Reviews 1980
Burt was remembered for being extraordinarily open-minded in his outlook. So perhaps he can be forgiven for the following:
He dances with screechingly regretful extravagance when her cortege carries her corpse across the stage. Plenty of Bong Bong Bong Bong in the Mahler that accompanies this section, though it started out a lot like “I’ll be Seeing You.” And finally, for everyone, there’s a ritual one-at-a-time run around the tree. Each character freezes and gets healed by the girl in white who caresses their limbs or walks her fingers over their faces. Sometime early in all that you’re blankly watching those wonderfully articulate but remote bodies, and idly speculating on who might be an interesting fuck.
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Sure Touch
October 15
Peter Sparling’s solo concert last year at this time was skillful and respectable; this one was indelible. An intelligently ordered program, it opened with Philip Grosser’s odd and satisfying Three Dances, set to music by Stravinsky. Sparling starts stooped, hands oddly held in front of him, like a deformed version of Nijinsky’s Faun, one of those brutish creatures between animal and man. The movement is primitive and muscular. The arms slap straight, curve in rococo gesture, or are forced into a flat plane, up or down, with the elbows bent. The head twists around,. Sparling simply carves out the dance, exploding with leaps, lavish arches back, runs, prances, stamps, and sending sinuous pulses through his torso. It is the angularities and sharpness of the body, the drive and punctuation of the rhythms that are stressed, with occasional lyrical movements and mimetic images weaves it into something richly textured and strange. Sparling has a marvelous ability to bind all this litter of movement and set it all flowing together.
His own Hard Rock was problematic: he wore a silver-gray futuristic suit with a wide carapace over the shoulders and a gray band around his head. He sticks his fist in the air and is attacked by a blast of sound (the score is Ralph Shapey’s Seven) and much of the dace has him cowering from sound or the expectation of it, or in a brief state of inner clam listening - ear to the floor or perched on one buttock attuned to a sound somewhere far away. The movement is sometimes wild and driven in long spurts, and much is repeated - once twisted and jerked by percussive sound. At one point, Sparling mimes guitar playing, hen smashes the instrument, though I was as far from thinking him a musician as an intergalactic miner. There seemed to be a complicated scenario, too much of it unclear.
Elegy (set to music of Eliott Carter) was a lyrical piece with sweeping opening and closing arms, smooth swinging legs. A sense of suspension in feeling is created by the arms, a sense of expectation in the sensitive, alert hands.
Sparling has distinctive gifts - he moves with spectacular ease and flair from floor to air or vice versa, through elaborate patterns and shifts of weight without breaking; he can weld styles together seamlessly without blurring their qualities, and phrase the most disparate elements into coherence. I guess it’s this that interests me most: the way he can mold many ideas at once, adding expression on expression in the design of the movement, in the quality ad intensity of its impulses, in the way parts of his body will comment on the whole, having their own say: his mouth refusing, the hands needy. When Sparling shows you ambivalence, you don’t merely see uncertainty and vacillation, you see all the poles to which he’s pulled at once.
What She Forgot He Remembered (to Brahms) was very impressive, a genuine portrait. But, in a way, I feel like I only saw half of it. Sparling’s role was so much more developed, detailed than that of his partner, Jane Gallagher, that my attention was always with him. Lovely as she was, she was just his lady.
What She Forgot seemed to be set in some vague, not too distant American ago, around Lilac Garden or Fall River Legend time - there’s that formality in the man-woman relationship, something strict and sometimes gallant. I kept being reminded of American actors, no longer hotbloods, in midwestern or western situations (Henry Fonda, John Wayne in The Shootist).
The piece flashes back loosely to episodes in the relationship of Sparling and Gallagher. We see them often in solos, eventually in longish duets. Sparling, staunch and neat in old-fashioned pants and vest, strokes his hair in a long, thoughtful gesture of forgetting, and from that moment on a pungent sense of loss and perhaps confusion colors the dance. The emotions are often extravagant, wild, grand, expressed perfectly in the contortions of the body, with the moods shifting easily from section to section, from anxious, to breezy, to loving, jealous, thoughtful. And sometimes Sparling will simply life himself erect, thoughtfully, out of all that turmoil. Or he’ll pull into himself with a sudden series of small, sharp contractions. In another mood, he flies into brisk traveling steps, swings, leaps, cabrioles. I’m amazed at how Sparling has integrated so much of his Graham heritage into his work p even the declamatory, heroic gestures and posse of her Greek warrior jacks, which Sparling whizzes through, have a natural place in his impassioned and complex portrayal.
In one of their duets, Sparling carries Gallagher stretched along his back, across his chest. He cradles her, they lie on the floor. In a later episode, he’s distraught, jealous. His hands beat rapidly near his chest with possessiveness. The gestures are half funny, in the way someone else’s distress can sometimes be, and invoke gorilla comparisons, but are strong and painful too. The ridiculousness of the gesture somehow accentuates its intensity. Sparling catches her up and the savagery mixes with tenderness.
Nothing is abstract, every gesture is evocative. All these thoughts and feelings, doubts and misunderstandings and desires are in Sparling’s body.
Three of the works had live music, a blessing, played beautifully by pianist David Oei, violinists Eriko Sato and Ik-Huan Bae, violist Kim Kash Kashian, and celist Chris Finkel.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (October 9 10 12).
Peter Sparling’s solo concert last year at this time was skillful and respectable; this one was indelible. An intelligently ordered program, it opened with Philip Grosser’s odd and satisfying Three Dances, set to music by Stravinsky. Sparling starts stooped, hands oddly held in front of him, like a deformed version of Nijinsky’s Faun, one of those brutish creatures between animal and man. The movement is primitive and muscular. The arms slap straight, curve in rococo gesture, or are forced into a flat plane, up or down, with the elbows bent. The head twists around,. Sparling simply carves out the dance, exploding with leaps, lavish arches back, runs, prances, stamps, and sending sinuous pulses through his torso. It is the angularities and sharpness of the body, the drive and punctuation of the rhythms that are stressed, with occasional lyrical movements and mimetic images weaves it into something richly textured and strange. Sparling has a marvelous ability to bind all this litter of movement and set it all flowing together.
His own Hard Rock was problematic: he wore a silver-gray futuristic suit with a wide carapace over the shoulders and a gray band around his head. He sticks his fist in the air and is attacked by a blast of sound (the score is Ralph Shapey’s Seven) and much of the dace has him cowering from sound or the expectation of it, or in a brief state of inner clam listening - ear to the floor or perched on one buttock attuned to a sound somewhere far away. The movement is sometimes wild and driven in long spurts, and much is repeated - once twisted and jerked by percussive sound. At one point, Sparling mimes guitar playing, hen smashes the instrument, though I was as far from thinking him a musician as an intergalactic miner. There seemed to be a complicated scenario, too much of it unclear.
Elegy (set to music of Eliott Carter) was a lyrical piece with sweeping opening and closing arms, smooth swinging legs. A sense of suspension in feeling is created by the arms, a sense of expectation in the sensitive, alert hands.
Sparling has distinctive gifts - he moves with spectacular ease and flair from floor to air or vice versa, through elaborate patterns and shifts of weight without breaking; he can weld styles together seamlessly without blurring their qualities, and phrase the most disparate elements into coherence. I guess it’s this that interests me most: the way he can mold many ideas at once, adding expression on expression in the design of the movement, in the quality ad intensity of its impulses, in the way parts of his body will comment on the whole, having their own say: his mouth refusing, the hands needy. When Sparling shows you ambivalence, you don’t merely see uncertainty and vacillation, you see all the poles to which he’s pulled at once.
What She Forgot He Remembered (to Brahms) was very impressive, a genuine portrait. But, in a way, I feel like I only saw half of it. Sparling’s role was so much more developed, detailed than that of his partner, Jane Gallagher, that my attention was always with him. Lovely as she was, she was just his lady.
What She Forgot seemed to be set in some vague, not too distant American ago, around Lilac Garden or Fall River Legend time - there’s that formality in the man-woman relationship, something strict and sometimes gallant. I kept being reminded of American actors, no longer hotbloods, in midwestern or western situations (Henry Fonda, John Wayne in The Shootist).
The piece flashes back loosely to episodes in the relationship of Sparling and Gallagher. We see them often in solos, eventually in longish duets. Sparling, staunch and neat in old-fashioned pants and vest, strokes his hair in a long, thoughtful gesture of forgetting, and from that moment on a pungent sense of loss and perhaps confusion colors the dance. The emotions are often extravagant, wild, grand, expressed perfectly in the contortions of the body, with the moods shifting easily from section to section, from anxious, to breezy, to loving, jealous, thoughtful. And sometimes Sparling will simply life himself erect, thoughtfully, out of all that turmoil. Or he’ll pull into himself with a sudden series of small, sharp contractions. In another mood, he flies into brisk traveling steps, swings, leaps, cabrioles. I’m amazed at how Sparling has integrated so much of his Graham heritage into his work p even the declamatory, heroic gestures and posse of her Greek warrior jacks, which Sparling whizzes through, have a natural place in his impassioned and complex portrayal.
In one of their duets, Sparling carries Gallagher stretched along his back, across his chest. He cradles her, they lie on the floor. In a later episode, he’s distraught, jealous. His hands beat rapidly near his chest with possessiveness. The gestures are half funny, in the way someone else’s distress can sometimes be, and invoke gorilla comparisons, but are strong and painful too. The ridiculousness of the gesture somehow accentuates its intensity. Sparling catches her up and the savagery mixes with tenderness.
Nothing is abstract, every gesture is evocative. All these thoughts and feelings, doubts and misunderstandings and desires are in Sparling’s body.
Three of the works had live music, a blessing, played beautifully by pianist David Oei, violinists Eriko Sato and Ik-Huan Bae, violist Kim Kash Kashian, and celist Chris Finkel.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (October 9 10 12).
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!"
Going Gaga Slowly
June 9
Lisa Kraus has been dancing with Trisha Brown since 1977, and her work shows a pleasing kinship with Brown’s concentrated ways of moving and structuring. With a genuine kinetic intelligence. Kraus teased sinuous, elastic movement into an invigorating concert at Brown’s studio.
Looking casual, in with shoes, Kraus, Susan Aposhyan, and Bobby Schulman (al of whom contributed movement to the piece), attack various repeated operations with a pair of sneakers. They stand, sneakers in hand, then slide forward on their hands (on their sneakers) till they go flat on the floor, roll to sitting and slide over. Pick the sneakers up and set the down, thunk. Stand on them, jump off backwards. Toss them in the air, maybe drop one or let it drop. Relocate themselves in the space. They bend over quickly, plunking the sneakers on the floor. Something about this non-nonsense bend typifies their brisk, clear energy. It’s apparent, too, in a trio like this where performers are independent in the space, that their configuration is almost always a line or a triangle, and the geometric layout of their arrangements becomes a surprisingly interesting focus.
They kick the sneakers behind them, jump onto them, and slide them back, swing them, walk around them, set them closely in a row. he spatial shifts and punctuated pause-attack quality keep things from seeing routine. But there’s kind of swing that really holds things together, and movement that keeps spurting in short arcs: smooth, brief changes of level and direction, short half-circles of running. The dancers are like geometric solids you see rotated on different axes.
In A Trio, Kraus, Eva Karczag and Stephen Petronio, in pink to lilac tops and loose, dark, wraparound pants, begin, in an offhand, warming-up way, with deep bends and supple lunges that ease into a crawl.
The movement shifts into and away from the floor, swiveling sensitively in any direction with apparently incessant changes of mind, and is heightened by, for example, a slow overhead flip. Arms are flung, head wobble, legs swivel, behinds reach, flop and recover. Frequently, there’s a back-and-forth shifting, a sort of delicate testing, that suggests sparring with a nonexistent partner.
Karczag has always loved the floor, but now, at home everywhere, she can even give it up. Her movement has incredible juice and richness: her joints simply melt. She is utterly in her body. Every move looks like it feels good, like it just occurred to her. Completely unpredictable. Well, all three are predictable: it’s a factor of this constantly deflecting, redeciding style, Kraus is beautiful too, and easy; Petronio is more decided and somehow plainer doing this squiggly stuff.
Sometimes they work closely together, or paired, but there’s always a sense of camaraderie, knowledge of what everyone else is going in the shuttling that weaves this organic web.
Besides the constant direction changes, the movement is characterized by a deeply resilient and spring (but never bouncy) quality, great softness, and strength that doesn’t need to be stressed. Kraus is choreographing real vehicles for dancing. Not pieces in which dancers inhabit a structure that is the major interest or illustrate some conception. In A Trio, you watch the dancers move, with enormous pleasure, and that is everything.
Kraus’s In the Palm of Your Hand is a series of five, short, related solos, that start with her taking a swat at one limp hand. Between each solo, she removes another top: a green tank top, a blue polo, a red tank top, and white T-shirt. It’s sinuous, changeable, and occasionally, in the first and closing sections, which follow the hands, rather flat and calligraphic. The second part starts with her erect, with one knee bent, slowly swaying the knee from side to side. Then the knee is joined by one arm, and the other, so the effect is of a wave through the three limbs which gradually go out of synch. In another section, she seems lifted, jerked, flung, almost like some cartoon figure who’s swallowed something live that’s zipping around inside her. Sort of going gaga slowly. In another part, her abrupt hands seem to convey very specific understated comments, silent jokes.
A kind of swelling quality infuses the piece with momentary, aching slowdowns that may just be delusions. Eloquent, awkward stretchings in the body seem to open up time the way air stretches and puffs out a weak spot in a balloon.
At Trisha Brown studio (May 25 to 27).
Lisa Kraus has been dancing with Trisha Brown since 1977, and her work shows a pleasing kinship with Brown’s concentrated ways of moving and structuring. With a genuine kinetic intelligence. Kraus teased sinuous, elastic movement into an invigorating concert at Brown’s studio.
Looking casual, in with shoes, Kraus, Susan Aposhyan, and Bobby Schulman (al of whom contributed movement to the piece), attack various repeated operations with a pair of sneakers. They stand, sneakers in hand, then slide forward on their hands (on their sneakers) till they go flat on the floor, roll to sitting and slide over. Pick the sneakers up and set the down, thunk. Stand on them, jump off backwards. Toss them in the air, maybe drop one or let it drop. Relocate themselves in the space. They bend over quickly, plunking the sneakers on the floor. Something about this non-nonsense bend typifies their brisk, clear energy. It’s apparent, too, in a trio like this where performers are independent in the space, that their configuration is almost always a line or a triangle, and the geometric layout of their arrangements becomes a surprisingly interesting focus.
They kick the sneakers behind them, jump onto them, and slide them back, swing them, walk around them, set them closely in a row. he spatial shifts and punctuated pause-attack quality keep things from seeing routine. But there’s kind of swing that really holds things together, and movement that keeps spurting in short arcs: smooth, brief changes of level and direction, short half-circles of running. The dancers are like geometric solids you see rotated on different axes.
In A Trio, Kraus, Eva Karczag and Stephen Petronio, in pink to lilac tops and loose, dark, wraparound pants, begin, in an offhand, warming-up way, with deep bends and supple lunges that ease into a crawl.
The movement shifts into and away from the floor, swiveling sensitively in any direction with apparently incessant changes of mind, and is heightened by, for example, a slow overhead flip. Arms are flung, head wobble, legs swivel, behinds reach, flop and recover. Frequently, there’s a back-and-forth shifting, a sort of delicate testing, that suggests sparring with a nonexistent partner.
Karczag has always loved the floor, but now, at home everywhere, she can even give it up. Her movement has incredible juice and richness: her joints simply melt. She is utterly in her body. Every move looks like it feels good, like it just occurred to her. Completely unpredictable. Well, all three are predictable: it’s a factor of this constantly deflecting, redeciding style, Kraus is beautiful too, and easy; Petronio is more decided and somehow plainer doing this squiggly stuff.
Sometimes they work closely together, or paired, but there’s always a sense of camaraderie, knowledge of what everyone else is going in the shuttling that weaves this organic web.
Besides the constant direction changes, the movement is characterized by a deeply resilient and spring (but never bouncy) quality, great softness, and strength that doesn’t need to be stressed. Kraus is choreographing real vehicles for dancing. Not pieces in which dancers inhabit a structure that is the major interest or illustrate some conception. In A Trio, you watch the dancers move, with enormous pleasure, and that is everything.
Kraus’s In the Palm of Your Hand is a series of five, short, related solos, that start with her taking a swat at one limp hand. Between each solo, she removes another top: a green tank top, a blue polo, a red tank top, and white T-shirt. It’s sinuous, changeable, and occasionally, in the first and closing sections, which follow the hands, rather flat and calligraphic. The second part starts with her erect, with one knee bent, slowly swaying the knee from side to side. Then the knee is joined by one arm, and the other, so the effect is of a wave through the three limbs which gradually go out of synch. In another section, she seems lifted, jerked, flung, almost like some cartoon figure who’s swallowed something live that’s zipping around inside her. Sort of going gaga slowly. In another part, her abrupt hands seem to convey very specific understated comments, silent jokes.
A kind of swelling quality infuses the piece with momentary, aching slowdowns that may just be delusions. Eloquent, awkward stretchings in the body seem to open up time the way air stretches and puffs out a weak spot in a balloon.
At Trisha Brown studio (May 25 to 27).
Say Something Funny
December 10
Harry Streep III has been in search of a style, and the shapes of three recent works suggest that his interests are beginning to coalesce and that he’s settling into one. Streep’s dances are modular, massing chunks of various sorts of dancing, talking, pedestrian activities, gestural game-playing, bits of philosophical speculation, “real” emotional situations seemingly left over from the process of making/rehearsing a piece, turning words around for their different meanings and associational links. He doesn’t seem much concerned with a formal overall structure, or any sort of resolution: his dances stop, I guess, when he decides enough is enough.
Personal Objects, a duet excerpted from The Destination and Instinct of Ants,is a grab-bag with a few nice moments: Myrna Packer moving with a lush, self-involved quality, smoothing her skin, blowing something away, gripped by a convulsing pain, etc.; Streep tossing off some beautiful, unpremeditated-looking leaps. But much of it seems annoyingly naive. Packer saying things like, “I want to save he world, I want to be me...” Things so grand and vague no one could be convincing. Another section has Streep and Packer going through an assortment of gestures, and characterizing them - I’m digging for gold, I’m throwing snowballs, I’m committing hari-kiri, I’m tasting chocolate. The gestures later become the basis of a duet. A turning, twisting duet becomes a critical quarrel. Streep can almost get away with this “honest” stuff because his manner is so reticent and subtly ironic; Packer is more serious, heavier, without that detachment. She’s too general, pushes a little too hard, and seems phony.
Take Care, the second work, is more coherent and more truly playful, though it starts to wander some as it goes on. It begins with Art Bridgman backing around a circle, talking with sudden freezes breaking his thoughts into fragments. Packer enters, and they nearly back into each other, nearly bump, several times. It becomes almost teasing, and then they do dovetail, and slip into a swinging, twisting duet. Suddenly Streep’s in, and with a quick, mischievous smile an intimate duet becomes an affectionate palsy trio, with abrupt leaps, embraces, and moves where they fling themselves away. Streep jumps into Bridgman’s arms and gets carried for a moment, obviously loving it, content as a baby. In another section they’re all in unison, and soon they’re leaping, catching, spinning each other. Then come the appendices: a long, earnestly chatty and innocent success story for Streep: “I have a job. I’m working, I’m earning my own living...I have a lifestyle...I have a fall and a spring wardrobe...” And a slightly sore duet for Bridgman and Packer that reverses their earlier, easy mingling. Maybe they’re too much together The shift from the initial trio to the following characterological, verbal sections is a little peculiar, but not uncomfortable. What makes it workable is that Steep, Bridgman and Packerhave won us over, personally, by their amiable, uncalculated charm, by their durable fellow-feeling So we’re inclined to allow that whatever they want to do is probably okay.
Streep’s job solo ties this piece directly into the last and newest dance, My Job. All his pieces are kin in their subject matter, in their apparent process, in their tendency to sprawl to make room for everyone. Maybe he’s really been making one giant piece and delivering it in sections.
But, happily, My Job is stricter about what it includes. There’s no pretense at “reality”, the language is leaner, and the result more sharp-edged in its contrasts, clearer, convincing and affecting. My Job shifts through many humorous moods and movements modes, most snappy and nicely punctuated. All five dancers - Streep, Bridgman, Martha Bowers, Helen Kent, and Stephen Peters - start onstage dressed smartly but not looking like members of the same club. Bridgman begins to move on his own - leaping, rolling, establishing his separateness, though you never feel he’s cut off from, or unlike the others. He’s just in another dimension. The four others shake and jiggle to rock music, and after a sudden freeze, are into cocktail party conversation gestures, moving into different casual pairings and isolations. When they go off, Bridgman continues dancing. A bony, gangly guy, nearly overeager in his expressiveness, he’s beautiful in Streep’s work. Much of the movement for him is swirly, twisty, melting, but he can be sharp and linear too. He gives full value, making every moment particular and special. I believe that he believes every facet of whatever story he tells himself to shape the sense of his dancing. He enfolds something in his hand, sets it free with such tenderness!
The contrasting comic solos are brilliantly funny, and poignant by virtue of their desperate, fatal eagerness. Bowers flashes in a long, fast solo that races verbally from one breathless, pictorial association to the next - I’ll be a taxi driver, I’ll get tips, I’ll make bets, I’ll work in Vegas, I’ll work for the Mafia...Peters, respectable in a vested suit and horn rims, is economical and precise, and amazingly, woozily, malleable as the ultimate, protean, accommodating job applicant. Then there’s Kent, a neat, organizing perfectionist, demonstrating how she files. But Bridgman is the axis. While Bowers flings herself around, Bridgman stretches long, reaching upward with one hand and breaks, falling hard to the ground. Learning nothing, he does it again, harder. Those falls reverberate for a long time.
There’s nothing in My Job that’s irritatingly private or awkward. It’s smart, funny, sweet and mysteriously upsetting. Streep’s no funnyman, but his wry humor can be a great strength. He’s onto something now.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (November 28 to 30).
Harry Streep III has been in search of a style, and the shapes of three recent works suggest that his interests are beginning to coalesce and that he’s settling into one. Streep’s dances are modular, massing chunks of various sorts of dancing, talking, pedestrian activities, gestural game-playing, bits of philosophical speculation, “real” emotional situations seemingly left over from the process of making/rehearsing a piece, turning words around for their different meanings and associational links. He doesn’t seem much concerned with a formal overall structure, or any sort of resolution: his dances stop, I guess, when he decides enough is enough.
Personal Objects, a duet excerpted from The Destination and Instinct of Ants,is a grab-bag with a few nice moments: Myrna Packer moving with a lush, self-involved quality, smoothing her skin, blowing something away, gripped by a convulsing pain, etc.; Streep tossing off some beautiful, unpremeditated-looking leaps. But much of it seems annoyingly naive. Packer saying things like, “I want to save he world, I want to be me...” Things so grand and vague no one could be convincing. Another section has Streep and Packer going through an assortment of gestures, and characterizing them - I’m digging for gold, I’m throwing snowballs, I’m committing hari-kiri, I’m tasting chocolate. The gestures later become the basis of a duet. A turning, twisting duet becomes a critical quarrel. Streep can almost get away with this “honest” stuff because his manner is so reticent and subtly ironic; Packer is more serious, heavier, without that detachment. She’s too general, pushes a little too hard, and seems phony.
Take Care, the second work, is more coherent and more truly playful, though it starts to wander some as it goes on. It begins with Art Bridgman backing around a circle, talking with sudden freezes breaking his thoughts into fragments. Packer enters, and they nearly back into each other, nearly bump, several times. It becomes almost teasing, and then they do dovetail, and slip into a swinging, twisting duet. Suddenly Streep’s in, and with a quick, mischievous smile an intimate duet becomes an affectionate palsy trio, with abrupt leaps, embraces, and moves where they fling themselves away. Streep jumps into Bridgman’s arms and gets carried for a moment, obviously loving it, content as a baby. In another section they’re all in unison, and soon they’re leaping, catching, spinning each other. Then come the appendices: a long, earnestly chatty and innocent success story for Streep: “I have a job. I’m working, I’m earning my own living...I have a lifestyle...I have a fall and a spring wardrobe...” And a slightly sore duet for Bridgman and Packer that reverses their earlier, easy mingling. Maybe they’re too much together The shift from the initial trio to the following characterological, verbal sections is a little peculiar, but not uncomfortable. What makes it workable is that Steep, Bridgman and Packerhave won us over, personally, by their amiable, uncalculated charm, by their durable fellow-feeling So we’re inclined to allow that whatever they want to do is probably okay.
Streep’s job solo ties this piece directly into the last and newest dance, My Job. All his pieces are kin in their subject matter, in their apparent process, in their tendency to sprawl to make room for everyone. Maybe he’s really been making one giant piece and delivering it in sections.
But, happily, My Job is stricter about what it includes. There’s no pretense at “reality”, the language is leaner, and the result more sharp-edged in its contrasts, clearer, convincing and affecting. My Job shifts through many humorous moods and movements modes, most snappy and nicely punctuated. All five dancers - Streep, Bridgman, Martha Bowers, Helen Kent, and Stephen Peters - start onstage dressed smartly but not looking like members of the same club. Bridgman begins to move on his own - leaping, rolling, establishing his separateness, though you never feel he’s cut off from, or unlike the others. He’s just in another dimension. The four others shake and jiggle to rock music, and after a sudden freeze, are into cocktail party conversation gestures, moving into different casual pairings and isolations. When they go off, Bridgman continues dancing. A bony, gangly guy, nearly overeager in his expressiveness, he’s beautiful in Streep’s work. Much of the movement for him is swirly, twisty, melting, but he can be sharp and linear too. He gives full value, making every moment particular and special. I believe that he believes every facet of whatever story he tells himself to shape the sense of his dancing. He enfolds something in his hand, sets it free with such tenderness!
The contrasting comic solos are brilliantly funny, and poignant by virtue of their desperate, fatal eagerness. Bowers flashes in a long, fast solo that races verbally from one breathless, pictorial association to the next - I’ll be a taxi driver, I’ll get tips, I’ll make bets, I’ll work in Vegas, I’ll work for the Mafia...Peters, respectable in a vested suit and horn rims, is economical and precise, and amazingly, woozily, malleable as the ultimate, protean, accommodating job applicant. Then there’s Kent, a neat, organizing perfectionist, demonstrating how she files. But Bridgman is the axis. While Bowers flings herself around, Bridgman stretches long, reaching upward with one hand and breaks, falling hard to the ground. Learning nothing, he does it again, harder. Those falls reverberate for a long time.
There’s nothing in My Job that’s irritatingly private or awkward. It’s smart, funny, sweet and mysteriously upsetting. Streep’s no funnyman, but his wry humor can be a great strength. He’s onto something now.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (November 28 to 30).
Worlds Apart
December 17
I liked seeing Junko Kikuchi and Blondell Cummings just a day apart because they’ve got something in common. Kikuchi’s performance is exquisite, perfectly controlled, designed with impeccable taste. Cummings roots around in the messiness of emotional life with spilling energy and an openhanded approach.
Kikuchi is lovely and exact, with a handsome line, and an ability to accent delicate contrasts and shirt gears with smooth intelligence - to wrest composure out of apparent wildness, to pinpoint stillness in the midst of busy activity. At Japan House, she wore white for each of the five dances, mostly variations of a shirt or a slip over pants. The walls of the busy stage were overlaid with frames of apparently equal size, covered in white cloth. (Costumes and sets were by Tetsuhiko Maeda.) You could see the darkness of the stretchers and wedged corners through the translucence of the cloth. Miyako Kato’s Scarecrow begins like an accumulation, with Kikuchi’s arms at her sides, turning in, out, moving up precisely to touch her shoulders, infusing her with energy till she begins to turn. She divers forward, torso to the floor, her legs in a wide second, then rocks on the floor, wrist to forehead. All she does is beautifully executed, but dry. She seems somehow too measured, too correct, as if she has fulfilled her instructions perfectly, but decided to omit an essential quality of her own understanding. So the dances seem hermetic, without perspective, and tend to have a distant, neuter effect.
The exception, to some degree, was Carla Blank’s Moving Lab, because of its low-key humor and because the relation of its parts was self-evident. Kikuchi walks in a mater-of-fact way to face four corners of the stage according to an instruction she reads from a card (white, of course). She accelerates, diddles around with her feet, goes into a high-stepping run, flings herself and winds up kneeling. “Sit,” she says, still kneeling, motionless. “Fall backward, fall forward” - and she does fall forward and starts to roll to the edge of the stage. It’s curious to see how close she sticks to these minimal instructions, or what variations, complications and delays she works on them. Of course, we don;t know what of this playing around is Blank’s idea, and what Kikuchi’s. For “two-dimensional walk”, she rolls sideways, but pointing, flexing, twisting her feet in very particular ways. Then she steps across the front in reversing half-circles, showing her back, her front, like a string of paper doll cut-outs. She looks at us upside-down and backward for “peek,” and then through a diamond of pointed feet (still “peek”) and offers some pleasantly smudgy footwork in the vicinity of “grapevine.” For “beat”, she jumps and hits her feet together, moves on to clap hands, slap her thighs and hips. And a whack on the behind gets her offstage.
There are beautiful moments and sections throughout the evening. In Carmen Beuchat’s Clear Water, set to a rippling version of a familiar Vivaldi concerto, Kikuchi walks briskly - forward, sideways, backward - through a figure eight, goes into glancing leaps, returns to the figure, and lets the movements again grow larger with scooping, reaching gestures, longer steps, and jumps. In the second movement, she is all loose and wobbly but toward the end of each phrase pulls herself up, straightens, solidifies - sometimes into arabesque with both arms stretched out uncurved in a wide symmetrical V.
Met Wong’s Imprint has the most hurry to it: running around, high kicks, stretched poses that go limp, a flinging upper body riding on intricate, almost folky steps. Kikuchi spins with wild, windmilling arms and flying hair; her limbs seem to shine out of a turmoil of action. In Minako Manita’s Nuance, Kikuchi moves from a stiff initial pose with arms bent down and head lowered. As the rigidity is dispelled, she turns and bends as her arms curl in rolling movements that are like inversions of clawing or clutching. As she bends forward, back flattening - or bows head to the floor, kneeling - her arms curve up long behind her like the bones defining a wing.
It’s hard to know what the possibilities of these dancer are and, for me, those possibilities depend on how their bits and pieces hang together. Kikuchi shapes each individual phrase or episode beautifully, but the relationship of the parts, how they bear on each other is not conveyed.
At Japan House (December 10 and 11)
Blondell Cummings is interested in emotional states and the ways relationships join people together. She’s gifted at showing someone raw, roughed up, dead beat, and quick to bounce out of that with rhythmic snap and punch, a big smile, pouring out energy and sassy goodwill. In her improvised The Ladies and Me, to a selection of blues, she starts out in a red robe, slumped at a table. Her dancing starts with a marathon of yawning and stretching and working the kinks out, which gets her shaking and jerking sharply, starting to sizzle. In another section, a stooped shuffle gives way to bouncing knees, which bring her erect into a tight, springy stomping with that smile riding on top. Weird, though, with an audience that’s so quiet. Later, wig off, hair pressed down, pouring gin, she looks coarse and battered, and cries with silent wildness. Like another person. She’s most astonishing, though, in a section where she moves as if caught in the flicker of a fast strobe, no sounds coming from her gaping mouth, sliding from worry to fear to screaming terror, blending into laughter which merges again into wailing...
In A Friend II, the set-up is homey - there’s a rug, a plant, a goldfish swimming in a bowl with orange gravel, a stuffed dog, an open newspaper, and Cummings puttering around, cleaning up after a diner. There are slides of people who, I imagine are friends of hers. It all seems pretty casual, realistically untheatrical, formless. One nice thing is a rubbery, doggy on-all-fours dance she does to the stuffed dog. A taped list of names, reeled off in the darkness, looks at the notion of friendships both amusing and provocative: Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, Eubie Blake and Noble Sisle, Monica Shlick and Katie Sue Bentley, Colette and Polaire, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Liza Minelli and Halston...
More slides appear of people who care about or enjoy each other, Which leads to the final section, a duet for shadows with Cummings and Connie Schrader behind the screen. Cummings’s shadow pets the stuffed dog just as she did earlier, plays tennis (we see her swing the racket, and a ball bounce back and forth). A tiny wriggling hand approaches a giant foot with intent to tickle. Cummings plays brilliantly with the varying sizes of the images. She seems to swim into a huge blurry shadow of the goldfish bowl to be with her fish. Grandmotherly in a wide-brimmed hat, Cummings pets a seated, Thumbelina-sized Schrader. Huge figures of the two of them talking and gesturing cross, merge split, vanish or multiply. There’s a secure feeling of connectedness and warmth welling out of these images. Made me sorry to have come alone.
On “Splitz” series at Black Theater Alliance (December 11 and 12).
I liked seeing Junko Kikuchi and Blondell Cummings just a day apart because they’ve got something in common. Kikuchi’s performance is exquisite, perfectly controlled, designed with impeccable taste. Cummings roots around in the messiness of emotional life with spilling energy and an openhanded approach.
Kikuchi is lovely and exact, with a handsome line, and an ability to accent delicate contrasts and shirt gears with smooth intelligence - to wrest composure out of apparent wildness, to pinpoint stillness in the midst of busy activity. At Japan House, she wore white for each of the five dances, mostly variations of a shirt or a slip over pants. The walls of the busy stage were overlaid with frames of apparently equal size, covered in white cloth. (Costumes and sets were by Tetsuhiko Maeda.) You could see the darkness of the stretchers and wedged corners through the translucence of the cloth. Miyako Kato’s Scarecrow begins like an accumulation, with Kikuchi’s arms at her sides, turning in, out, moving up precisely to touch her shoulders, infusing her with energy till she begins to turn. She divers forward, torso to the floor, her legs in a wide second, then rocks on the floor, wrist to forehead. All she does is beautifully executed, but dry. She seems somehow too measured, too correct, as if she has fulfilled her instructions perfectly, but decided to omit an essential quality of her own understanding. So the dances seem hermetic, without perspective, and tend to have a distant, neuter effect.
The exception, to some degree, was Carla Blank’s Moving Lab, because of its low-key humor and because the relation of its parts was self-evident. Kikuchi walks in a mater-of-fact way to face four corners of the stage according to an instruction she reads from a card (white, of course). She accelerates, diddles around with her feet, goes into a high-stepping run, flings herself and winds up kneeling. “Sit,” she says, still kneeling, motionless. “Fall backward, fall forward” - and she does fall forward and starts to roll to the edge of the stage. It’s curious to see how close she sticks to these minimal instructions, or what variations, complications and delays she works on them. Of course, we don;t know what of this playing around is Blank’s idea, and what Kikuchi’s. For “two-dimensional walk”, she rolls sideways, but pointing, flexing, twisting her feet in very particular ways. Then she steps across the front in reversing half-circles, showing her back, her front, like a string of paper doll cut-outs. She looks at us upside-down and backward for “peek,” and then through a diamond of pointed feet (still “peek”) and offers some pleasantly smudgy footwork in the vicinity of “grapevine.” For “beat”, she jumps and hits her feet together, moves on to clap hands, slap her thighs and hips. And a whack on the behind gets her offstage.
There are beautiful moments and sections throughout the evening. In Carmen Beuchat’s Clear Water, set to a rippling version of a familiar Vivaldi concerto, Kikuchi walks briskly - forward, sideways, backward - through a figure eight, goes into glancing leaps, returns to the figure, and lets the movements again grow larger with scooping, reaching gestures, longer steps, and jumps. In the second movement, she is all loose and wobbly but toward the end of each phrase pulls herself up, straightens, solidifies - sometimes into arabesque with both arms stretched out uncurved in a wide symmetrical V.
Met Wong’s Imprint has the most hurry to it: running around, high kicks, stretched poses that go limp, a flinging upper body riding on intricate, almost folky steps. Kikuchi spins with wild, windmilling arms and flying hair; her limbs seem to shine out of a turmoil of action. In Minako Manita’s Nuance, Kikuchi moves from a stiff initial pose with arms bent down and head lowered. As the rigidity is dispelled, she turns and bends as her arms curl in rolling movements that are like inversions of clawing or clutching. As she bends forward, back flattening - or bows head to the floor, kneeling - her arms curve up long behind her like the bones defining a wing.
It’s hard to know what the possibilities of these dancer are and, for me, those possibilities depend on how their bits and pieces hang together. Kikuchi shapes each individual phrase or episode beautifully, but the relationship of the parts, how they bear on each other is not conveyed.
At Japan House (December 10 and 11)
Blondell Cummings is interested in emotional states and the ways relationships join people together. She’s gifted at showing someone raw, roughed up, dead beat, and quick to bounce out of that with rhythmic snap and punch, a big smile, pouring out energy and sassy goodwill. In her improvised The Ladies and Me, to a selection of blues, she starts out in a red robe, slumped at a table. Her dancing starts with a marathon of yawning and stretching and working the kinks out, which gets her shaking and jerking sharply, starting to sizzle. In another section, a stooped shuffle gives way to bouncing knees, which bring her erect into a tight, springy stomping with that smile riding on top. Weird, though, with an audience that’s so quiet. Later, wig off, hair pressed down, pouring gin, she looks coarse and battered, and cries with silent wildness. Like another person. She’s most astonishing, though, in a section where she moves as if caught in the flicker of a fast strobe, no sounds coming from her gaping mouth, sliding from worry to fear to screaming terror, blending into laughter which merges again into wailing...
In A Friend II, the set-up is homey - there’s a rug, a plant, a goldfish swimming in a bowl with orange gravel, a stuffed dog, an open newspaper, and Cummings puttering around, cleaning up after a diner. There are slides of people who, I imagine are friends of hers. It all seems pretty casual, realistically untheatrical, formless. One nice thing is a rubbery, doggy on-all-fours dance she does to the stuffed dog. A taped list of names, reeled off in the darkness, looks at the notion of friendships both amusing and provocative: Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, Eubie Blake and Noble Sisle, Monica Shlick and Katie Sue Bentley, Colette and Polaire, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Liza Minelli and Halston...
More slides appear of people who care about or enjoy each other, Which leads to the final section, a duet for shadows with Cummings and Connie Schrader behind the screen. Cummings’s shadow pets the stuffed dog just as she did earlier, plays tennis (we see her swing the racket, and a ball bounce back and forth). A tiny wriggling hand approaches a giant foot with intent to tickle. Cummings plays brilliantly with the varying sizes of the images. She seems to swim into a huge blurry shadow of the goldfish bowl to be with her fish. Grandmotherly in a wide-brimmed hat, Cummings pets a seated, Thumbelina-sized Schrader. Huge figures of the two of them talking and gesturing cross, merge split, vanish or multiply. There’s a secure feeling of connectedness and warmth welling out of these images. Made me sorry to have come alone.
On “Splitz” series at Black Theater Alliance (December 11 and 12).