Initially, several sequences of quick little diagonal running steps are brought to a halt with the flick of tilting arms. There are nice lilting hesitations, moments hen a tentative step in the middle of a phrase is repeated, toyed with before the phrase progresses. The dance is filled with the curving, reaching, "feminine" gestures that fill Tseng's other dances. Theodora shifts through a variety of moods, growing gradually less flighty. At the end, Crane stands in willowy profile, her belly slightly protuberant with procreative promise like a bride in one of those early Flemish paintings. She places her hand gently on its roundness, her head tilts up and way back in a kind of exaltation.
1000 Flowers, Tseng's glamorous 1977 solo set to the clangor of a gamelan,has a rhythmic sharpness. There's a ----- hesitancy ad a repetition of occasional steps and gestures, a strong quality of ebb and flow, a surprising abrupt decisiveness. There's elegance in the way Tseng carries her arms. The articulation of her fingers and the many specific shapes her hands take ornament the body's movement, but never seem forced or intrusive. The arms open, unfold, swish from side to side. A sudden spin devolves into a rush back and away. Tseng's arms whip close about her body once, twice, again and send her into a spin with one leg outflung. She achieves a strong, long line through the pull of the arms. And the movement ---- through a variety of impulses with a dramatic, carefully designed naturalness.
When Tseng strings things together quickly, they have a kind of vivacity. Small changes in weight, speed and intensity make her phrases delightful. But when the overall conception is larger, the movement is slowed and seems all broad strokes. The color of the movement becomes monochrome., and he sense that impels and informs the solos disappears. Tseng's wit and flair for details gets relegated to the sidelines. In the concert as a whole, an excess of "feminine" movement creates a numbing fog. Wafting, floating gestures, opening-and-closing body shapes, a wavelike ebb-and-flow in the use of weight and in the on-and off-stage transitions generate a contextual limbo. The dancers come to appear unfocused because there's no significant direction in their world. They don't seem to be going anywhere, even momentarily.
The group choreography also suffers from plainness, a lack of development and inflection; the variety of the earlier solos is missing from Bach Suite and Epochal Songs. In the first, a humorous element points exactly, if unintentionally, to the problem. Clare, Peggy Florin and Junko Kikuchi, unitard-clad, are doing formal, abstract, very balanced movements. Occasionally, a croquet ball rumbles across the floor. Then Tseng, dippy and apparently confused, with mallet in hand, skips through in white socks, white knickers and a stiff, see-through pinafore affair. One waits for the next interruption, because this bit has the intent and detail the choreography lacks. And because one is so much more interested in the interruption than in the body of the it doesn't even seem like part of the same piece. In another entrance, Tseng wanders in making little zigzagsa; the women are standing here and there, legs apart. Timidly and with secret glee, Tseng inspects their legs, their heels, those open, upside-down V's. You know she's seeing them as croquet hoops. Unfortunately, we're seeing them as croquet hoops too - or, as things that move around in patterns and ought to be put to better use.
Epochal Songs, for four women, has a similar weakness. Edgar Froesce's music starts out dire. (Later, it becomes percussive, throbbingly repetitive, very strong). The women are posed in relaxed shapes, with chiffony, tubular appendages (feathers? extra limbs?). Two shadow puppet ibises (by Eric Bass) fly across the back of the stage. A skeleton ibis passes. The dancing is formal, repetitive, not quite trance-inducing. The dances become foreground, background, Muzak. You wait (hope) for definition, for the next little shadow figure to sail across (two Egyptians rowing a papyrus-prowed boat, a man and an ox rowing a wagon, two astronauts or robots rowing a rocket with a sputtering sparkler tail), or for Tseng, who appears supporting a sculpture of wire figures, wearing a white Egyptian-style headdress, or, on her last cross, gowned in a gauzy, stiff, white structure that turns her into an orchid. It is only these distinct images, these sharp-etched figures - the woman-orchid, the skeleton bird on the wing - that read clear, that have any effect. The dancing itself is an arduous blur.
At American Theatre Lab (November 3 to 16).
Last Gasp of Romance
November 12
You hear a mournful, droning accordion. Throughout the piece it comes and goes, sometimes with snatches of familiar songs (a bit of "Lili Marlene", three notes from "But Where is Your Heart"). The walls of the Kitchen are covered with black plastic, a runway edged with light bulbs is filled with dirt. When the lights brighten, we see Montreal choreographer Eduard Lock lying on the floor; several times he brings his body partway up, points his index finger to the ceiling, shivers his head and upper torso, and sinks back. He lets his head bob - like one of those dashboard toys - till it comes into balance. A bare-breasted woman who has been standing in the back throws herself over his shoulder where she hangs, for a moment, limply. Then she grasps Lock by his belt and lets him dangle. I
n this first section, Lock and two women are barehested and, oddly, it seems more democratic than erotic. They wear pants with knee pads that cinch the legs tightly. Later they switch to green T-shirts, then white, and red. A woman runs in and slides across the floor. The movement occurs in spurts, erupting in a generally lazy "decadent" atmosphere where the dancers (and the accordionist) wait on wooden chairs in a semi-dark corner of the stage area. Someone jumps around with a shivery, shimmy motion and throws herself on the floor. Lays there. Gets up. The dancers are often like puppets, or masterless androids from some world we prefer to picture in the future or the past, creatures who are erratically frenetic and desperate in their activity, but who have no purpose and whose experiences have no internal quality at all - nothing registers. But they can't quit. They get up and fall down, live and die, and it's all the same.
Lock's Lili Marlene in the Jungle is in 13 sections, with brief blackouts between, in a style that's slouchy and depleted most of the time, though frequently the dancers fling and shudder and run and keel over. Another man (Louis Guillemette) saunters slowly in, shivers his upper body, points his finger. (The pointing finger seems to point at something, then it seems neutral, or like a kind of rhythmic accent in pop dancing; enfeebled, as it usually is, it becomes a sinister comic comment; turned to the temple, a pistol. But it never has the force of an accusation.) His walk is coldly erotic, and many of the movements and other elements of the piece are distinctly sexual in an empty, necrophiliac sort of way: zombie-like come-hither gestures, kissing sounds and kisses for oneself, severely restricted, swivel-hipped walks, an occasional direct stare that says to anyone "I'm not for you," but which also communicates an aloofness and a blank, passive, uncaring quality that's never intense enough to become hostility. The dancers frequently dance together, handle each other, but the contact is purely manual.
The movement vocabulary is eclectic and wide-ranging. In a bright beam of light, Lock holds a woman by her belt she leans away in an arch, swings around slowly, gradually pulling them both off balance. Two women do a long, frenetic tap dance, flinging their arms and legs wide with a kind of helter-skelter dislocation. A girl in a white T-shirt undulates her arms, skips wildly up and back, vibrates and pants, runs, throw herself splat on the floor, skips back. One woman swiftly swings her extended leg through second, through sort-of arabesque, and curls it under herself as she buckles and collapses over it. Lock sidles backwards, sinking just-so-far into his hip with each step: each step the shell of an invitation, a taunt. He has an exquisitely measured way of marking or indicating a gesture to give it the utmost cynical thrust. It's like the last gasp of disco - people are used up, isolated twitches of movement are all that's left. The dancers appear to bounce, jiggle, vibrate with the kind of haywire energy that exceeds the ability of exhausted muscles to contain it. They're victims of the same ailment. Maybe they've all died of chic but don't know it.
The dancers are excellent (the women are Monique Giard, Manon Levac, and Miryam Moutillet) and the piece's theatricality is beautifully controlled. The bittersweet, now-and-then music of accordionist Robert Racine adds immeasurably to the atmosphere and texture. But the piece seems overlong in some sections, partly because the inexpressive movements don't gain in complexity or shading by the ways they're linked up or overlaid. And repetition produced no intoxication. What is intriguing and provoking is how and when and where they stop and start. After all that emotional deprivation, Marlene Dietrich's singing of "Lili Marlene" washes in blurring at first with the sound of the accordion. You don't know what you're hearing. Then the warm ache of that voice in the darkness becomes just about unbearable.
At the Kitchen (October 30 to November 2).
You hear a mournful, droning accordion. Throughout the piece it comes and goes, sometimes with snatches of familiar songs (a bit of "Lili Marlene", three notes from "But Where is Your Heart"). The walls of the Kitchen are covered with black plastic, a runway edged with light bulbs is filled with dirt. When the lights brighten, we see Montreal choreographer Eduard Lock lying on the floor; several times he brings his body partway up, points his index finger to the ceiling, shivers his head and upper torso, and sinks back. He lets his head bob - like one of those dashboard toys - till it comes into balance. A bare-breasted woman who has been standing in the back throws herself over his shoulder where she hangs, for a moment, limply. Then she grasps Lock by his belt and lets him dangle. I
n this first section, Lock and two women are barehested and, oddly, it seems more democratic than erotic. They wear pants with knee pads that cinch the legs tightly. Later they switch to green T-shirts, then white, and red. A woman runs in and slides across the floor. The movement occurs in spurts, erupting in a generally lazy "decadent" atmosphere where the dancers (and the accordionist) wait on wooden chairs in a semi-dark corner of the stage area. Someone jumps around with a shivery, shimmy motion and throws herself on the floor. Lays there. Gets up. The dancers are often like puppets, or masterless androids from some world we prefer to picture in the future or the past, creatures who are erratically frenetic and desperate in their activity, but who have no purpose and whose experiences have no internal quality at all - nothing registers. But they can't quit. They get up and fall down, live and die, and it's all the same.
Lock's Lili Marlene in the Jungle is in 13 sections, with brief blackouts between, in a style that's slouchy and depleted most of the time, though frequently the dancers fling and shudder and run and keel over. Another man (Louis Guillemette) saunters slowly in, shivers his upper body, points his finger. (The pointing finger seems to point at something, then it seems neutral, or like a kind of rhythmic accent in pop dancing; enfeebled, as it usually is, it becomes a sinister comic comment; turned to the temple, a pistol. But it never has the force of an accusation.) His walk is coldly erotic, and many of the movements and other elements of the piece are distinctly sexual in an empty, necrophiliac sort of way: zombie-like come-hither gestures, kissing sounds and kisses for oneself, severely restricted, swivel-hipped walks, an occasional direct stare that says to anyone "I'm not for you," but which also communicates an aloofness and a blank, passive, uncaring quality that's never intense enough to become hostility. The dancers frequently dance together, handle each other, but the contact is purely manual.
The movement vocabulary is eclectic and wide-ranging. In a bright beam of light, Lock holds a woman by her belt she leans away in an arch, swings around slowly, gradually pulling them both off balance. Two women do a long, frenetic tap dance, flinging their arms and legs wide with a kind of helter-skelter dislocation. A girl in a white T-shirt undulates her arms, skips wildly up and back, vibrates and pants, runs, throw herself splat on the floor, skips back. One woman swiftly swings her extended leg through second, through sort-of arabesque, and curls it under herself as she buckles and collapses over it. Lock sidles backwards, sinking just-so-far into his hip with each step: each step the shell of an invitation, a taunt. He has an exquisitely measured way of marking or indicating a gesture to give it the utmost cynical thrust. It's like the last gasp of disco - people are used up, isolated twitches of movement are all that's left. The dancers appear to bounce, jiggle, vibrate with the kind of haywire energy that exceeds the ability of exhausted muscles to contain it. They're victims of the same ailment. Maybe they've all died of chic but don't know it.
The dancers are excellent (the women are Monique Giard, Manon Levac, and Miryam Moutillet) and the piece's theatricality is beautifully controlled. The bittersweet, now-and-then music of accordionist Robert Racine adds immeasurably to the atmosphere and texture. But the piece seems overlong in some sections, partly because the inexpressive movements don't gain in complexity or shading by the ways they're linked up or overlaid. And repetition produced no intoxication. What is intriguing and provoking is how and when and where they stop and start. After all that emotional deprivation, Marlene Dietrich's singing of "Lili Marlene" washes in blurring at first with the sound of the accordion. You don't know what you're hearing. Then the warm ache of that voice in the darkness becomes just about unbearable.
At the Kitchen (October 30 to November 2).
Lonely Wife Fixes Footloose Batman's Wagon
August 27
They can't all be stevedores and drug dealers. There's got to be a big middle class to sponsor the ballet company choreographer Roland Petit founded at the invitation of the city of Marseilles in 1972. I suppose it makes some sort of business sense to spend the company's first engagement here with a confection, Petit's The Bat, set to mostly Fledermaus music of Johann Strauss, and loosely based on the Fledermaus plot. But it's a trifle discouraging when such a production's highest aim is to be cute (and maybe just a smidge naughty, to remind folks how "sophisticated" the French are), and even then it doesn't quite succeed.
Into a domestic scene comes Zizi Jeanmaire (as Bella, not Rosalinda), in a black dress and a frizz of horrid red hair, carrying a stack of plates. So this is the Little Woman. But her manner's hardly that of a homebody; she stalks around vamping the audience. You'd never think she's upper class but for the presence of the maid. The music surges with high spirits for Jeanmaire's solo(s). A giant smile is plastered on her face, but her dancing is sticklike and minimal. Johann, the husband, prances in, but he's casually cold to her and she just can't get his attention. Her pal and admirer Ulric turns up too, and everybody dines: the maid splats gobs of food in front of them and they "eat" with great rolling motions of hands and forearms, stuffing their mouths like some mechanical-doll family. Bedtime, and Johann jumps in, squirming under the covers into his itsy-bitsy batwing equipment (proportionally kin to those little wings on Mercury's boots). Bella joins him, but when he thinks she's asleep, he's out of bed and, all wired up, flies over the stage into the night, off to a nightclub. Zizi has a fit, calls the mail to bring the telephone, and rings Ulric, dragging the maid-holding telephone all around the stage with the flaring impulses of her conversation. When Ulric arrives, she swoons briefly in his arms. There's a nice moment when he presses his lips greedily to her bosom, and she revives (no, no, no!) and he pulls her backwards as her feet ratatat objections along the floor. He figures to turn her into an exciting, mysterious lady (gives her a polka lesson), and after a moment behind a screen, we see the new but familiar Zizi, with her dark hair slicked down and the world's oldest semi-permanent spit curl and her dazzling gamine smile. Put her in a cape and off we go to the nightclub hubby hangs out at.
I enjoyed Jeanmarie's tough cookie act at the Casino de Paris some years ago; I've liked her saucy smiles her pert shrugging shoulders, her rough, insinuating voice. Reviewers write about her as if her powers and charms are intact. She looks good for her age, but that's hardly the same thing. Basically, despite whatever ticket-pulling-power Jeanmarie may have, she's misplaced in The Bat. Flimsy as it is, it must succeed by exuberance. And how can anything really get going when the star's capabilities are so limited and have to be carefully managed and conserved? The audience's sentimental goodwill must carry the evening. We're all to pretend we're not seeing what we're seeing, and think about how fascinating, alluring and captivating she's supposed to be. Bobbed along in a lovely but endless trance of ein, zwei, drei and yum-pum-pum, we night come to believe anything.
Petit's choreography has its flashily clever and droll moments, but it's choreography by the yard. What he has done beautifully, particularly in the love reunion adagio for Jeanmarie and Denys Ganio, is contrive ways of having Jeanmaire caught and carried and lifted and spun so as to reveal as little as possible how much her abilities have diminished. The duet is a masterpiece of fakery, and rather touching. Jeanmarie looks lovely here too, not so tarty for a change, in a plain body-tight garment of two shades of pale pink. The men are pretty good; the women are blurrier. Ganio is whiplike, and self-possessed as Johann; Luigi Bonino is funny and unabashedly game in his foolish disguises as Bella's pal, Ulric. Johann is hardly a role - it has no range at all - but Ganio does get you to believe that he is thoroughly smitten, ensnared, and stupefied, and generates a kind of sad grandeur in his singlemindedness. I liked, too, the way Petit has him go around shoving aside the men who've gathered around Bella once she's got him hooked. Jean-Charles Gil is flashy, precise and humpy as decidedly sexy trade in a Czardas with six girls. The waiters show off with their specialties: straight-legged pop-up jumps with flexed feet, hand-walking, air splits, and infinite turns a la seconde. The cancan girls are pretty tame, and the women, all in burnt orange, seem definitely to be "ladies" rather than ladies. The whole nightclub shebang looks like revels in the first-class saloon the night the liner goes down. The plot's finish, just before a waltzing finale, involves something that I imagine is meant to be clever and maybe funny, but seems to be repellent and sour. Bella, having knocked Johann senseless with love, cuts off his wings. Perfectly tamed, he then becomes the happy hubby. And Bella, we are to assume, is content with a gelding.
At the Uris Theatre (August 20 to September 20).
They can't all be stevedores and drug dealers. There's got to be a big middle class to sponsor the ballet company choreographer Roland Petit founded at the invitation of the city of Marseilles in 1972. I suppose it makes some sort of business sense to spend the company's first engagement here with a confection, Petit's The Bat, set to mostly Fledermaus music of Johann Strauss, and loosely based on the Fledermaus plot. But it's a trifle discouraging when such a production's highest aim is to be cute (and maybe just a smidge naughty, to remind folks how "sophisticated" the French are), and even then it doesn't quite succeed.
Into a domestic scene comes Zizi Jeanmaire (as Bella, not Rosalinda), in a black dress and a frizz of horrid red hair, carrying a stack of plates. So this is the Little Woman. But her manner's hardly that of a homebody; she stalks around vamping the audience. You'd never think she's upper class but for the presence of the maid. The music surges with high spirits for Jeanmaire's solo(s). A giant smile is plastered on her face, but her dancing is sticklike and minimal. Johann, the husband, prances in, but he's casually cold to her and she just can't get his attention. Her pal and admirer Ulric turns up too, and everybody dines: the maid splats gobs of food in front of them and they "eat" with great rolling motions of hands and forearms, stuffing their mouths like some mechanical-doll family. Bedtime, and Johann jumps in, squirming under the covers into his itsy-bitsy batwing equipment (proportionally kin to those little wings on Mercury's boots). Bella joins him, but when he thinks she's asleep, he's out of bed and, all wired up, flies over the stage into the night, off to a nightclub. Zizi has a fit, calls the mail to bring the telephone, and rings Ulric, dragging the maid-holding telephone all around the stage with the flaring impulses of her conversation. When Ulric arrives, she swoons briefly in his arms. There's a nice moment when he presses his lips greedily to her bosom, and she revives (no, no, no!) and he pulls her backwards as her feet ratatat objections along the floor. He figures to turn her into an exciting, mysterious lady (gives her a polka lesson), and after a moment behind a screen, we see the new but familiar Zizi, with her dark hair slicked down and the world's oldest semi-permanent spit curl and her dazzling gamine smile. Put her in a cape and off we go to the nightclub hubby hangs out at.
I enjoyed Jeanmarie's tough cookie act at the Casino de Paris some years ago; I've liked her saucy smiles her pert shrugging shoulders, her rough, insinuating voice. Reviewers write about her as if her powers and charms are intact. She looks good for her age, but that's hardly the same thing. Basically, despite whatever ticket-pulling-power Jeanmarie may have, she's misplaced in The Bat. Flimsy as it is, it must succeed by exuberance. And how can anything really get going when the star's capabilities are so limited and have to be carefully managed and conserved? The audience's sentimental goodwill must carry the evening. We're all to pretend we're not seeing what we're seeing, and think about how fascinating, alluring and captivating she's supposed to be. Bobbed along in a lovely but endless trance of ein, zwei, drei and yum-pum-pum, we night come to believe anything.
Petit's choreography has its flashily clever and droll moments, but it's choreography by the yard. What he has done beautifully, particularly in the love reunion adagio for Jeanmarie and Denys Ganio, is contrive ways of having Jeanmaire caught and carried and lifted and spun so as to reveal as little as possible how much her abilities have diminished. The duet is a masterpiece of fakery, and rather touching. Jeanmarie looks lovely here too, not so tarty for a change, in a plain body-tight garment of two shades of pale pink. The men are pretty good; the women are blurrier. Ganio is whiplike, and self-possessed as Johann; Luigi Bonino is funny and unabashedly game in his foolish disguises as Bella's pal, Ulric. Johann is hardly a role - it has no range at all - but Ganio does get you to believe that he is thoroughly smitten, ensnared, and stupefied, and generates a kind of sad grandeur in his singlemindedness. I liked, too, the way Petit has him go around shoving aside the men who've gathered around Bella once she's got him hooked. Jean-Charles Gil is flashy, precise and humpy as decidedly sexy trade in a Czardas with six girls. The waiters show off with their specialties: straight-legged pop-up jumps with flexed feet, hand-walking, air splits, and infinite turns a la seconde. The cancan girls are pretty tame, and the women, all in burnt orange, seem definitely to be "ladies" rather than ladies. The whole nightclub shebang looks like revels in the first-class saloon the night the liner goes down. The plot's finish, just before a waltzing finale, involves something that I imagine is meant to be clever and maybe funny, but seems to be repellent and sour. Bella, having knocked Johann senseless with love, cuts off his wings. Perfectly tamed, he then becomes the happy hubby. And Bella, we are to assume, is content with a gelding.
At the Uris Theatre (August 20 to September 20).
Nothing But Coupling
January 7
The five-year-old International Ballet of Caracas is a fine company with a genial spirit. Artistic director and choreographer Vicente Nebrada (who was resident choreographer with the Harkness Ballet) and ballerina Zhandra Rodriguez (a principal dancer with ABT till he left in 1974), the company's founder, have assembled a solid group of excellent dancers with a unity of style and a sense of confidence in each other that's exemplified by their fearless partnering. And all the girls are small, of a perfect size to be thrown around. But the underlying sensibility is shallow.
Nebrada's Estudios, which begins in a sputter of steps and friezes and grows into a speedier chatter of intermittent solos, duets and ensembles, has some pretty moments, but seems blurry and shapeless without sweep or decision. Dancers run in, and do something or other, then run off. More come in and do something else. Nebrada's Gemini is a duet for two men (Alejandro Menendez and Alex Subiria, both excellent) who start out well apart on the floor. Eventually, they move together for a comradely adagio with the kneeling partner balancing the other Lots of gymnastics - like shoulder stands. Once, the standing partner jumps on the kneeling on, thunking right into the back of his neck, it seems, though I suppose it's just high on his back. Interesting stuff - but the self-important monotone of the dynamic freights the movement with unjustified significance.
Nebrada's Lento a Tempo e Appassionato, fashioned to three Scriabin pieces, is a lush and amorous trio of duets dances by Zane Wilson and Rodriguez. The first is clasping and spoonlike: the pair barely make it out of an embrace. But the next two are speedier, wilder, and more swinging. Rodriguez, an exquisite monkey of a dancer, is feral and precise. Nebrada certainly has a knack for the spectacular aspects of the duet. In Our Waltzes, a man snatches his partner, then whirls with her to the floor. Spirally wraparound lifts are followed by sudden dips that snap the woman to the man's body. Momentum is abruptly warped or halted. But the mechanisms protrude: partners keep running away from each other only so they can hurl themselves together again. Of course it's always like that in ballet, but rarely so annoying. There's no direction. (Where would the next thrill come from if a couple just stayed glued? Another couple would run in.)
Margo Sappington's Rodin Mis En Vie carries the duet to even wilder extravagances: the men snap the women into the air as the women fling their limbs open or they barely catch the women's spinning bodies on the fly. For all the charm of the dancers, the two programs I saw were disturbing. The pieces are "enjoyable", but without substance. They leave you hungry for something with real taste. Not everything is flashy, but everything is a showpiece. Nebrada's Percussion for Six Men (like Gemini, a revival from his Harkness days) is a circus for Menendez, Dale Talley, Manuel Molina, Zubiria, Zane Wilson and Yanis Pikieris, who march in in formal patterns, present themselves, do pirouettes like clockwork, then do specialty solos. Pikieris's solo, for example, is an eddying stream of turns A tour de force, I suppose, and a silly waste of talent in the service of gimmickry.
I was impressed, however, by a kind of rough, offhand exuberance in Talley's "jazz" solo, and later thrilled by his solo in Rodin, "The Athlete Called the American," to which he brought nuances of attack and inflection that were otherwise absent, as if saying "Now I'm heavier, now I'm light, now more elastic...isn't it all just a breeze?" The stage space seems to have no value for Nebrada: there's no reason why something happens in one place rather than another. The dancers seem to have no air around them. It's astonishing, in Sappington's Rodin, when space suddenly becomes a visible, powerful element. In the "Burghers of Calais" section of that piece, to have some of the dancers motionless and others moving seems like a revelation. The dancers shine by their attractiveness and by their technical know how. But we don't see much of these dancers' real range, nothing of anyone's particular intelligence or wit or understanding. Just the tricks they can do. How cunning they can be with their bodies. This makes an audience greedy, insatiable: you want to see another trick, a better one, a more dangerous one. And under the excitement, you feel yourself going numb.
At City Center (November 13 to 25)
The five-year-old International Ballet of Caracas is a fine company with a genial spirit. Artistic director and choreographer Vicente Nebrada (who was resident choreographer with the Harkness Ballet) and ballerina Zhandra Rodriguez (a principal dancer with ABT till he left in 1974), the company's founder, have assembled a solid group of excellent dancers with a unity of style and a sense of confidence in each other that's exemplified by their fearless partnering. And all the girls are small, of a perfect size to be thrown around. But the underlying sensibility is shallow.
Nebrada's Estudios, which begins in a sputter of steps and friezes and grows into a speedier chatter of intermittent solos, duets and ensembles, has some pretty moments, but seems blurry and shapeless without sweep or decision. Dancers run in, and do something or other, then run off. More come in and do something else. Nebrada's Gemini is a duet for two men (Alejandro Menendez and Alex Subiria, both excellent) who start out well apart on the floor. Eventually, they move together for a comradely adagio with the kneeling partner balancing the other Lots of gymnastics - like shoulder stands. Once, the standing partner jumps on the kneeling on, thunking right into the back of his neck, it seems, though I suppose it's just high on his back. Interesting stuff - but the self-important monotone of the dynamic freights the movement with unjustified significance.
Nebrada's Lento a Tempo e Appassionato, fashioned to three Scriabin pieces, is a lush and amorous trio of duets dances by Zane Wilson and Rodriguez. The first is clasping and spoonlike: the pair barely make it out of an embrace. But the next two are speedier, wilder, and more swinging. Rodriguez, an exquisite monkey of a dancer, is feral and precise. Nebrada certainly has a knack for the spectacular aspects of the duet. In Our Waltzes, a man snatches his partner, then whirls with her to the floor. Spirally wraparound lifts are followed by sudden dips that snap the woman to the man's body. Momentum is abruptly warped or halted. But the mechanisms protrude: partners keep running away from each other only so they can hurl themselves together again. Of course it's always like that in ballet, but rarely so annoying. There's no direction. (Where would the next thrill come from if a couple just stayed glued? Another couple would run in.)
Margo Sappington's Rodin Mis En Vie carries the duet to even wilder extravagances: the men snap the women into the air as the women fling their limbs open or they barely catch the women's spinning bodies on the fly. For all the charm of the dancers, the two programs I saw were disturbing. The pieces are "enjoyable", but without substance. They leave you hungry for something with real taste. Not everything is flashy, but everything is a showpiece. Nebrada's Percussion for Six Men (like Gemini, a revival from his Harkness days) is a circus for Menendez, Dale Talley, Manuel Molina, Zubiria, Zane Wilson and Yanis Pikieris, who march in in formal patterns, present themselves, do pirouettes like clockwork, then do specialty solos. Pikieris's solo, for example, is an eddying stream of turns A tour de force, I suppose, and a silly waste of talent in the service of gimmickry.
I was impressed, however, by a kind of rough, offhand exuberance in Talley's "jazz" solo, and later thrilled by his solo in Rodin, "The Athlete Called the American," to which he brought nuances of attack and inflection that were otherwise absent, as if saying "Now I'm heavier, now I'm light, now more elastic...isn't it all just a breeze?" The stage space seems to have no value for Nebrada: there's no reason why something happens in one place rather than another. The dancers seem to have no air around them. It's astonishing, in Sappington's Rodin, when space suddenly becomes a visible, powerful element. In the "Burghers of Calais" section of that piece, to have some of the dancers motionless and others moving seems like a revelation. The dancers shine by their attractiveness and by their technical know how. But we don't see much of these dancers' real range, nothing of anyone's particular intelligence or wit or understanding. Just the tricks they can do. How cunning they can be with their bodies. This makes an audience greedy, insatiable: you want to see another trick, a better one, a more dangerous one. And under the excitement, you feel yourself going numb.
At City Center (November 13 to 25)
Plain Fare
April 28
The auditorium of P.S. 122 on First Avenue and 9th Street is just a plain, big studio type room, with several narrow columns, a lovely space with a good, blond floor. Few people came to see
Gabrielle Lansner and Ruth Alpert's solos the night I did: friends and some others. There's something gratifying about seeing dancers work in a low-key but special and ungrubby situation. As a member of the audience, it puts one in a particularly mild, unpressed and unquestioning, mood, willing to see the dancers do whatever it is they do.
The first part of Lansner's portion of the program was meant to have a film, but the projector went fatally on the fritz just before the concert. Lansner starts at one side of the room, just standing still in blue top and loose black pants, looking quite young. She takes a few steps. stretches her arms before and behind her, pauses, runs a few steps more. She seems slightly buoyed on the air by her arms, which she keeps moving ever so slightly. Then she lowers them. She runs backwards, and back again in another direction, dropping into a sharp inverted V her head lightly bobbing. Much of what she does concentrates in the arms and hands and has a kind of careful grace and finesse: she stretches her arm out overhand, or underhand, with a quality of uncurling, with a sense in the hand of lightly caressing, or plucking. Or she pushes gently through the hands. Sometimes her movement becomes more abrupt, with rough turns that sweep the leg wide as her head twists and her arms are thrown in a circle around the head, rather like something Duncanesque in shape, though labored in execution. I didn't always grasp what these more active episodes meant to Lansner, what prompted them, how they fit with the rest. This was a modest essay, studied, not attempting much It seemed to be very much about making the movement internally right. Overall, Lansner conveyed a sense of peacefulness in the way she went about these things.
In a pale apricot Indian shirt, Alpert seems to be leaning moonily or shyly against a column (actually she's just plain leaning). Eventually, one hand begins to move over the fluted ridges of the column; her somewhat downcast face lifts up. She begins to curl her fingers, and gradually the curling invades her arms, which begin to ripple gently. She looks altogether readier, more energized now. The rippling becomes more extreme: the arms move into asymmetrical, deep curves, sharper flexions, as Alpert takes slow steps forward. Her head shifts quirkily as her attention darts to and from her hands. She succumbs to the floor as her arms twist behind her. She crawls, takes a step forward but doesn't progress, sliding her leg smoothly back, over and over. Later, she goes into a decisive series of partial turns, rapidly changing her facing. Tilts her hips from side to side with her knees bent. Does various leggy things, turning the leg in and out through passe.
Joined by Scott Ainslie playing mournful/joyous country fiddle, Alpert begins to run lightly through the room and fills the runs with turnings sprinkled with hops, letting her arms sweep horizontally. The violin has a powerful tone, resonates wonderfully in this big near-empty room. Ainslie plays it beautifully. Seems sad to me, hearing this music which has the power to quicken bunches of people...Forty people should be up there dancing, including me. After the fiddle section, Alpert goes into arabesque with arms flat forward, jumps into the air with a shiver of the hips, goes into a lunge that arches and keels forward. She repeats the sequence again and again, faster and faster, and then on the other diagonal. She does a series of grand poses, and an assortment of grand, modest and humble bows. Again, I don't know what to make of some of these fragments - like the poses and bows, or a crude stamping dance in 4/4 time during the fiddle section. Arbitrary seems too strong a word for these somewhat casual-seeming compilations of things-we've-been-thinking-about.
P.S. 122 (April 17 to 19).
The auditorium of P.S. 122 on First Avenue and 9th Street is just a plain, big studio type room, with several narrow columns, a lovely space with a good, blond floor. Few people came to see
Gabrielle Lansner and Ruth Alpert's solos the night I did: friends and some others. There's something gratifying about seeing dancers work in a low-key but special and ungrubby situation. As a member of the audience, it puts one in a particularly mild, unpressed and unquestioning, mood, willing to see the dancers do whatever it is they do.
The first part of Lansner's portion of the program was meant to have a film, but the projector went fatally on the fritz just before the concert. Lansner starts at one side of the room, just standing still in blue top and loose black pants, looking quite young. She takes a few steps. stretches her arms before and behind her, pauses, runs a few steps more. She seems slightly buoyed on the air by her arms, which she keeps moving ever so slightly. Then she lowers them. She runs backwards, and back again in another direction, dropping into a sharp inverted V her head lightly bobbing. Much of what she does concentrates in the arms and hands and has a kind of careful grace and finesse: she stretches her arm out overhand, or underhand, with a quality of uncurling, with a sense in the hand of lightly caressing, or plucking. Or she pushes gently through the hands. Sometimes her movement becomes more abrupt, with rough turns that sweep the leg wide as her head twists and her arms are thrown in a circle around the head, rather like something Duncanesque in shape, though labored in execution. I didn't always grasp what these more active episodes meant to Lansner, what prompted them, how they fit with the rest. This was a modest essay, studied, not attempting much It seemed to be very much about making the movement internally right. Overall, Lansner conveyed a sense of peacefulness in the way she went about these things.
In a pale apricot Indian shirt, Alpert seems to be leaning moonily or shyly against a column (actually she's just plain leaning). Eventually, one hand begins to move over the fluted ridges of the column; her somewhat downcast face lifts up. She begins to curl her fingers, and gradually the curling invades her arms, which begin to ripple gently. She looks altogether readier, more energized now. The rippling becomes more extreme: the arms move into asymmetrical, deep curves, sharper flexions, as Alpert takes slow steps forward. Her head shifts quirkily as her attention darts to and from her hands. She succumbs to the floor as her arms twist behind her. She crawls, takes a step forward but doesn't progress, sliding her leg smoothly back, over and over. Later, she goes into a decisive series of partial turns, rapidly changing her facing. Tilts her hips from side to side with her knees bent. Does various leggy things, turning the leg in and out through passe.
Joined by Scott Ainslie playing mournful/joyous country fiddle, Alpert begins to run lightly through the room and fills the runs with turnings sprinkled with hops, letting her arms sweep horizontally. The violin has a powerful tone, resonates wonderfully in this big near-empty room. Ainslie plays it beautifully. Seems sad to me, hearing this music which has the power to quicken bunches of people...Forty people should be up there dancing, including me. After the fiddle section, Alpert goes into arabesque with arms flat forward, jumps into the air with a shiver of the hips, goes into a lunge that arches and keels forward. She repeats the sequence again and again, faster and faster, and then on the other diagonal. She does a series of grand poses, and an assortment of grand, modest and humble bows. Again, I don't know what to make of some of these fragments - like the poses and bows, or a crude stamping dance in 4/4 time during the fiddle section. Arbitrary seems too strong a word for these somewhat casual-seeming compilations of things-we've-been-thinking-about.
P.S. 122 (April 17 to 19).
Speeding Bullets
March 31
I remember when Charles Moulton was dancing with Merce Cunningham (1973-1976), how full his dancing was, communicating without apparent effort or design the sheer pleasure of dancing. His recent concert at the Kitchen with himself, Susan Eschelbach and Janna Jensen, conveyed the same sense of delight and accomplishment. The dancers enter casually but the movement is instantly demanding and changeable. Only a few moments - pulled up, quick, and intricate - remind me of Cunningham. The costumes create a sense of dancers' workaday flash: Eschelbach's in a red top, sort-of-salmon pants, thick gray folded-down socks; Jensen wears a purple top, gray ants and acid-yellow socks; Moulton's in blue, black and blue. Small holes have been snipped here and there in their tops, but nothing gapes.
What turns out to be part one is about half-an-hour long, broken into brief, exciting movement episodes anywhere in the space. There's no music but Moulton, Eschelbach and Jensen work to a fast percussive ground you can hear distinctly in their footwork. And they play with the accents. There are lots of wide, wheeling solo movements, knotty interweavings, drastic or silky changes of level that sweep from standing to the ground or reverse. Bodies bend or change direction in surprising ways___ equilibrium. Some of the more s----ious movements, that need but aren't tied to the rhythms, have a kind of retard or lilt that gives them a sense of lifting p ---, of grandeur beyond the brief time that they take.
Much of the excitement has to do with taking weight and shifting balance, getting a sure grip, suddenly releasing, spinning to the floor, sliding through, or swinging away. This can be slow or swift. For example, Jensen lies on the floor holding Moulton's foot. He leans away. Eschelbach adds her leverage to Jensen's as Moulton descends with astonishingly steady slowness to the floor. A related slow fall is like the opening and folding of a fan. The three stand together, locking wrists: the women, one at a time, lean to the floor, then support Moulton as he comes down on them. Occasionally, they break to towel their faces, wipe the slippery sweat from their arms so they can get a reliable grip.
Moulton's gift for phrasing struck me very early: he breezed into a tour jete with beautiful elevation, and landed rolling over into a wide, upside down V. He made the whole configuration - step, leap, land, roll, V - feel like a single move containing its own climax and resolution. Jensen and Eschelbach are pretty wonderful too. It's hard to know how much of the piece us set, but at such speeds, not much could be improvised. Nonetheless, there is a strong feeling of spontaneity. The sequence of sections appeared to be decided on the instant. Also, incidental things, like when one of the women spins Moulton down the floor at great speed, flat as a saucer, whirling on his butt. As his pivot shifts, like that of any top, it brings Moulton closer to one of the poles that intrude into the Kitchen space. Moulton smoothly rounds himself into a deeper curve to shrink his circle and avoid collision.
In an obvious free-for-all, Moulton calls out "shake, jump, free, squiggle, square, helicopter, arch, cross, hips, sink, free." The section takes about as long to do as to say. When they stop, you're as joyous and satisfied as they are breathless and exhausted. The second part, after a short pause, is totally different, tight and contained. The three stand together. and transfer pink balls from hand to hand in complicated shifting patterns keyed to music by A. Leroy on electric organ and rhythm machine. This is the kind of fascinatingly obsessive and gratuitous task that takes on a soothing, introspective quality when you watch it done with such concentration. A deep humor also emerges from the intimacy of three people essaying a maddening task that absorbs the audience and involves them in complicity. You don't grasp the whole pattern, but you recognize some elements and the musical sequences they seem to go with. You hardly see the balls except when they're occasionally bounced or flipped overhead. When they flub it, they g back and resume without exasperation. It's like weaving an intricate braid of arms through time. Or the ingenious designs of Celtic interlacing. Like lace-making. Or just a tongue-twister for arms.
At the Kitchen (February 21 to 24).
I remember when Charles Moulton was dancing with Merce Cunningham (1973-1976), how full his dancing was, communicating without apparent effort or design the sheer pleasure of dancing. His recent concert at the Kitchen with himself, Susan Eschelbach and Janna Jensen, conveyed the same sense of delight and accomplishment. The dancers enter casually but the movement is instantly demanding and changeable. Only a few moments - pulled up, quick, and intricate - remind me of Cunningham. The costumes create a sense of dancers' workaday flash: Eschelbach's in a red top, sort-of-salmon pants, thick gray folded-down socks; Jensen wears a purple top, gray ants and acid-yellow socks; Moulton's in blue, black and blue. Small holes have been snipped here and there in their tops, but nothing gapes.
What turns out to be part one is about half-an-hour long, broken into brief, exciting movement episodes anywhere in the space. There's no music but Moulton, Eschelbach and Jensen work to a fast percussive ground you can hear distinctly in their footwork. And they play with the accents. There are lots of wide, wheeling solo movements, knotty interweavings, drastic or silky changes of level that sweep from standing to the ground or reverse. Bodies bend or change direction in surprising ways___ equilibrium. Some of the more s----ious movements, that need but aren't tied to the rhythms, have a kind of retard or lilt that gives them a sense of lifting p ---, of grandeur beyond the brief time that they take.
Much of the excitement has to do with taking weight and shifting balance, getting a sure grip, suddenly releasing, spinning to the floor, sliding through, or swinging away. This can be slow or swift. For example, Jensen lies on the floor holding Moulton's foot. He leans away. Eschelbach adds her leverage to Jensen's as Moulton descends with astonishingly steady slowness to the floor. A related slow fall is like the opening and folding of a fan. The three stand together, locking wrists: the women, one at a time, lean to the floor, then support Moulton as he comes down on them. Occasionally, they break to towel their faces, wipe the slippery sweat from their arms so they can get a reliable grip.
Moulton's gift for phrasing struck me very early: he breezed into a tour jete with beautiful elevation, and landed rolling over into a wide, upside down V. He made the whole configuration - step, leap, land, roll, V - feel like a single move containing its own climax and resolution. Jensen and Eschelbach are pretty wonderful too. It's hard to know how much of the piece us set, but at such speeds, not much could be improvised. Nonetheless, there is a strong feeling of spontaneity. The sequence of sections appeared to be decided on the instant. Also, incidental things, like when one of the women spins Moulton down the floor at great speed, flat as a saucer, whirling on his butt. As his pivot shifts, like that of any top, it brings Moulton closer to one of the poles that intrude into the Kitchen space. Moulton smoothly rounds himself into a deeper curve to shrink his circle and avoid collision.
In an obvious free-for-all, Moulton calls out "shake, jump, free, squiggle, square, helicopter, arch, cross, hips, sink, free." The section takes about as long to do as to say. When they stop, you're as joyous and satisfied as they are breathless and exhausted. The second part, after a short pause, is totally different, tight and contained. The three stand together. and transfer pink balls from hand to hand in complicated shifting patterns keyed to music by A. Leroy on electric organ and rhythm machine. This is the kind of fascinatingly obsessive and gratuitous task that takes on a soothing, introspective quality when you watch it done with such concentration. A deep humor also emerges from the intimacy of three people essaying a maddening task that absorbs the audience and involves them in complicity. You don't grasp the whole pattern, but you recognize some elements and the musical sequences they seem to go with. You hardly see the balls except when they're occasionally bounced or flipped overhead. When they flub it, they g back and resume without exasperation. It's like weaving an intricate braid of arms through time. Or the ingenious designs of Celtic interlacing. Like lace-making. Or just a tongue-twister for arms.
At the Kitchen (February 21 to 24).
Strong Medicine
May 19
Christopher Beck's territory is psychological, and though his dances come rounded out, they hold questions, and appear to have been made with an exploratory spirit. Mercifully, he hasn't stamped "significant" all over everything. Neither squeamish nor facile, Beck goes on intuition, and with more than respect for the mysterious ways of the p----. Bursts of violence, invasive perceptions, finger the onlooker, as an emotional thread is traced.
In The Dreaming Ground, four robed figures appear out of the darkness, unmoving, as music by Daniel Rosen gently chimes and tocks behind them. The figures are men (although Beck has presented it with men and women); their garb and their formal, designed movements make them seem like officers or authorities, nearly Byzantine. They start to shift positions, recomposing the order of their quartet: what they do is strongly patterned, essentially abstract, and studied. Each new position is brief, held with the intensity and absolute precision of frozen heroes in a Poussin painting. The four pace back and forward in various alternations. They move along the back like a sort of stop-motion frieze, with arms bent or straight, bodies frontal or tilted, but never off balance, never the slightest bit accidental. The angular, squared shapes they make suggest letters, though none are recognizable.
This is a solemn ritual, with some sense of a message in cryptic semaphore. Later, walking from one side of the stage to the other, the men pass between each other as they have before, but their invisible lanes are narrower, and the barest sideways twist comes into their walk so they can dodge each other as they pass. Unavoidably, they seem to be drawing together. They remove their robes. They're wearing brown leotards underneath. Now they move tentatively, on edge, searching, their feet sort of nervous and twittery. They crawl through, under and over each other - altogether more dependent. Once, when the men are all huddling together in a clump, Beck touches one who wakes, and this moment of "recognition" somehow embarrasses me. Aroused, the men form a chain like Matisse's dancers. The group leans sideways and all catch whoever falls first through he palisade. Three are left resting on each other. When Beck slowly touches them one at a time, each turns to him, like a sleepwalker, then gradually reverts to his former position. At last, the phase passes, and they wake They formally clothe each other. As the light fades, they are as they were at the beginning.
One obvious assumption is that the unrobed men are the real, unarmored selves of the robed beings. But to me they seem less true. I mistrust the men's "innocence", a certain goody-goody quality, partly because much of what they enact has already been cliched through the routines of ensemble theatre groups and modish therapies. The men's unmitigated consideration and care felt heavy: it seemed that in this section the piece was governed more by wishful thinking than intuition. The tender touch of the hand that suddenly achieves communication, recognition, is infused with too much sentimental importance, as if it were an ultimate solution.
In The Other, a blond dolly turns up in a short, satiny red dress. In the darker half of the stage, another woman, in loose gray pants and top, holds herself tightly, shuffles, screams fiercely in silence. The blond wigglewalks, caresses herself. Gray keels over flat on the floor, heaving, and then begins to struggle wit the onslaught of some terrible sloughing of the skin. The blond, looking in a mirror, is struck by spasms, and possessed by a voiceless scream. You can see how the piece is going - that some sort of transformation is overtaking both women (or both aspects) and that they'll probably achieve some sort of reconciliation. But the particular things that happen are constantly surprising, stark and intense - perfectly logical, but not in the logic of straight-line thinking. The upshot is as expected. They endure a number of encounters in a puzzle of hostility and attraction until their reactions grow less extreme. They crawl together. Sitting, they touch each other in that gesture of acknowledgment: "I see you." But here, unlike Dreaming Ground, the touch is earned.
Beck's solo, Stone Shadow, is a stunner. He's bent like a question mark, one hand on the ground. The sound, initially, is soft and windy, and slowly grows louder. Beck is in a drab, no-color outfit with a suggestion of bindings. Almost a mummy. He slowly curls his head up, and comes more or less erect. One hand seems to be forced to his horrified, frightened mouth. His legs shiver, he fusses knottily with his hands. The face is ugly, ratlike, cruel. This is a barely human thing, crippled with bitterness. Hunched again, Beck straightens his arms vertically, one up, one down, and the long unwavering line, earth to sky, is suddenly amazing and beautiful. This simple thing. It's just a respite, a shaft of light, if that. Beck then hunkers down, grinding his hand into the floor. He releases one arm, watches his hand return toward him like some alien, dangerous thing. Suddenly he's up, legs wide, arms jerking. A horrible, hoarse scream comes from his mouth. His hands thrash. A moment later he screams again. Each is icy, astonishing, from nowhere, from no experience we'd allow ourselves to know about.. He stays motionless, arms outstretches, then shrinks slowly back into his original hooked pose. Someone paralyzed with ancient rage and horror. It accumulates in him, appalls him, bursts out, and settles to build again like steam in a volcanic pocket.
At Theatre of the Open Eye (to April 27).
Christopher Beck's territory is psychological, and though his dances come rounded out, they hold questions, and appear to have been made with an exploratory spirit. Mercifully, he hasn't stamped "significant" all over everything. Neither squeamish nor facile, Beck goes on intuition, and with more than respect for the mysterious ways of the p----. Bursts of violence, invasive perceptions, finger the onlooker, as an emotional thread is traced.
In The Dreaming Ground, four robed figures appear out of the darkness, unmoving, as music by Daniel Rosen gently chimes and tocks behind them. The figures are men (although Beck has presented it with men and women); their garb and their formal, designed movements make them seem like officers or authorities, nearly Byzantine. They start to shift positions, recomposing the order of their quartet: what they do is strongly patterned, essentially abstract, and studied. Each new position is brief, held with the intensity and absolute precision of frozen heroes in a Poussin painting. The four pace back and forward in various alternations. They move along the back like a sort of stop-motion frieze, with arms bent or straight, bodies frontal or tilted, but never off balance, never the slightest bit accidental. The angular, squared shapes they make suggest letters, though none are recognizable.
This is a solemn ritual, with some sense of a message in cryptic semaphore. Later, walking from one side of the stage to the other, the men pass between each other as they have before, but their invisible lanes are narrower, and the barest sideways twist comes into their walk so they can dodge each other as they pass. Unavoidably, they seem to be drawing together. They remove their robes. They're wearing brown leotards underneath. Now they move tentatively, on edge, searching, their feet sort of nervous and twittery. They crawl through, under and over each other - altogether more dependent. Once, when the men are all huddling together in a clump, Beck touches one who wakes, and this moment of "recognition" somehow embarrasses me. Aroused, the men form a chain like Matisse's dancers. The group leans sideways and all catch whoever falls first through he palisade. Three are left resting on each other. When Beck slowly touches them one at a time, each turns to him, like a sleepwalker, then gradually reverts to his former position. At last, the phase passes, and they wake They formally clothe each other. As the light fades, they are as they were at the beginning.
One obvious assumption is that the unrobed men are the real, unarmored selves of the robed beings. But to me they seem less true. I mistrust the men's "innocence", a certain goody-goody quality, partly because much of what they enact has already been cliched through the routines of ensemble theatre groups and modish therapies. The men's unmitigated consideration and care felt heavy: it seemed that in this section the piece was governed more by wishful thinking than intuition. The tender touch of the hand that suddenly achieves communication, recognition, is infused with too much sentimental importance, as if it were an ultimate solution.
In The Other, a blond dolly turns up in a short, satiny red dress. In the darker half of the stage, another woman, in loose gray pants and top, holds herself tightly, shuffles, screams fiercely in silence. The blond wigglewalks, caresses herself. Gray keels over flat on the floor, heaving, and then begins to struggle wit the onslaught of some terrible sloughing of the skin. The blond, looking in a mirror, is struck by spasms, and possessed by a voiceless scream. You can see how the piece is going - that some sort of transformation is overtaking both women (or both aspects) and that they'll probably achieve some sort of reconciliation. But the particular things that happen are constantly surprising, stark and intense - perfectly logical, but not in the logic of straight-line thinking. The upshot is as expected. They endure a number of encounters in a puzzle of hostility and attraction until their reactions grow less extreme. They crawl together. Sitting, they touch each other in that gesture of acknowledgment: "I see you." But here, unlike Dreaming Ground, the touch is earned.
Beck's solo, Stone Shadow, is a stunner. He's bent like a question mark, one hand on the ground. The sound, initially, is soft and windy, and slowly grows louder. Beck is in a drab, no-color outfit with a suggestion of bindings. Almost a mummy. He slowly curls his head up, and comes more or less erect. One hand seems to be forced to his horrified, frightened mouth. His legs shiver, he fusses knottily with his hands. The face is ugly, ratlike, cruel. This is a barely human thing, crippled with bitterness. Hunched again, Beck straightens his arms vertically, one up, one down, and the long unwavering line, earth to sky, is suddenly amazing and beautiful. This simple thing. It's just a respite, a shaft of light, if that. Beck then hunkers down, grinding his hand into the floor. He releases one arm, watches his hand return toward him like some alien, dangerous thing. Suddenly he's up, legs wide, arms jerking. A horrible, hoarse scream comes from his mouth. His hands thrash. A moment later he screams again. Each is icy, astonishing, from nowhere, from no experience we'd allow ourselves to know about.. He stays motionless, arms outstretches, then shrinks slowly back into his original hooked pose. Someone paralyzed with ancient rage and horror. It accumulates in him, appalls him, bursts out, and settles to build again like steam in a volcanic pocket.
At Theatre of the Open Eye (to April 27).
Give ‘Em a Tumble
August 20
There’s almost too much to take in. First, you register the spectacular and sumptuous troops whizzing like somersaulting footballs from the corners of the stage: an army bounding head-over-heels, vaulting a cloth wall to conquer a city; four pink clam cuties opening and closing their green shells. Swirly-masked generals, resplendent but hue and cumbersome in layers of silver and gold, bristle with pennants, and stride in high platform shoes. A mild scholar wears a royal blue robe, with undercoats of lilac and the palest blue. Strong men of importance move with determination, speak with deep, bellowing voices, and wear longer-than- waist-length beards. Peking Opera is astonishing, in part, by virtue of the way it combines blatant physical virtuosity and subtlety of expression, by its intricate mix of gymnastic and acrobatic feats with a complex and refined dance-mime.
A 20-minute excerpt of The White Snake is all martial gymnastics and juggling except for a song and a brief dialogue. The fight excerpt from Three-Forked Crossroad is 30 minutes, almost entirely gymnastic. Much of the movement range of the combat is familiar, in a general way, through martial arts - the habit of saluting or honoring the opponent, elaborate and rather decorative displays of prowess to wow the opposition, deep lunges, circling and spiraling moves that weave around the body, legs pulled in and snapped forcefully out. But more of the movement is acrobatic: whirling leg-over-leg with the torso horizontal, like a propeller; whirling close to the floor, one leg flung wide; swinging the legs around open and flat as the hands shift swiftly to gear the body’s eight. Whole gangs of warriors intercut rapid flips and rolls. Teams interlace rapid jumping dives onto hands and bellies. Flying human pinwheels sometimes spring full circle from feet to feet, without the usual midway pushoff from the hands.
In The White Snake the heroine battles a quartet of Stags and Cranes to obtain a curative red flower. The battle, which begins with swords, becomes a juggling challenge with flexible candy-striped sticks being tossed and switched and kicked back by the White Snake. The Monkey King, so confident, powerful, and amused he seems lackadaisical, fights each of 18 demons, and then takes on the whole lot together. These long combats occur in sections, punctuated by occasional freezes in dynamic poses that are brimful of energy. They seem like moments for the audience to assess the situation, read the expressions (triumph, determination, puzzlement...) and take a deep breath. It’s as if the performers are coasting along at such high inner speed they just don’t need any more thrust.
Everything is marked by beautiful, absolute control of weight, balance and impetus. The actors have the full freedom of the air and of the floor - to jump and bound through, to plant themselves on, bounce off and scuttle across. The Innkeeper, in Three-Forked Crossroads, jumps from a crouch on the floor to a calm perch on a table with n evident effort, no difference in energy r attitude. As if he simply decided, in his mind, to change places. The famous fight in the dark from Three-Forked Crossroads is a hilarious tour de force of near-misses, a fanciful game of life and death. The Innkeeper, a bit of a clown, mistakenly tries to kill the noble warrior Jen T’ang-hui, thinking he’s an enemy. The choicest moments are when almost nothing’s happening: the opponents are close to each other, sensing someone, nearly touching. The Innkeeper vaults backwards as Jen T’ang-hui tentatively lifts his sword. Both stand on the small table, one peering over the other’s shoulder, seeing nothing. Jen lifts and swings his legs just as the Innkeeper zips under. These two are attuned in so many ways - sometimes nearly dovetailing in their movements, sometimes echoing each other. Their decisive strikes are in empty air: each follows with his head and eyes the path a sword has sliced in the darkness; each halts before perils sensed but unseen. The Innkeeper may harmlessly wiggle his sword between Jen’s elbow and waist. But, often enough, probing with sword or hand, sudden contact sparks flurries of slashing at nothing. The actions of the characters in this and the other plays read pretty clearly in any language. The White Snake wipes away an occasional tear, espies the red flower, pleads with the Stag-Guardian. The Monkey King lightly wields a stick; a demon catching it crashes backwards, knocked over by its tremendous weight. Puzzling gestures tend to explain themselves.
For a while, I wondered about a move where a foot is pulled sharply back to the knee or shin, just before someone leaves the stage, or starts to fight. After a while, I realized what it was. It’s not rhetorical. It’s the character collecting himself. It’s Jackie Gleason’s old exit, “...and away we go!”
There’s almost too much to take in. First, you register the spectacular and sumptuous troops whizzing like somersaulting footballs from the corners of the stage: an army bounding head-over-heels, vaulting a cloth wall to conquer a city; four pink clam cuties opening and closing their green shells. Swirly-masked generals, resplendent but hue and cumbersome in layers of silver and gold, bristle with pennants, and stride in high platform shoes. A mild scholar wears a royal blue robe, with undercoats of lilac and the palest blue. Strong men of importance move with determination, speak with deep, bellowing voices, and wear longer-than- waist-length beards. Peking Opera is astonishing, in part, by virtue of the way it combines blatant physical virtuosity and subtlety of expression, by its intricate mix of gymnastic and acrobatic feats with a complex and refined dance-mime.
A 20-minute excerpt of The White Snake is all martial gymnastics and juggling except for a song and a brief dialogue. The fight excerpt from Three-Forked Crossroad is 30 minutes, almost entirely gymnastic. Much of the movement range of the combat is familiar, in a general way, through martial arts - the habit of saluting or honoring the opponent, elaborate and rather decorative displays of prowess to wow the opposition, deep lunges, circling and spiraling moves that weave around the body, legs pulled in and snapped forcefully out. But more of the movement is acrobatic: whirling leg-over-leg with the torso horizontal, like a propeller; whirling close to the floor, one leg flung wide; swinging the legs around open and flat as the hands shift swiftly to gear the body’s eight. Whole gangs of warriors intercut rapid flips and rolls. Teams interlace rapid jumping dives onto hands and bellies. Flying human pinwheels sometimes spring full circle from feet to feet, without the usual midway pushoff from the hands.
In The White Snake the heroine battles a quartet of Stags and Cranes to obtain a curative red flower. The battle, which begins with swords, becomes a juggling challenge with flexible candy-striped sticks being tossed and switched and kicked back by the White Snake. The Monkey King, so confident, powerful, and amused he seems lackadaisical, fights each of 18 demons, and then takes on the whole lot together. These long combats occur in sections, punctuated by occasional freezes in dynamic poses that are brimful of energy. They seem like moments for the audience to assess the situation, read the expressions (triumph, determination, puzzlement...) and take a deep breath. It’s as if the performers are coasting along at such high inner speed they just don’t need any more thrust.
Everything is marked by beautiful, absolute control of weight, balance and impetus. The actors have the full freedom of the air and of the floor - to jump and bound through, to plant themselves on, bounce off and scuttle across. The Innkeeper, in Three-Forked Crossroads, jumps from a crouch on the floor to a calm perch on a table with n evident effort, no difference in energy r attitude. As if he simply decided, in his mind, to change places. The famous fight in the dark from Three-Forked Crossroads is a hilarious tour de force of near-misses, a fanciful game of life and death. The Innkeeper, a bit of a clown, mistakenly tries to kill the noble warrior Jen T’ang-hui, thinking he’s an enemy. The choicest moments are when almost nothing’s happening: the opponents are close to each other, sensing someone, nearly touching. The Innkeeper vaults backwards as Jen T’ang-hui tentatively lifts his sword. Both stand on the small table, one peering over the other’s shoulder, seeing nothing. Jen lifts and swings his legs just as the Innkeeper zips under. These two are attuned in so many ways - sometimes nearly dovetailing in their movements, sometimes echoing each other. Their decisive strikes are in empty air: each follows with his head and eyes the path a sword has sliced in the darkness; each halts before perils sensed but unseen. The Innkeeper may harmlessly wiggle his sword between Jen’s elbow and waist. But, often enough, probing with sword or hand, sudden contact sparks flurries of slashing at nothing. The actions of the characters in this and the other plays read pretty clearly in any language. The White Snake wipes away an occasional tear, espies the red flower, pleads with the Stag-Guardian. The Monkey King lightly wields a stick; a demon catching it crashes backwards, knocked over by its tremendous weight. Puzzling gestures tend to explain themselves.
For a while, I wondered about a move where a foot is pulled sharply back to the knee or shin, just before someone leaves the stage, or starts to fight. After a while, I realized what it was. It’s not rhetorical. It’s the character collecting himself. It’s Jackie Gleason’s old exit, “...and away we go!”