1981 CONTINUED
13 People Who Gotta Dance
April 1
Jerome Robbins' Opus 19/The Dreamer is not a ballet I liked much until I saw Bart Cook do it. It was made on him (and Heather Watts), though the premiere went to Baryshnikov. With Cook even the costuming became intelligible: Cook in white and everyone else in dark blues, because everything that happens is focused through this figure of light. You don't ask who this man is and why he's moving like that: Cook sends the message straight to your bones. Not a moment is vague, not a moment is filler, not a moment is merely beautiful. What makes him a revelation, in this and other ballets, like Four Temperaments, is a combination of a tenacious, finely tempered intelligence and remorseless imagination. He never chooses to be comfortable, but risks dancing at the limits that imagination dictates, translating his insights into every aspect of his dancing. His sharp features can seem pinched or washed-out in photos, but you can't miss his alert, edgy, rather febrile quality, a restlessness that mixes with assurance and dedication in his warm manner. That itch keeps him busy, has him making leaded stained glass in what is laughably called "spare time".
Now 30, Cook joined the New York City Ballet in 1971, and became a principal in 1979. He comes from Utah, where he danced with the Utah Civic Ballet (now Ballet West) under the Christensen brothers. The company had a lot of the Balanchine staples in its repertory, and "I could see that Balanchine was something special through the works." After high school, he tried to ---- in college, while touring with Ballet West, but he just got more hooked on dance and decided to come to New York where he studied, on scholarship, at the School of American Ballet for nine months. ("I should have been there longer.") "I was the oldest person in the school. I was 19 then. Fernando Bujones was in my class. Victor Castelli, Daniel Duell, Jean-Pierre Frolich...I found the competition incredible. I could do all the tricks, but I was a rough-hewn thing." He had an invaluable ability to sell, which he "learned from the Christensens with their vaudeville experience," and that helped him. But he needed polish. Still, he had something. When he joined the company, Jerome Robbins "took a liking to me and gave me some stuff immediately. And I just kept getting more."
"I think," says Cook, "in a past life I was a dancer also. I seem pretty good at picking up the feeling of a ballet. Nobody has to tell me something's too much or not enough. I like to think part of my style is adaptability, though I used to dance in a wider spectrum of ballets. I don't do many of the...story ballets, though, of course, we don't do many, I enjoy anything in A Midsummer Night's Dream. God, it's wonderful to lose yourself in a character! I've done The Concert. I did Sonnambula for one season, but not since. I'd love to do Prodigal Son, or Bugaku. "But what's wonderful about abstract ballets is that you can pour into them, and the audience can take out of them. Everyone tries to make teir own story - and Mr. Balanchine will deny whatever it is. It doesn't matter. You're affected by watching that ballet. "It's always good to be part of a new ballet," he says. "That's where the alive aspect of ballet is strongest. Ballet's alive. It's not a museum. I mean, it is. Some of our ballets are old enough now to be definite museum pieces. Yet they're constantly changing."
When Cook joined City Ballet, he found that Balanchine had recently added a section to Serenade.
"I thought that was blasphemy. I thought, 'How dare he do that!' Somebody said, 'He can do what he wants.' And he does. And it's alive. Even Jerry (Robbins) changes parts of his old ballets, and he has the reputation of being a real stickler. But it's not so. He's under the influence of this growing thing too." So is Cook. "I try to approach dancing that way. As you change, different roles change with you. You have to stay within the framework, but there's more going on than just the steps. I know Mr. B doesn't like to hear that. But if you take your ideas and inspiration from the work itself, and you have taste about it, then you can only make it better." Like any activity you devote yourself to, dancing is a way you create yourself. "You make yourself into what you feel you truly are or should become...And if you're on the right track, and listening to the world, it always benefits other people. Because the Force always wins. Thank you, Star Wars."
Jerome Robbins' Opus 19/The Dreamer is not a ballet I liked much until I saw Bart Cook do it. It was made on him (and Heather Watts), though the premiere went to Baryshnikov. With Cook even the costuming became intelligible: Cook in white and everyone else in dark blues, because everything that happens is focused through this figure of light. You don't ask who this man is and why he's moving like that: Cook sends the message straight to your bones. Not a moment is vague, not a moment is filler, not a moment is merely beautiful. What makes him a revelation, in this and other ballets, like Four Temperaments, is a combination of a tenacious, finely tempered intelligence and remorseless imagination. He never chooses to be comfortable, but risks dancing at the limits that imagination dictates, translating his insights into every aspect of his dancing. His sharp features can seem pinched or washed-out in photos, but you can't miss his alert, edgy, rather febrile quality, a restlessness that mixes with assurance and dedication in his warm manner. That itch keeps him busy, has him making leaded stained glass in what is laughably called "spare time".
Now 30, Cook joined the New York City Ballet in 1971, and became a principal in 1979. He comes from Utah, where he danced with the Utah Civic Ballet (now Ballet West) under the Christensen brothers. The company had a lot of the Balanchine staples in its repertory, and "I could see that Balanchine was something special through the works." After high school, he tried to ---- in college, while touring with Ballet West, but he just got more hooked on dance and decided to come to New York where he studied, on scholarship, at the School of American Ballet for nine months. ("I should have been there longer.") "I was the oldest person in the school. I was 19 then. Fernando Bujones was in my class. Victor Castelli, Daniel Duell, Jean-Pierre Frolich...I found the competition incredible. I could do all the tricks, but I was a rough-hewn thing." He had an invaluable ability to sell, which he "learned from the Christensens with their vaudeville experience," and that helped him. But he needed polish. Still, he had something. When he joined the company, Jerome Robbins "took a liking to me and gave me some stuff immediately. And I just kept getting more."
"I think," says Cook, "in a past life I was a dancer also. I seem pretty good at picking up the feeling of a ballet. Nobody has to tell me something's too much or not enough. I like to think part of my style is adaptability, though I used to dance in a wider spectrum of ballets. I don't do many of the...story ballets, though, of course, we don't do many, I enjoy anything in A Midsummer Night's Dream. God, it's wonderful to lose yourself in a character! I've done The Concert. I did Sonnambula for one season, but not since. I'd love to do Prodigal Son, or Bugaku. "But what's wonderful about abstract ballets is that you can pour into them, and the audience can take out of them. Everyone tries to make teir own story - and Mr. Balanchine will deny whatever it is. It doesn't matter. You're affected by watching that ballet. "It's always good to be part of a new ballet," he says. "That's where the alive aspect of ballet is strongest. Ballet's alive. It's not a museum. I mean, it is. Some of our ballets are old enough now to be definite museum pieces. Yet they're constantly changing."
When Cook joined City Ballet, he found that Balanchine had recently added a section to Serenade.
"I thought that was blasphemy. I thought, 'How dare he do that!' Somebody said, 'He can do what he wants.' And he does. And it's alive. Even Jerry (Robbins) changes parts of his old ballets, and he has the reputation of being a real stickler. But it's not so. He's under the influence of this growing thing too." So is Cook. "I try to approach dancing that way. As you change, different roles change with you. You have to stay within the framework, but there's more going on than just the steps. I know Mr. B doesn't like to hear that. But if you take your ideas and inspiration from the work itself, and you have taste about it, then you can only make it better." Like any activity you devote yourself to, dancing is a way you create yourself. "You make yourself into what you feel you truly are or should become...And if you're on the right track, and listening to the world, it always benefits other people. Because the Force always wins. Thank you, Star Wars."
Any Two Men on the Planet
March 18, 1981
So this is their day off. I meet Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane in their house in Valley Cottage, in Rockland County. It's got lots of windows, pleasing proportions inside, and in summer the other houses around will be happily obliterated by foliage. They've started to rip out a wall upstairs: the kitchen will be up there too. Meantime, it's downstairs, where you come in, with a central beam low enough to smack your head on (I scored four times). But, even with clogs, Zane sneaks safely under. When the kitchen gets moved, this will be his darkroom.
Jones arrives with stuff from the store and heaps of mail, including a letter from the mother of a junior high schooler in Arkansas who was struck by Bill's recent performance there and wants to correspond. Also from Arkansas is a package of little drumsticks, cymbals, wood blocks, that Jones had borrowed from the school staff and which someone, mistakenly, was returning to him. Incessant phone calls to Zane, the business head, about upcoming schedules. Berlin and Cologne in April, Festivals in the summer. Can Bill come to Tacoma in the fall?
The carpenter arrives with a sample of the slanted board (about two feet by eight), braced on a wheeled base, which will be part of the set for Valley Cottage, a new piece they'll premiere at American Theater Lab April 2 to 6. Seven of these, covered with sod will make a mountain that can come apart. The sod, properly moist, could add up to 60 pounds to the weight. Will it balance? While we're inside talking, the wind blows it over. While Jones is working with Zane on the final part of the trilogy that started with Monkey Run Road in 197--, and Blauvelt Mountain, he's also collaborating with Senta Driver on another new piece, lo, at American Theater Lab March 6 to 30). And he's got some third thing going that I don't even want to know about.
Five narrow mirrors on the left side of Driver's studio give an inkling of how 15 mirrors on that side of the stage and 14 across the back wall, will reflect, multiply and shatter the dancers' images. Running through, Jones skips his first solo, which will be improvised in a corner of the darkened stage. Driver will start in the ---by, so you'll only be able to see her in the mirrors. She throws herself around, fall staggers back. The solo, broken into sections, is marked by accelerating movements that shift from the powerful to the fe--- and maidenly, in a staccato headlong chain. Jones's solos alternate with Driver's, until they overlap more and more and finally become simultaneous; he whips around, dribbles, flings his legs in a sideways arc with hands on the floor.
One continuing concern has to do with the way they handle each other. Jones treats Driver with more care than she requires. "Put your pelvis on me. Lean on me. Ride me down," she says. "You can give me more weight." She doesn't want to be kicked or suddenly jabbed by some hard bone, but she doesn't mind some roughness. But they don't want the piece to look like it's about pushing; and punching shouldn't look like they're fighting. It doesn't. They match each other strength for strength. Do you think I'm stronger than you are," asks Jones toward the end and as part of the piece. "Sometimes," says Driver. "Sometimes not."
Driver questions one of the improvised sections. "There's so much freedom. I don't know what it's for." But the freedom is important to Jones. He has high hopes. "when two people have a rapport, they can surprise themselves." Rehearsals with Zane in a studio on Canal Street are a different story. They start off a little tense: Jones has just come back from touring, things are a little rusty, off, awkward. But they've been working together for 10 years now, and, physically, they seem to be able to jump on each other and interlock any way at all. Zane is white, shorter, and more explicit, more forceful, harder-edged than Jones. He reminds me sometimes of those star-shaped weapons ninjas and other baddies throw in 007 movies. Jones, black and tall, seems to dream his dancing, however urgent and spontaneous it is. He combines strength and delicacy, power and grace. I imagine a diagram of energy trailing out of his arms and hands in arabesques and curlicues.
Valley Cottage is in chunks now, being rebuilt, refined, rearranged. They talk it over, evaluating, fixing. They're concerned at all times for how any action will read to the audience, occasionally speaking in the third person as they envision themselves "objectively" in performance. Jones, behind Zane, grabs his frantically waving arms, but interferes too much. He tries to restrict Zane's movement less, but "You're real wild, I don't know how to hold onto that." Jones falls sideways a short distance, caught atilt against Zane's upper arm and Zane promenades him in a circle as Jones placidly "sunbathes". The catch is awfully delicate, since Jones doesn't look and there’s no secure hook. Both like the ways their hands link for reassurance on that promenade. Jones feels the need to take stock of their material, not to build any more until they know what they're missing.
By this time in Blauvelt, "we'd gotten all the material out and were dissecting it." This time they've become more wrapped up in each individual part. A duet section has become "do a thing, stop, do a thing, stop." and Jones dislikes that. They try it again, trying to find its flow, marking some natural pauses in the sequence. And they add something: Jones has imagined a new way to lift and throw Zane. He catches his head and shoulder under Zane's belly, lifts him and heaves him lightly aside: "horse tossing child."
Jones and Zane became friends in 1971 in Binghamton. Jones was studying in the theatre department at SUNY and Zane had recently graduated. Then, in 1973, Zane took a contact improvisation workshop which turned him on to dancing. And their involvement moved onto another level. With Lois Welk, they founded the American Dance Asylum. "We all choreographed, we all worked in each others' pieces, we all suffered with the bills." 'We started to develop this cycle of dances in the latter part of 1976," says Jones. "We did a very 'modern dance' sort of study for two men, with no shirts on, and khaki pants, dancing in pools of light to no music. It frightened one critic in the Binghamton area. She didn't know what to make of our 'spurts of violence and tenderness'". Irony in Jones's voice floats unspoken quotation marks in the air. "It was a real 'modern dance' - full of angst."
"After that, we began to think about Monkey Run Road. Arnie had done a piece called Hand Dance which set accumulation against improvisation. He explored it very thoroughly, too, as Arnie tends to do things. Then we decided to try it in a looser fashion. I thought, 'What if we were to accumulate a scene from a play, and why don't we make the play?' I would be a vaudeville ventriloquist with a dummy. Arnie was going to wear blackface and I would have him sit on my lap. But he was too big, so we thought, 'Why don't we put him in a box?' So we had this big box built, and suddenly the box was too big, and anyway it was too provocative to use in such a predictable way. So we went off on another tangent: no costumes,very stark, and we developed this whole athletic vocabulary of movement and space became very important, and the next thing you know we had Monkey Run Road."
Jones hadn't done any serious choreography before meeting Zane, but in the three or four years before Zane started dancing, he had begun to create a repertory of "little fledgling solos."
"I used to prod Arnie to become more physical," says Jones. "he was a very visual person. He had quite a success with his photographs from the beginning." Zane, with some measure of beginner's luck, got a show in Rochester of portraits he'd taken on a European trip with an inexpensive borrowed camera. He got a CAPS grant, bought himself a good camera. Then "I started doing torsos of people of all ages, bodies that were devastated to the very beautiful.
I photographed the person from just beneath the eyes to the groin. This coincided with my developing as a dancer.
I wanted the torso to bring the personality out. I wanted to be able to look at an anonymous person, like in a medical photograph, look at their torso and tell all about the person."
"I was compelled," Bill goes on, "to get Arnie more involved physically. I encouraged him to do yoga."
"It was terrible," Arnie interrupts. "I had tears, tears in my eyes. Bill was trying to get me to do the plow. Three mornings in a row I was crying. The pain - from trying to put my toes to the floor behind my head."
"I don't know why I pushed him so," says Jones "But sure enough, once he got a taste of it, he was quite precocious."
'The best thing for me," says Zane, "was that, from the outset, people encouraged me to choreograph. It was lucky, because I wasn't about to put everything on hold while I took 10 years to make my dancer's body."
"We took Yvonne Rainer's manifesto to heart," says Jones. No to technique, no to illusion, no to spectacle -whatever." They understood her to be saying that anyone can do it. Just get up there and create with whatever you have to work with. "We took that notion to heart, although we hadn't seen the work behind it."
Jones says, "At the Movement Research benefit at Symphony Space, after our performance, which was very well received...."We felt good about our dancing, " says Zane. "Yeah," says Jones, we felt very good about it, felt great about it, as a matter of fact. Anyway, one critic said that it was 'the hit of the evening'. Someone else was overheard remarking, 'Well, they're very charismatic, but haven't they gotten a bit slick?' Do people want us to be the grungy primitives from upstate for the rest of our lives? How do we keep our own notion of what we do, and yet develop?"
I ask if a photo of a young black boy, eight to 10 years old, in glasses and Sunday best, is Jones. It is. "I was always considered not a good-looking person. He was maybe going to be a preacher," he says of the boy he was, "and he was intelligent. He was not one of the pretty children. It wasn't till the past two years that I decided I didn't need to wear my glasses all the time.
"It wasn't till the past two years that you realized you were a beauty," jokes Zane. "All those people," says Zane, "Meredith Monk, Yvonne Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, they did the groundwork, they introduced a path on which we have embarked. Of course we color it with our own beliefs and our own originality."
"Confronted with their contribution," continues Jones, "I thought 'what do I have to offer?' And the only thing I really felt honest about was my own personal development, was a revealing of a person. Revealing something that is normally hidden. Because in this dance scene there aren't many people like myself, that is, black people from poverty backgrounds, who have been educated in a university, and now, instead of being doctors and lawyers - which is the usual trajectory of improvement - have instead become downtown artist types. I feel that if I can reveal the process that has brought me here, that's a social bridge. I feel like a map of the aspirations of the '60's."
"People see us immediately as large and small, black and white, male and male," says Zane. "And the work runs a gamut of emotions. The roles and the relationships may be slightly jarring. But our relationship is not overstated. We're simply two individuals. What I'd like an audience to see is any two men on the planet working together, cooperating, sharing, to bring an event or a task to fulfillment."
"When I hear us go on like this," says Jones, "I think, 'well, how come the actual nature of what you do is full of violence, full of struggle and pain?' And I guess that's my experience: my sense of identity has been shaped that way because I am black, male, born in such a year - and identity is a pivotal idea in everything I do."
"I come from a very violent place," he says in a voice like honey. "I think one of the first things I ever heard was screaming. People moving around. 'Get out of the way. Be Quiet.' Standing when I was very young, next to a state trooper who seemed to be about seven feet tall - just this monolithic form in gray cloth, a gun at his side and white skin, standing in a room full of black faces. And this first awareness I ever had of a white person was an authority presence which changed the chemistry of the whole room. Even my mother and father began to behave differently. So these feelings exist in me. And when I make work, I try to reflect back all those things, as purely as possible. And to put them in a larger context."
"If I were a brilliant technician, says Jones, "maybe I'd be showing people the potential of the human body. If I were an incredible poet, I'd want to put words together that would move people and lift them up and transform them. If I'm an honest and concise enough performer, which I hope to be, I can present myself, my efforts, as an example of a world in which the imagination is striving to be free. In this era, that's an important thing to try to get across. We don't - most of us - really believe that we have beauty in us."
So this is their day off. I meet Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane in their house in Valley Cottage, in Rockland County. It's got lots of windows, pleasing proportions inside, and in summer the other houses around will be happily obliterated by foliage. They've started to rip out a wall upstairs: the kitchen will be up there too. Meantime, it's downstairs, where you come in, with a central beam low enough to smack your head on (I scored four times). But, even with clogs, Zane sneaks safely under. When the kitchen gets moved, this will be his darkroom.
Jones arrives with stuff from the store and heaps of mail, including a letter from the mother of a junior high schooler in Arkansas who was struck by Bill's recent performance there and wants to correspond. Also from Arkansas is a package of little drumsticks, cymbals, wood blocks, that Jones had borrowed from the school staff and which someone, mistakenly, was returning to him. Incessant phone calls to Zane, the business head, about upcoming schedules. Berlin and Cologne in April, Festivals in the summer. Can Bill come to Tacoma in the fall?
The carpenter arrives with a sample of the slanted board (about two feet by eight), braced on a wheeled base, which will be part of the set for Valley Cottage, a new piece they'll premiere at American Theater Lab April 2 to 6. Seven of these, covered with sod will make a mountain that can come apart. The sod, properly moist, could add up to 60 pounds to the weight. Will it balance? While we're inside talking, the wind blows it over. While Jones is working with Zane on the final part of the trilogy that started with Monkey Run Road in 197--, and Blauvelt Mountain, he's also collaborating with Senta Driver on another new piece, lo, at American Theater Lab March 6 to 30). And he's got some third thing going that I don't even want to know about.
Five narrow mirrors on the left side of Driver's studio give an inkling of how 15 mirrors on that side of the stage and 14 across the back wall, will reflect, multiply and shatter the dancers' images. Running through, Jones skips his first solo, which will be improvised in a corner of the darkened stage. Driver will start in the ---by, so you'll only be able to see her in the mirrors. She throws herself around, fall staggers back. The solo, broken into sections, is marked by accelerating movements that shift from the powerful to the fe--- and maidenly, in a staccato headlong chain. Jones's solos alternate with Driver's, until they overlap more and more and finally become simultaneous; he whips around, dribbles, flings his legs in a sideways arc with hands on the floor.
One continuing concern has to do with the way they handle each other. Jones treats Driver with more care than she requires. "Put your pelvis on me. Lean on me. Ride me down," she says. "You can give me more weight." She doesn't want to be kicked or suddenly jabbed by some hard bone, but she doesn't mind some roughness. But they don't want the piece to look like it's about pushing; and punching shouldn't look like they're fighting. It doesn't. They match each other strength for strength. Do you think I'm stronger than you are," asks Jones toward the end and as part of the piece. "Sometimes," says Driver. "Sometimes not."
Driver questions one of the improvised sections. "There's so much freedom. I don't know what it's for." But the freedom is important to Jones. He has high hopes. "when two people have a rapport, they can surprise themselves." Rehearsals with Zane in a studio on Canal Street are a different story. They start off a little tense: Jones has just come back from touring, things are a little rusty, off, awkward. But they've been working together for 10 years now, and, physically, they seem to be able to jump on each other and interlock any way at all. Zane is white, shorter, and more explicit, more forceful, harder-edged than Jones. He reminds me sometimes of those star-shaped weapons ninjas and other baddies throw in 007 movies. Jones, black and tall, seems to dream his dancing, however urgent and spontaneous it is. He combines strength and delicacy, power and grace. I imagine a diagram of energy trailing out of his arms and hands in arabesques and curlicues.
Valley Cottage is in chunks now, being rebuilt, refined, rearranged. They talk it over, evaluating, fixing. They're concerned at all times for how any action will read to the audience, occasionally speaking in the third person as they envision themselves "objectively" in performance. Jones, behind Zane, grabs his frantically waving arms, but interferes too much. He tries to restrict Zane's movement less, but "You're real wild, I don't know how to hold onto that." Jones falls sideways a short distance, caught atilt against Zane's upper arm and Zane promenades him in a circle as Jones placidly "sunbathes". The catch is awfully delicate, since Jones doesn't look and there’s no secure hook. Both like the ways their hands link for reassurance on that promenade. Jones feels the need to take stock of their material, not to build any more until they know what they're missing.
By this time in Blauvelt, "we'd gotten all the material out and were dissecting it." This time they've become more wrapped up in each individual part. A duet section has become "do a thing, stop, do a thing, stop." and Jones dislikes that. They try it again, trying to find its flow, marking some natural pauses in the sequence. And they add something: Jones has imagined a new way to lift and throw Zane. He catches his head and shoulder under Zane's belly, lifts him and heaves him lightly aside: "horse tossing child."
Jones and Zane became friends in 1971 in Binghamton. Jones was studying in the theatre department at SUNY and Zane had recently graduated. Then, in 1973, Zane took a contact improvisation workshop which turned him on to dancing. And their involvement moved onto another level. With Lois Welk, they founded the American Dance Asylum. "We all choreographed, we all worked in each others' pieces, we all suffered with the bills." 'We started to develop this cycle of dances in the latter part of 1976," says Jones. "We did a very 'modern dance' sort of study for two men, with no shirts on, and khaki pants, dancing in pools of light to no music. It frightened one critic in the Binghamton area. She didn't know what to make of our 'spurts of violence and tenderness'". Irony in Jones's voice floats unspoken quotation marks in the air. "It was a real 'modern dance' - full of angst."
"After that, we began to think about Monkey Run Road. Arnie had done a piece called Hand Dance which set accumulation against improvisation. He explored it very thoroughly, too, as Arnie tends to do things. Then we decided to try it in a looser fashion. I thought, 'What if we were to accumulate a scene from a play, and why don't we make the play?' I would be a vaudeville ventriloquist with a dummy. Arnie was going to wear blackface and I would have him sit on my lap. But he was too big, so we thought, 'Why don't we put him in a box?' So we had this big box built, and suddenly the box was too big, and anyway it was too provocative to use in such a predictable way. So we went off on another tangent: no costumes,very stark, and we developed this whole athletic vocabulary of movement and space became very important, and the next thing you know we had Monkey Run Road."
Jones hadn't done any serious choreography before meeting Zane, but in the three or four years before Zane started dancing, he had begun to create a repertory of "little fledgling solos."
"I used to prod Arnie to become more physical," says Jones. "he was a very visual person. He had quite a success with his photographs from the beginning." Zane, with some measure of beginner's luck, got a show in Rochester of portraits he'd taken on a European trip with an inexpensive borrowed camera. He got a CAPS grant, bought himself a good camera. Then "I started doing torsos of people of all ages, bodies that were devastated to the very beautiful.
I photographed the person from just beneath the eyes to the groin. This coincided with my developing as a dancer.
I wanted the torso to bring the personality out. I wanted to be able to look at an anonymous person, like in a medical photograph, look at their torso and tell all about the person."
"I was compelled," Bill goes on, "to get Arnie more involved physically. I encouraged him to do yoga."
"It was terrible," Arnie interrupts. "I had tears, tears in my eyes. Bill was trying to get me to do the plow. Three mornings in a row I was crying. The pain - from trying to put my toes to the floor behind my head."
"I don't know why I pushed him so," says Jones "But sure enough, once he got a taste of it, he was quite precocious."
'The best thing for me," says Zane, "was that, from the outset, people encouraged me to choreograph. It was lucky, because I wasn't about to put everything on hold while I took 10 years to make my dancer's body."
"We took Yvonne Rainer's manifesto to heart," says Jones. No to technique, no to illusion, no to spectacle -whatever." They understood her to be saying that anyone can do it. Just get up there and create with whatever you have to work with. "We took that notion to heart, although we hadn't seen the work behind it."
Jones says, "At the Movement Research benefit at Symphony Space, after our performance, which was very well received...."We felt good about our dancing, " says Zane. "Yeah," says Jones, we felt very good about it, felt great about it, as a matter of fact. Anyway, one critic said that it was 'the hit of the evening'. Someone else was overheard remarking, 'Well, they're very charismatic, but haven't they gotten a bit slick?' Do people want us to be the grungy primitives from upstate for the rest of our lives? How do we keep our own notion of what we do, and yet develop?"
I ask if a photo of a young black boy, eight to 10 years old, in glasses and Sunday best, is Jones. It is. "I was always considered not a good-looking person. He was maybe going to be a preacher," he says of the boy he was, "and he was intelligent. He was not one of the pretty children. It wasn't till the past two years that I decided I didn't need to wear my glasses all the time.
"It wasn't till the past two years that you realized you were a beauty," jokes Zane. "All those people," says Zane, "Meredith Monk, Yvonne Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, they did the groundwork, they introduced a path on which we have embarked. Of course we color it with our own beliefs and our own originality."
"Confronted with their contribution," continues Jones, "I thought 'what do I have to offer?' And the only thing I really felt honest about was my own personal development, was a revealing of a person. Revealing something that is normally hidden. Because in this dance scene there aren't many people like myself, that is, black people from poverty backgrounds, who have been educated in a university, and now, instead of being doctors and lawyers - which is the usual trajectory of improvement - have instead become downtown artist types. I feel that if I can reveal the process that has brought me here, that's a social bridge. I feel like a map of the aspirations of the '60's."
"People see us immediately as large and small, black and white, male and male," says Zane. "And the work runs a gamut of emotions. The roles and the relationships may be slightly jarring. But our relationship is not overstated. We're simply two individuals. What I'd like an audience to see is any two men on the planet working together, cooperating, sharing, to bring an event or a task to fulfillment."
"When I hear us go on like this," says Jones, "I think, 'well, how come the actual nature of what you do is full of violence, full of struggle and pain?' And I guess that's my experience: my sense of identity has been shaped that way because I am black, male, born in such a year - and identity is a pivotal idea in everything I do."
"I come from a very violent place," he says in a voice like honey. "I think one of the first things I ever heard was screaming. People moving around. 'Get out of the way. Be Quiet.' Standing when I was very young, next to a state trooper who seemed to be about seven feet tall - just this monolithic form in gray cloth, a gun at his side and white skin, standing in a room full of black faces. And this first awareness I ever had of a white person was an authority presence which changed the chemistry of the whole room. Even my mother and father began to behave differently. So these feelings exist in me. And when I make work, I try to reflect back all those things, as purely as possible. And to put them in a larger context."
"If I were a brilliant technician, says Jones, "maybe I'd be showing people the potential of the human body. If I were an incredible poet, I'd want to put words together that would move people and lift them up and transform them. If I'm an honest and concise enough performer, which I hope to be, I can present myself, my efforts, as an example of a world in which the imagination is striving to be free. In this era, that's an important thing to try to get across. We don't - most of us - really believe that we have beauty in us."
Loving That Spin I'm In
November 4
Laura Dean's music from Night, her dance for the Joffrey Ballet, was a fine intro to her concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It put you in The mood. Exciting and driving, it has a strong claustrophobic intensity - and a certain quality of confinement also persists throughout her Tympani, which closed the program.
Dance (1976), the middle work, done in spangly white suits to full, firm strumming on two autoharps (and the tail end to the plucking of one string), has a brightness to its energy. Tympani (1980), in silky blacks, but with the same six dancers - Angela Caponigro, Peter Healey, Ching Gonzalez, Erin Mattiesen, Sarah Brumgart, Mark Morris - has more movement that brings the body low, or stooped over, like turns with the torso tilted nearly flat forward, the arms swept behind. Gestures that press away from the body are an important theme, as are movements that drive down with a bit of a twist - like fast stamping that accents a tight swivel in the hand downward. The piece is also given weight by that punching kettledrum thud, joined to Dean's layered, unresolving fabric of piano melody.
The oddest aspect of Tympani's movement is evocative of the serious agonies of Modern Dance. Three dancers move into a central cluster as the other three spin in an outside circle. The dancers in the cluster lunge and slowly stretch their arms, pushing through the forearm, in one direction. And then reverse. The spinners switch places with the cluster and soon the movement quickens and fuses into a sinking step combined with a push. Much later, at the end, this movement is repeated, only everyone is doing it now, spreading out around the stage. You feel that the dancers are blind, or the space is thick and inchoate. Keeping the movement going is the basic element in these dances. Early in Dance, it's clear that whenever the excitement feels like it's about to climax, the pitch of the music, which has been climbing, plummets, and the dancing continues, perhaps unchanged, but with a feeling of renewal.
I don't miss climaxes in this work. But the most readily satisfying parts of Dean's dances are usually the simplest in terms of pattern, often symmetrical, and the parts where the whole group is equally involved. It's less absorbing when some of them become background - like when two pairs stand to the sides, keeping the rhythmic bounce and gestural components going, while two other dancers spin center stage, or when three stand in back doing a muted version of the foot-stamping and arm-flinging that the other three do downstage. It's also awkward when we're between patterns, because the patterns, once set, seem immutable, don't generate much reason to change. Though, of course, all that repetition makes the dancers' bodies need a change.
I wonder what has been so appealing to so many people in Dean's dances. Part of it is that they're easy to take. The dense harmonies and steady rhythms of the music give them a firm ground. They're not particularly trance-inducing - they're too earthy for that. And they don't seem to take the dancers out of their bodies, but lock them into them. These dances have an unlikely kinship with some kind of nightclubby floor show. I'm reminded vaguely of Hollywood spectacles with the Circassian slaves, or whoever, rushing in to do their stuff. Or sometimes there's the modesty f gesture, the precise suggestiveness of Japanese dance. Or the intricate ornament of Hindu dance or sculpture in the sharp -edged fillip of a dancer's swinging hand, or, say, the kind of languid S-shape that curves through the arms and sags slightly into the hip.
A variety of flavors, of spices in the gesture, define and impel the plain movements that give Dean's work its broad shape. There's a contradiction and exaggeration in many of these gestures, and a show-off quality in sections when the dancers, one or two at a time, get to do their stuff. All this gives a kind of persistent, low-key teasing quality, with more inherent humor than the potential climaxes that keep evaporating. The teasing, with the cyclical, contained, self-controlled quality of the movement (you fling your arm up to draw it down, you scoot left to scoot right, you swing down to draw erect), makes these dancers tempting, ornery morsels you don't quite get enough of. Some inconsistencies, even in the way people spin, puzzle me. Some dancers are even-footed, but for example, Gonzales carries one foot over the other, accenting one moment and slipping a bobbing motion into his spin.
I wonder whether these differences matter to Dean, or whether she encourages them. I can't tell from the work, and although I don't want to see automata onstage, I find some differences in the way people do things disquieting. Differences in their bodies don't disturb me. Angela Caponigro has a pristine, focused quality and flings her limbs away from her body with a lightness in clarity that leaves her torso free. Others do the same movement with more evident will, and that's interesting too (but not beautiful).
The kind of petty thing that I do find worrisome is like one movement in Tympani, a fast flutter of the hands in front of the body. The stress is on the outward press of the palm, on the split-second stop before movement repeats: out, out, out. But it blurs, it's inconsistent, it loses focus. And you wonder if it matters. Dean's dancers are compelling, and for the dancers, there's neither rest nor escape from the rhythmic onslaught. And, of course, a good part of the satisfaction is the contradiction, the freedom she creates for herself within its rigorous forms. At one point, she's in a row of stamping dancers. It appears that with each driving,downward stamp, her arms grow longer, finer. She extends herself even in a movement that you might think would demand the down thrust of the whole body. But she shows you that it doesn't require that. The force is in her, but her energy is light and free.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 30 to November 1).
Laura Dean's music from Night, her dance for the Joffrey Ballet, was a fine intro to her concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It put you in The mood. Exciting and driving, it has a strong claustrophobic intensity - and a certain quality of confinement also persists throughout her Tympani, which closed the program.
Dance (1976), the middle work, done in spangly white suits to full, firm strumming on two autoharps (and the tail end to the plucking of one string), has a brightness to its energy. Tympani (1980), in silky blacks, but with the same six dancers - Angela Caponigro, Peter Healey, Ching Gonzalez, Erin Mattiesen, Sarah Brumgart, Mark Morris - has more movement that brings the body low, or stooped over, like turns with the torso tilted nearly flat forward, the arms swept behind. Gestures that press away from the body are an important theme, as are movements that drive down with a bit of a twist - like fast stamping that accents a tight swivel in the hand downward. The piece is also given weight by that punching kettledrum thud, joined to Dean's layered, unresolving fabric of piano melody.
The oddest aspect of Tympani's movement is evocative of the serious agonies of Modern Dance. Three dancers move into a central cluster as the other three spin in an outside circle. The dancers in the cluster lunge and slowly stretch their arms, pushing through the forearm, in one direction. And then reverse. The spinners switch places with the cluster and soon the movement quickens and fuses into a sinking step combined with a push. Much later, at the end, this movement is repeated, only everyone is doing it now, spreading out around the stage. You feel that the dancers are blind, or the space is thick and inchoate. Keeping the movement going is the basic element in these dances. Early in Dance, it's clear that whenever the excitement feels like it's about to climax, the pitch of the music, which has been climbing, plummets, and the dancing continues, perhaps unchanged, but with a feeling of renewal.
I don't miss climaxes in this work. But the most readily satisfying parts of Dean's dances are usually the simplest in terms of pattern, often symmetrical, and the parts where the whole group is equally involved. It's less absorbing when some of them become background - like when two pairs stand to the sides, keeping the rhythmic bounce and gestural components going, while two other dancers spin center stage, or when three stand in back doing a muted version of the foot-stamping and arm-flinging that the other three do downstage. It's also awkward when we're between patterns, because the patterns, once set, seem immutable, don't generate much reason to change. Though, of course, all that repetition makes the dancers' bodies need a change.
I wonder what has been so appealing to so many people in Dean's dances. Part of it is that they're easy to take. The dense harmonies and steady rhythms of the music give them a firm ground. They're not particularly trance-inducing - they're too earthy for that. And they don't seem to take the dancers out of their bodies, but lock them into them. These dances have an unlikely kinship with some kind of nightclubby floor show. I'm reminded vaguely of Hollywood spectacles with the Circassian slaves, or whoever, rushing in to do their stuff. Or sometimes there's the modesty f gesture, the precise suggestiveness of Japanese dance. Or the intricate ornament of Hindu dance or sculpture in the sharp -edged fillip of a dancer's swinging hand, or, say, the kind of languid S-shape that curves through the arms and sags slightly into the hip.
A variety of flavors, of spices in the gesture, define and impel the plain movements that give Dean's work its broad shape. There's a contradiction and exaggeration in many of these gestures, and a show-off quality in sections when the dancers, one or two at a time, get to do their stuff. All this gives a kind of persistent, low-key teasing quality, with more inherent humor than the potential climaxes that keep evaporating. The teasing, with the cyclical, contained, self-controlled quality of the movement (you fling your arm up to draw it down, you scoot left to scoot right, you swing down to draw erect), makes these dancers tempting, ornery morsels you don't quite get enough of. Some inconsistencies, even in the way people spin, puzzle me. Some dancers are even-footed, but for example, Gonzales carries one foot over the other, accenting one moment and slipping a bobbing motion into his spin.
I wonder whether these differences matter to Dean, or whether she encourages them. I can't tell from the work, and although I don't want to see automata onstage, I find some differences in the way people do things disquieting. Differences in their bodies don't disturb me. Angela Caponigro has a pristine, focused quality and flings her limbs away from her body with a lightness in clarity that leaves her torso free. Others do the same movement with more evident will, and that's interesting too (but not beautiful).
The kind of petty thing that I do find worrisome is like one movement in Tympani, a fast flutter of the hands in front of the body. The stress is on the outward press of the palm, on the split-second stop before movement repeats: out, out, out. But it blurs, it's inconsistent, it loses focus. And you wonder if it matters. Dean's dancers are compelling, and for the dancers, there's neither rest nor escape from the rhythmic onslaught. And, of course, a good part of the satisfaction is the contradiction, the freedom she creates for herself within its rigorous forms. At one point, she's in a row of stamping dancers. It appears that with each driving,downward stamp, her arms grow longer, finer. She extends herself even in a movement that you might think would demand the down thrust of the whole body. But she shows you that it doesn't require that. The force is in her, but her energy is light and free.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 30 to November 1).
No Stone Unturned
May 6
In the neatness of Kiva loft, two handsome sculptures of tacked and fitted natural rocks sit in the performing space. They have a powerful presence. Ordered by uncivilized objects, they've for the potential of a wild animal on the loose.
I'm here for Renee Rockoff's Penumbra, "a movement-sound environment for six dancers and a collection of rocks from Wyoming," upstate and Atlantic beaches. In semi-darkness, six humps move in waves - crawling in, rising and falling. Occasionally, one or another figure stands erect, Three progress to the far corner, and disappear behind a chest-high curtain/wall that projects along either side of the narrow performing space. The remaining three arch backwards, looking out toward us with heads upside-down, arms outstretched, then reverse front, arms still extended and beating patiently like arrowy wings. They shift sharply from side-to-side across the space. I'm seeing these hawk-people flying in my mind over a deep, straight-sided gorge; it may be the narrowness of this arm of the space, narrowed further by those low walls, as well as the presence of the sculptures, that fixes the image in a distant but distinct landscape. Then the image breaks. They roll out sideways, others roll across. In some sections, here's a sense of the dancers being almost spellbound. Their arms drift, they drift within their bodies, aware of slight shifts in balance and heaviness, acclimating to the slow and the subtle. Two women disappear behind the sculptures. Then, a head sticks out, like an extra rock. One woman picks the top rock off her sculpture and walks out, holding it in front of her like a blank mask. The other places the top rock of her sculpture on her head. A man faces away, into the corner. Another man, crouching, embraces the rear sculpture. Motionless for a while, he becomes part of it. A woman links her arms around it from the other side. They're almost symmetrical. When they stand, they life the heavy stones they've wrapped their arms around and stagger away under the weight. That sculpture has nearly vanished. A man steps on the remaining flattish stone...
Many episodes follow, frequently related to these and other rocks. Looking at what remains of the front sculpture, a mighty hulk of black stone maybe a foot or so high, Rockoff opens a small black purse. She carefully sets tiny pine trees atop it, a few animals, a man. The shift in scale, the switch in emphasis from the weight of stone back to its visual effect, brings a flash of witty clarity. A kind of breather. A sudden telescoping of distance, that shifts you close up and far away simultaneously. he movement is only part of what Penumbra's about, and, in itself, not terribly interesting. But it shouldn't be separated out, I think. The performers manage to put themselves in relation to these stones in simple, quiet ways. Their manner is governed by a respect for the materials, without coyness or self-consciousness, and creates a serious, but resilient atmosphere.
At a certain point, somewhere beyond the middle, I felt that Penumbra had begun to slip sideways, out of focus, that external considerations - perhaps an inclination tO exhaust the possibilities of the situation - had begun to pressure the form of the piece and weaken it. The muted quality of the performers was interesting, even necessary in relation to the stones, less so in relation to each other. People relating to people through stones, even sharing the objective physical value of those stones, was fundamental to Penumbra. More direct human intercourse seemed inappropriate. Vocalizations on vowel sounds opened the possibility of a kind of community that seemed distracting.
But I enjoyed enormously the absence of a ritual quality. All these operations, slow and sometimes formal, seemed to express perfectly natural activity. A woman empties a bag of round, flattened stones, none very large. She spreads them out, leans over them and draws them back to her. She spreads them wider, swings over them and draws them back in, over and over in ways that seem voluptuous, greedy, impulsive, satisfying -a often all at once. She scatters them so far she can barely reach, has to sweep out flat and low to gather them to her. Covers them with her body. Some scenes were wonderfully vivid. A woman builds a wall on Rockoff, lying flat. The first stones are laid on her chest and belly. You watch them rise and fall, separate and touch, with her breathing. As more stones are laid, her breathing stills. Up to her neck, and down along the crevice where her legs join, slowly three or four courses are built. A while after completion, they crash off. Toward the end, more stones are shoved out from under those low side walls. Bodies push, pull, hug those stones. The scene's a bit scrubby - maybe there's too much rubbing and clacking of rocks - and leaves the people scattered, humming in their new, broken landscape. I've scanted Nigel Rollings excellent score (sometimes like nighttime sounds of a desert where the critters are at least part mechanical), and the remarkably atmospheric and sensitive lighting Rockoff and John Parton achieved with minimal equipment.
At Kiva loft (April 24 to 26).
In the neatness of Kiva loft, two handsome sculptures of tacked and fitted natural rocks sit in the performing space. They have a powerful presence. Ordered by uncivilized objects, they've for the potential of a wild animal on the loose.
I'm here for Renee Rockoff's Penumbra, "a movement-sound environment for six dancers and a collection of rocks from Wyoming," upstate and Atlantic beaches. In semi-darkness, six humps move in waves - crawling in, rising and falling. Occasionally, one or another figure stands erect, Three progress to the far corner, and disappear behind a chest-high curtain/wall that projects along either side of the narrow performing space. The remaining three arch backwards, looking out toward us with heads upside-down, arms outstretched, then reverse front, arms still extended and beating patiently like arrowy wings. They shift sharply from side-to-side across the space. I'm seeing these hawk-people flying in my mind over a deep, straight-sided gorge; it may be the narrowness of this arm of the space, narrowed further by those low walls, as well as the presence of the sculptures, that fixes the image in a distant but distinct landscape. Then the image breaks. They roll out sideways, others roll across. In some sections, here's a sense of the dancers being almost spellbound. Their arms drift, they drift within their bodies, aware of slight shifts in balance and heaviness, acclimating to the slow and the subtle. Two women disappear behind the sculptures. Then, a head sticks out, like an extra rock. One woman picks the top rock off her sculpture and walks out, holding it in front of her like a blank mask. The other places the top rock of her sculpture on her head. A man faces away, into the corner. Another man, crouching, embraces the rear sculpture. Motionless for a while, he becomes part of it. A woman links her arms around it from the other side. They're almost symmetrical. When they stand, they life the heavy stones they've wrapped their arms around and stagger away under the weight. That sculpture has nearly vanished. A man steps on the remaining flattish stone...
Many episodes follow, frequently related to these and other rocks. Looking at what remains of the front sculpture, a mighty hulk of black stone maybe a foot or so high, Rockoff opens a small black purse. She carefully sets tiny pine trees atop it, a few animals, a man. The shift in scale, the switch in emphasis from the weight of stone back to its visual effect, brings a flash of witty clarity. A kind of breather. A sudden telescoping of distance, that shifts you close up and far away simultaneously. he movement is only part of what Penumbra's about, and, in itself, not terribly interesting. But it shouldn't be separated out, I think. The performers manage to put themselves in relation to these stones in simple, quiet ways. Their manner is governed by a respect for the materials, without coyness or self-consciousness, and creates a serious, but resilient atmosphere.
At a certain point, somewhere beyond the middle, I felt that Penumbra had begun to slip sideways, out of focus, that external considerations - perhaps an inclination tO exhaust the possibilities of the situation - had begun to pressure the form of the piece and weaken it. The muted quality of the performers was interesting, even necessary in relation to the stones, less so in relation to each other. People relating to people through stones, even sharing the objective physical value of those stones, was fundamental to Penumbra. More direct human intercourse seemed inappropriate. Vocalizations on vowel sounds opened the possibility of a kind of community that seemed distracting.
But I enjoyed enormously the absence of a ritual quality. All these operations, slow and sometimes formal, seemed to express perfectly natural activity. A woman empties a bag of round, flattened stones, none very large. She spreads them out, leans over them and draws them back to her. She spreads them wider, swings over them and draws them back in, over and over in ways that seem voluptuous, greedy, impulsive, satisfying -a often all at once. She scatters them so far she can barely reach, has to sweep out flat and low to gather them to her. Covers them with her body. Some scenes were wonderfully vivid. A woman builds a wall on Rockoff, lying flat. The first stones are laid on her chest and belly. You watch them rise and fall, separate and touch, with her breathing. As more stones are laid, her breathing stills. Up to her neck, and down along the crevice where her legs join, slowly three or four courses are built. A while after completion, they crash off. Toward the end, more stones are shoved out from under those low side walls. Bodies push, pull, hug those stones. The scene's a bit scrubby - maybe there's too much rubbing and clacking of rocks - and leaves the people scattered, humming in their new, broken landscape. I've scanted Nigel Rollings excellent score (sometimes like nighttime sounds of a desert where the critters are at least part mechanical), and the remarkably atmospheric and sensitive lighting Rockoff and John Parton achieved with minimal equipment.
At Kiva loft (April 24 to 26).
Proven Steel
January 28
In the hollow shell of St. Clement's Church on a recent bitter night, Phoebe Neville gave a striking concert. The bare brick walls and meager lighting setup (excellently utilized by Blu) made it easy to imagine Neville dancing in even more primitive surroundings - in a cavern with firelight. But probably not out in the fields in daylight. The kind of inner drama her dances portray, and their tenacious quality, seem to forbid that.
Neville takes hold of her subject and hangs on to a conclusion like some fish whose jaws won't release its prey no matter what. Well, that's overstating it, but there's a quality of firmness and dedication in Neville's work that's very satisfying. She handles material with mythic resonance in a blunt, unsentimental way. The formality of the patterns, the weight and simplicity of the crucial gestures and movements, carry authority, create an atmosphere, and impart a sense of resolve. The very particular sensibility of each gesture makes the archaic, timeless situations Neville takes on immediate and concrete.
I was gripped by her solo, Passage. Her dancing has a muted fierceness and sturdiness, a precise attack, and a use of weight that is definite and powerful but never leaden or inert. The designs and inflections of her hands are especially alive and vivid; even her feet are prehensile and expressive. Neville stands in a spot of light in a plain long dress of pale blue. Her head wobbles, and the wobbles have many shades and attitudes, as if the head and the spirit within are caught in some peculiar internal current which she partly surrenders to and partly strives against. Her hands are another vital part of the ambivalent, silent dialogue, as they push draw in, slice, smooth, inveigle, make ists, shunt the invisible gently aside. They never stop their conversational weaving, playing against that shying head, as her whole being wheedles and battles some force that can't be successfully skirted or mitigated.
At one point, I imagine her caught in a fine, soft, almost smothering net. Then she starts to throw her head around, first slowly, then violently, as her hands jerk and clutch. As the circles slow, Neville grabs hold of the ends of her hair and finally stops erect, holding the mass of it tight above her head. Then she strides out into a big circle, walks, and falls. She continues to walk that circle, one arm at her waist as the other probes ahead of her like a guide. Walking, she seems more and more alone, more stripped down, the space around her colder. Increasingly, she avoids the sight of and actually dodges the had that flutters ahead of her, until in a moment of final decision, she seems to throw open a door in space.
Her new group work, Voyage (into or through death), doesn't have the steady bite of Passage. It's vaguer, and many of the images are softer, related to water. The music is Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead. A chorus of four women, lined on a diagonal, create a pulsing wave, opening their arms, brushing their legs, in unison or serial movement akin to swimming. Vic Stornant backs through the group, arms crossed stiffly against his chest. A while later, his arms frame his head in a sharp, angular, knotted V. Twisting or shifting, they seem to belong to someone else. The women come up behind hi in a cluster, their arms open and enfold each other in a very usual and comforting way. Stornant's own arms isolate and lock him in. Then he seems to die: lying on the floor, he draws his arms tightly down along his body and lets them relax at his sides. Suddenly his legs swing to one side and pull up. There's a fresh and astonishing illusion of floating, like something wedged in a crevice that tugs and washes free as the water rises. Then, on his feet again, and in a another phase I guess, he holds one arm across his chest, the other bent and held to one side of his head in stiff agony or resistance. Behind him, the women have linked up like a closed gate, then make a sort of loose, rocking cradle with their arms.
At the last moment, Stornant, like Neville in Passage, thrusts his arms aside as if parting a veil or opening a door, a statement of emergence, or decision, or even triumph, that Neville leaves the audience with again and again. At the end of her powerful Dodona - beautifully danced by Tryntje Shapli, and Sheila Kaminsky - the three women, having come through their ritual, face the audience with arms stretched forward, fists grasping something, their whole attitude proclaiming achievement. Also on the program were Tryntje Shapli's bucolic but flimsy Spring Dance, and Remy Charlip's Twelve Contra Dances, a playful, uncluttered, but exact series of alternating moves, dares, relays, and chases, like some teasing, buoyant game you might devise skimming circles and arcs with a compass.
At Playhouse 46 (January 7 to 18).
In the hollow shell of St. Clement's Church on a recent bitter night, Phoebe Neville gave a striking concert. The bare brick walls and meager lighting setup (excellently utilized by Blu) made it easy to imagine Neville dancing in even more primitive surroundings - in a cavern with firelight. But probably not out in the fields in daylight. The kind of inner drama her dances portray, and their tenacious quality, seem to forbid that.
Neville takes hold of her subject and hangs on to a conclusion like some fish whose jaws won't release its prey no matter what. Well, that's overstating it, but there's a quality of firmness and dedication in Neville's work that's very satisfying. She handles material with mythic resonance in a blunt, unsentimental way. The formality of the patterns, the weight and simplicity of the crucial gestures and movements, carry authority, create an atmosphere, and impart a sense of resolve. The very particular sensibility of each gesture makes the archaic, timeless situations Neville takes on immediate and concrete.
I was gripped by her solo, Passage. Her dancing has a muted fierceness and sturdiness, a precise attack, and a use of weight that is definite and powerful but never leaden or inert. The designs and inflections of her hands are especially alive and vivid; even her feet are prehensile and expressive. Neville stands in a spot of light in a plain long dress of pale blue. Her head wobbles, and the wobbles have many shades and attitudes, as if the head and the spirit within are caught in some peculiar internal current which she partly surrenders to and partly strives against. Her hands are another vital part of the ambivalent, silent dialogue, as they push draw in, slice, smooth, inveigle, make ists, shunt the invisible gently aside. They never stop their conversational weaving, playing against that shying head, as her whole being wheedles and battles some force that can't be successfully skirted or mitigated.
At one point, I imagine her caught in a fine, soft, almost smothering net. Then she starts to throw her head around, first slowly, then violently, as her hands jerk and clutch. As the circles slow, Neville grabs hold of the ends of her hair and finally stops erect, holding the mass of it tight above her head. Then she strides out into a big circle, walks, and falls. She continues to walk that circle, one arm at her waist as the other probes ahead of her like a guide. Walking, she seems more and more alone, more stripped down, the space around her colder. Increasingly, she avoids the sight of and actually dodges the had that flutters ahead of her, until in a moment of final decision, she seems to throw open a door in space.
Her new group work, Voyage (into or through death), doesn't have the steady bite of Passage. It's vaguer, and many of the images are softer, related to water. The music is Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead. A chorus of four women, lined on a diagonal, create a pulsing wave, opening their arms, brushing their legs, in unison or serial movement akin to swimming. Vic Stornant backs through the group, arms crossed stiffly against his chest. A while later, his arms frame his head in a sharp, angular, knotted V. Twisting or shifting, they seem to belong to someone else. The women come up behind hi in a cluster, their arms open and enfold each other in a very usual and comforting way. Stornant's own arms isolate and lock him in. Then he seems to die: lying on the floor, he draws his arms tightly down along his body and lets them relax at his sides. Suddenly his legs swing to one side and pull up. There's a fresh and astonishing illusion of floating, like something wedged in a crevice that tugs and washes free as the water rises. Then, on his feet again, and in a another phase I guess, he holds one arm across his chest, the other bent and held to one side of his head in stiff agony or resistance. Behind him, the women have linked up like a closed gate, then make a sort of loose, rocking cradle with their arms.
At the last moment, Stornant, like Neville in Passage, thrusts his arms aside as if parting a veil or opening a door, a statement of emergence, or decision, or even triumph, that Neville leaves the audience with again and again. At the end of her powerful Dodona - beautifully danced by Tryntje Shapli, and Sheila Kaminsky - the three women, having come through their ritual, face the audience with arms stretched forward, fists grasping something, their whole attitude proclaiming achievement. Also on the program were Tryntje Shapli's bucolic but flimsy Spring Dance, and Remy Charlip's Twelve Contra Dances, a playful, uncluttered, but exact series of alternating moves, dares, relays, and chases, like some teasing, buoyant game you might devise skimming circles and arcs with a compass.
At Playhouse 46 (January 7 to 18).
Screwing for Art
July 8
Kenneth MacMillan can sometimes be marvelously inventive in movement (although there is little evidence in his new Isadora), but often his cleverness seems futile. Watching his Gloria, which the Royal Ballet premiered here recently, I thought this or that was Theatrically "effective." But what does that mean? Effective for what? Beyond a certain visual distinction and refinement, most of those directorial and choreographic ideas have no impact.
Gloria refers to World War I. Men and women walk up from behind a flattened mound in a barren, blaster no-man's landscape divided by a plain angled metal frame that suggests in its spareness all the metal detritus of was we do not see. The atmosphere is entirely a matter of the presence of these beautiful young men and women in a background so redolent of death, but so tasteful and beautifully tinted in tones of gray, ochre, brown-reds like dried blood, Gloria is vague and anonymous. The men in their tattered garb and flat helmets are soldiers, maybe dead soldiers. But who are those sleek girls in silver? The dancing (with figures staggering, stamping, collapsing, flinching) often contrasts with the brightness of the Poulenc music and just as often doesn't.
The many fine moments - like Wayne Eagling spinning with his hand before his face as if hiding in a dream, or the final moment when he plunges backwards off the edge of the top of the mound, into the unseen put r trench into which every other figure had already retreated - seem like they should be rich with feeling, but they're neutral. Gloria is a sheep in wolf's clothing, an innocuous, pretty ballet that borrows (largely by means of Andy Kundera's striking sets and costumes) some resonance from WWI. British audiences, I believe, have been particularly vulnerable to the apparent subject matter and a certain sad, nostalgic aroma. But it's a cheat - an elegant, beautifully danced cheat.
Doing the life of Isadora Duncan as a ballet is such a foul - and obviously perverse - idea that it's hard to imagine anyone persisting in it. Of course, in a showbiz way, it might seem perfect - tragedy, glamor, scandal, a bizarre death...but the big events of Duncan's life are too well-known. She's a cartoon heroine with a cartoon life, a life without privacy. The reality and the honest grandeur of the woman keep escaping us.
Anyway, MacMillan has attempted his Isadora in the grandiose manner of a Panov or a Bejart, with Isadora a double role, danced by Merle Park spoken by Mary Miller. What happens is that we get, as usual, the story of Isadora the floozie, not Isadora the artist, and dance pioneer. MacMillan's "Duncan-esque" dances for Isadora seem foolish: she's a silly woman skipping around and waving her arms This whole circus is not worth 30 seconds of Annabelle Gamson dancing one of her Duncan reconstructions, or a glimpse of Maria-Therese Duncan at 83, or however many years, striding across the stage in the fullness of her conviction.
Because conviction is certainly missing here. Authenticity is not necessarily required. But we must believe, and see that this woman has a special gift and vision, that's she's not just an aesthetic loudmouth in imitation Greek outfits. If she spouts on about her discovery of the solar plexus as the center of movement, then we have to see what this discovery means, that it makes a real difference. MacMillan gives us examples of the trashy dancing Isadora rebels against (drooping Romantic fairies and a simpering cavalier; a Spanish gypsy" troupe that rushes en masse from one side of the stage to the other, barking, with a leading lady who swings under the guitar, like a monkey on a branch, onto the floor). If this was all Isadora was up against, then she'd have had a clear field.
On the whole, the dancing is illustration: Mary Miller's --- and playfulness carry almost all the drama. Miller speaks in a way that seems precious initially, but which gains authority, and the gestures of her arms are almost always pleasingly substantial. Merle Park's Isadora starts off as a pretty hearty gal. In the "dances", she brings some mature authority to the slower movements, but anything allegro looks frantic. And the character turns, choreographically, into a dishrag rather quickly, except when she's haranguing the audience, or when fucking galvanizes her energies. It's quite weird: As Isadora the woman, her dancing is balletic, or balleto-Graham, and once in a while, particularly in the amorous pas de deux, her dancing is dithery and ludicrous. The audience snickers, and rightly. The lovemaking is sufficiently literal, even with clothing, that a person may wonder, when, after Edward Gordon Craig and Duncan satisfy their burning passion front to front, they move from front to back, as if that means he's fucking her in the ass. Julian Hosking as Craig dances beautifully, but he's simply An Intensse Young Man, self-involved and impatient. Stephen Jefferies plays a rowdy and impassioned Esenin, and Derek Rancher is impressive as Isadora's millionaire, Paris Singer, particularly in his duet with Park when they find out about the deaths of the children. Isadora is sitting. Singer comes in followed by two men carrying the little bodies. Singer topples to the floor near her; she turns and sees the children, and falls backwards. They became embroiled in a duet where, hanging on to each other, each staggers and falls and is hauled up by the other, who falls. Clumsily, they pull each other wrenchingly down and up, interlock on the floor in anguish in a position which harks back to the happy coupling with Craig in the first act. What outrages me about Isadora is partly the waste and stupidity of it, but mostly MacMillan's almost spiteful condescension towards his subject. In Isadora's Darmstadt school, run by her sister the pupils under Max Merz's direction, following his example, execute a rigid clockwork, "German" caricature of her material. Does Isadora stop the show, take over the lesson, give Merz the air? No. She storms out, leaving the girls in tears.
Isadora was certainly erratic in her treatment of her pupils, but the only thing we see of this important relationship is her abandoning them to a martinet. I was most offended, however by the treatment of Loie Fuller, a midwestern trouper who was one of the great modern dance pioneers, a tireless experimenter with the effects of lighting and projection on moving silk. MacMillan shows Fuller as a vast blue butterfly (her costume covers almost the entire stage). The outer edges of the fabric are rippled, or rather rumpled, ineptly by several girls. (Fuller, never, I believe, had her silk manipulated by members of her company, although the young girls did frolic with scarves of their own.) The manipulation of the fabric goes haywire and Loie winds up in a tangle on the floor, to be carted away by the stagehands. I was mad enough to spit. You have only to see old photos or posters of Fuller, or a performance of something like Ruth St. Denis an Doris Humphrey's Soaring, which involves much simpler manipulations of fabric, to imagine how glorious this sort of thing could be. Of course, the intent was not to show us anything true about Loie Fuller, or even about Isadora, except to lead into Isadora's being pawed by one of the members of Loie's "entirely lesbian" (oh, really?) troupe. At the premiere the people who didn't boo or leave clapped a lot. So somebody likes this crap.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 15 to July 4).
Kenneth MacMillan can sometimes be marvelously inventive in movement (although there is little evidence in his new Isadora), but often his cleverness seems futile. Watching his Gloria, which the Royal Ballet premiered here recently, I thought this or that was Theatrically "effective." But what does that mean? Effective for what? Beyond a certain visual distinction and refinement, most of those directorial and choreographic ideas have no impact.
Gloria refers to World War I. Men and women walk up from behind a flattened mound in a barren, blaster no-man's landscape divided by a plain angled metal frame that suggests in its spareness all the metal detritus of was we do not see. The atmosphere is entirely a matter of the presence of these beautiful young men and women in a background so redolent of death, but so tasteful and beautifully tinted in tones of gray, ochre, brown-reds like dried blood, Gloria is vague and anonymous. The men in their tattered garb and flat helmets are soldiers, maybe dead soldiers. But who are those sleek girls in silver? The dancing (with figures staggering, stamping, collapsing, flinching) often contrasts with the brightness of the Poulenc music and just as often doesn't.
The many fine moments - like Wayne Eagling spinning with his hand before his face as if hiding in a dream, or the final moment when he plunges backwards off the edge of the top of the mound, into the unseen put r trench into which every other figure had already retreated - seem like they should be rich with feeling, but they're neutral. Gloria is a sheep in wolf's clothing, an innocuous, pretty ballet that borrows (largely by means of Andy Kundera's striking sets and costumes) some resonance from WWI. British audiences, I believe, have been particularly vulnerable to the apparent subject matter and a certain sad, nostalgic aroma. But it's a cheat - an elegant, beautifully danced cheat.
Doing the life of Isadora Duncan as a ballet is such a foul - and obviously perverse - idea that it's hard to imagine anyone persisting in it. Of course, in a showbiz way, it might seem perfect - tragedy, glamor, scandal, a bizarre death...but the big events of Duncan's life are too well-known. She's a cartoon heroine with a cartoon life, a life without privacy. The reality and the honest grandeur of the woman keep escaping us.
Anyway, MacMillan has attempted his Isadora in the grandiose manner of a Panov or a Bejart, with Isadora a double role, danced by Merle Park spoken by Mary Miller. What happens is that we get, as usual, the story of Isadora the floozie, not Isadora the artist, and dance pioneer. MacMillan's "Duncan-esque" dances for Isadora seem foolish: she's a silly woman skipping around and waving her arms This whole circus is not worth 30 seconds of Annabelle Gamson dancing one of her Duncan reconstructions, or a glimpse of Maria-Therese Duncan at 83, or however many years, striding across the stage in the fullness of her conviction.
Because conviction is certainly missing here. Authenticity is not necessarily required. But we must believe, and see that this woman has a special gift and vision, that's she's not just an aesthetic loudmouth in imitation Greek outfits. If she spouts on about her discovery of the solar plexus as the center of movement, then we have to see what this discovery means, that it makes a real difference. MacMillan gives us examples of the trashy dancing Isadora rebels against (drooping Romantic fairies and a simpering cavalier; a Spanish gypsy" troupe that rushes en masse from one side of the stage to the other, barking, with a leading lady who swings under the guitar, like a monkey on a branch, onto the floor). If this was all Isadora was up against, then she'd have had a clear field.
On the whole, the dancing is illustration: Mary Miller's --- and playfulness carry almost all the drama. Miller speaks in a way that seems precious initially, but which gains authority, and the gestures of her arms are almost always pleasingly substantial. Merle Park's Isadora starts off as a pretty hearty gal. In the "dances", she brings some mature authority to the slower movements, but anything allegro looks frantic. And the character turns, choreographically, into a dishrag rather quickly, except when she's haranguing the audience, or when fucking galvanizes her energies. It's quite weird: As Isadora the woman, her dancing is balletic, or balleto-Graham, and once in a while, particularly in the amorous pas de deux, her dancing is dithery and ludicrous. The audience snickers, and rightly. The lovemaking is sufficiently literal, even with clothing, that a person may wonder, when, after Edward Gordon Craig and Duncan satisfy their burning passion front to front, they move from front to back, as if that means he's fucking her in the ass. Julian Hosking as Craig dances beautifully, but he's simply An Intensse Young Man, self-involved and impatient. Stephen Jefferies plays a rowdy and impassioned Esenin, and Derek Rancher is impressive as Isadora's millionaire, Paris Singer, particularly in his duet with Park when they find out about the deaths of the children. Isadora is sitting. Singer comes in followed by two men carrying the little bodies. Singer topples to the floor near her; she turns and sees the children, and falls backwards. They became embroiled in a duet where, hanging on to each other, each staggers and falls and is hauled up by the other, who falls. Clumsily, they pull each other wrenchingly down and up, interlock on the floor in anguish in a position which harks back to the happy coupling with Craig in the first act. What outrages me about Isadora is partly the waste and stupidity of it, but mostly MacMillan's almost spiteful condescension towards his subject. In Isadora's Darmstadt school, run by her sister the pupils under Max Merz's direction, following his example, execute a rigid clockwork, "German" caricature of her material. Does Isadora stop the show, take over the lesson, give Merz the air? No. She storms out, leaving the girls in tears.
Isadora was certainly erratic in her treatment of her pupils, but the only thing we see of this important relationship is her abandoning them to a martinet. I was most offended, however by the treatment of Loie Fuller, a midwestern trouper who was one of the great modern dance pioneers, a tireless experimenter with the effects of lighting and projection on moving silk. MacMillan shows Fuller as a vast blue butterfly (her costume covers almost the entire stage). The outer edges of the fabric are rippled, or rather rumpled, ineptly by several girls. (Fuller, never, I believe, had her silk manipulated by members of her company, although the young girls did frolic with scarves of their own.) The manipulation of the fabric goes haywire and Loie winds up in a tangle on the floor, to be carted away by the stagehands. I was mad enough to spit. You have only to see old photos or posters of Fuller, or a performance of something like Ruth St. Denis an Doris Humphrey's Soaring, which involves much simpler manipulations of fabric, to imagine how glorious this sort of thing could be. Of course, the intent was not to show us anything true about Loie Fuller, or even about Isadora, except to lead into Isadora's being pawed by one of the members of Loie's "entirely lesbian" (oh, really?) troupe. At the premiere the people who didn't boo or leave clapped a lot. So somebody likes this crap.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 15 to July 4).
This and That in Black and White
February 2
Two main devices make for compelling stage pictures in Jessica Fogel's ambitious, theatrical dance works. Her palette of color is black and white; only the odd prop or temporary costume accessory or photographic image used a flash of color. And almost every piece makes use of discontinuous or restricted light sources, crucial to its picture.
Catches from a Strand occurs as a series of brief blackout scenes with two women and a man in black bathing suits on white sheets on a "beach". In Beast, the women are usually caught in the light of a handheld slide projector which sometimes sweeps through or glares at the audience and and frequently waves around the stage. In Shard, four women are lit in theatrical frames of stationary projectors set across the front of the stage.
Shard, a premiere, seemed the most solid work. Four plates are staggered on the floor, one in each quarter of the stage, and are periodically shattered by a different dancer. The momvements, often involving heavily rotating torsos or flinging heads, meld with the climate of rhythmic, gongy music (by the David Bouton Ensemble). The dancers are caught within the hard light of their individual frames, although sometimes they';; cluster or two will take a turn around the stage. You see the dancers in, or partly in and out of, a steady beam, truncated and shaved off by the edge of light. Attention is sucked back to their chunky shadows, seated torsos, say, alternating with giant legs. With your attention shifting back and forth, the shadows deliver surprises that add uncertainty and a kind of wit: they're abrupt, partial, suddenly small or huge, unpredictably absent. The chopped-off shadows, partial dancers, divided stage space, and broken plates, give Shard a consistency that is heavy and dire in a kind of homey, satisfying way.
Fogel's other works are well paced and rigorously elaborated, but too often come off as exhaustive, clever exercises, thin in the middle. Broadloom (1979), has two couples working easily and identically in separate spaces, bending, rocking, stretching together, crawling, scooting - always on their knees or low to the floor. It's absorbing for a long while, but then you wonder if they're glued there. And when they get up - casually put on socks to slide better and then remove them, jump onto each others' waists and swing around - the piece seems messy and arbitrary.
Catches from a Strand (1977), the blackout piece, is pictorial and static, but any one of the pictures it offers has more interest and mystery than their sequence, whatever dramatic possibility you sense initially (who are these people? what's going to happen?) drains as their activities are played out (snapping sheets, tossing an apple, wrapping up, spilling a whole basket of apples...). They just do this and that with props.
In Black and White (1976), Fogel, lying on the floor, keeps putting the needle on a record which makes a blurt of percussive sound, as Stuart Pimsler, in the audience, snaps flash pictures. Even when the flash stops flashing, and he's onstage, he keeps snapping. Pimsler collapses, then shots are heard on the record. Later, Fogel starts snipping scissors in the air, and the piece reduces to an Idea. Snipping Pimsler's lack pants and polo shirt away, she exposes him underclad in white.
There's lots of play with changing scale in Beast, and an acid, ironic element, but it's a bit of a mixed-media junk shop. A small photographic image projects on the back wall behind a trio of women who sit facing it The image is pulled away, enlarges, sweeps through the auditorium, and returns to the stage, lifesize, so that the women, facing away, face themselves. Then they turn to us, just as they are in the slide that now blotches their bodies. They lie down and flap their arms pen and closed with the stiff regularity of mechanical wings; then they wind up multi-colored bird toys whose wings clatter as they move. Gorilla images supersede birds - huge faces of little gorilla/troll windup toys that a projectionist waves around the stage. The women put on short, bright dresses that have been lying scattered around, as we hear mild screams and howls on tape. The images become sleazy, fetishy, as the pseudo-threat of the gorilla increases, and then women turn punk-tough, lashing their belts like eels, marching along in single spike-heeled shoes. Two, leashed around their necks with their belts, are "walked" on all fours by the third. On tape, a female voice pleads with, I assume, Kong: "You put me down! Please put me down" The assault from the large, projected gorilla head is clearly ironic; we can even see the little gorilla toys (three or four inches high?) at the back of the stage. And after "fainting:" sideways, the women wind up their gorillas and stalk about with them, taking terror in their hands, mastering the monster. At the end, the women reclaim those forgotten bird toys, and standing erect, hold the birds aloft and wt their wide wings flapping as they walk, upstage, into their image. The finish in fine - but Beast feels hollow most of the way through. Fogel comes on strong. She plainly aims to astonish, but at a certain point, not too far along, you become accustomed to her bag of tricks, and it becomes clear that she's not going to manage to weld that clutter of elements into a vision. Not this time around, anyway.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (January 29 to February 1).
Two main devices make for compelling stage pictures in Jessica Fogel's ambitious, theatrical dance works. Her palette of color is black and white; only the odd prop or temporary costume accessory or photographic image used a flash of color. And almost every piece makes use of discontinuous or restricted light sources, crucial to its picture.
Catches from a Strand occurs as a series of brief blackout scenes with two women and a man in black bathing suits on white sheets on a "beach". In Beast, the women are usually caught in the light of a handheld slide projector which sometimes sweeps through or glares at the audience and and frequently waves around the stage. In Shard, four women are lit in theatrical frames of stationary projectors set across the front of the stage.
Shard, a premiere, seemed the most solid work. Four plates are staggered on the floor, one in each quarter of the stage, and are periodically shattered by a different dancer. The momvements, often involving heavily rotating torsos or flinging heads, meld with the climate of rhythmic, gongy music (by the David Bouton Ensemble). The dancers are caught within the hard light of their individual frames, although sometimes they';; cluster or two will take a turn around the stage. You see the dancers in, or partly in and out of, a steady beam, truncated and shaved off by the edge of light. Attention is sucked back to their chunky shadows, seated torsos, say, alternating with giant legs. With your attention shifting back and forth, the shadows deliver surprises that add uncertainty and a kind of wit: they're abrupt, partial, suddenly small or huge, unpredictably absent. The chopped-off shadows, partial dancers, divided stage space, and broken plates, give Shard a consistency that is heavy and dire in a kind of homey, satisfying way.
Fogel's other works are well paced and rigorously elaborated, but too often come off as exhaustive, clever exercises, thin in the middle. Broadloom (1979), has two couples working easily and identically in separate spaces, bending, rocking, stretching together, crawling, scooting - always on their knees or low to the floor. It's absorbing for a long while, but then you wonder if they're glued there. And when they get up - casually put on socks to slide better and then remove them, jump onto each others' waists and swing around - the piece seems messy and arbitrary.
Catches from a Strand (1977), the blackout piece, is pictorial and static, but any one of the pictures it offers has more interest and mystery than their sequence, whatever dramatic possibility you sense initially (who are these people? what's going to happen?) drains as their activities are played out (snapping sheets, tossing an apple, wrapping up, spilling a whole basket of apples...). They just do this and that with props.
In Black and White (1976), Fogel, lying on the floor, keeps putting the needle on a record which makes a blurt of percussive sound, as Stuart Pimsler, in the audience, snaps flash pictures. Even when the flash stops flashing, and he's onstage, he keeps snapping. Pimsler collapses, then shots are heard on the record. Later, Fogel starts snipping scissors in the air, and the piece reduces to an Idea. Snipping Pimsler's lack pants and polo shirt away, she exposes him underclad in white.
There's lots of play with changing scale in Beast, and an acid, ironic element, but it's a bit of a mixed-media junk shop. A small photographic image projects on the back wall behind a trio of women who sit facing it The image is pulled away, enlarges, sweeps through the auditorium, and returns to the stage, lifesize, so that the women, facing away, face themselves. Then they turn to us, just as they are in the slide that now blotches their bodies. They lie down and flap their arms pen and closed with the stiff regularity of mechanical wings; then they wind up multi-colored bird toys whose wings clatter as they move. Gorilla images supersede birds - huge faces of little gorilla/troll windup toys that a projectionist waves around the stage. The women put on short, bright dresses that have been lying scattered around, as we hear mild screams and howls on tape. The images become sleazy, fetishy, as the pseudo-threat of the gorilla increases, and then women turn punk-tough, lashing their belts like eels, marching along in single spike-heeled shoes. Two, leashed around their necks with their belts, are "walked" on all fours by the third. On tape, a female voice pleads with, I assume, Kong: "You put me down! Please put me down" The assault from the large, projected gorilla head is clearly ironic; we can even see the little gorilla toys (three or four inches high?) at the back of the stage. And after "fainting:" sideways, the women wind up their gorillas and stalk about with them, taking terror in their hands, mastering the monster. At the end, the women reclaim those forgotten bird toys, and standing erect, hold the birds aloft and wt their wide wings flapping as they walk, upstage, into their image. The finish in fine - but Beast feels hollow most of the way through. Fogel comes on strong. She plainly aims to astonish, but at a certain point, not too far along, you become accustomed to her bag of tricks, and it becomes clear that she's not going to manage to weld that clutter of elements into a vision. Not this time around, anyway.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (January 29 to February 1).
You Can Go Home Again
April 29
Baryshnikov's decision to secure Balanchine's The Prodigal Son for American Ballet Theatre was brilliant. It might have seemed odd: why bother when the guys next door at New York City Ballet already do it, and do it well? But NYCB has been doing Prodigal Son with a certain sense of remove, a tacit recognition that it's a sort of relic. Maybe they're not very interested in it anymore. But at ABT, the dancers have restored its immediacy; on their bodies, driven by their enthusiasm, it no longer looks 50-odd years old. It might have been made yesterday. And it's a dramatic juggernaut.
Prodigal's not pretty; it has an ugly, brute harshness that's a big part of its truth, and the ABT dancers don't skirt or smooth over any of that ugliness. They enjoy it. I'm thinking mostly of the nine male Drinking Companions (even the Servants), bald, bullet-headed trolls who react as one to any stimulus, like nine creatures governed by the same instinctual brain, or a community of an exceedingly low form of social organism. Throughout the long middle section of the ballet, you're aware of them skulking, dozing, maybe ganging up, friendly this minute, but liable to turn any time. And they create a general, impersonal sense of the world as a place of stupid, erratic dangers. They don't seem particularly malicious, though they're always threatening in their mindlessness. They may be eunuchs or drones; even when their sport has a sexual edge, that only seems like a color of heir incipient violence.
Cynthia Gregory is a born Siren, stalking with the elegance and icy power of a mantis. Robert LaFosse is spectacular in the role of the Prodigal Son, as anyone must be who dances it. His attack is sharp, exact; those amazing leaps are powerful, steely. You see his initial impatience, his anger, his eagerness to bolt, but in some way he's slow to catch fire. He seems almost thick-skinned, unfeeling, until all that is stripped away in adversity. And his energy is wonderful, on the very borderline of control and abandon, once the situation heats up. When he leaps on the table, the Drinking Companions heave up one end as he races along it. Unable to beat the extreme incline, he's forced to slide down and lands with a thunk. LaFosse shows you the moment is real, not safe; it was impossible to continue up the table, his turn was just in time to give him some faint control of his descent. If this were a contemporary movie, once the Prodigal Son's wrung out, the trolls would try to turn him into one of themselves through some horrid potion that would rot his brain and make his hair fall out. Here, they shove him against the table, turned upright, scourge him with their hands, strip him, rob him. The centipede-like motion of their fingers over his body has a delicacy that suggests using him sexually. Saint Sebastian, beautiful, studded with arrows. The end of Prodigal Son is one of the most moving moments in any ballet. He has crawled home on his knees and collapsed at his father's gate. When his father appears and stands impassive, LaFosse crawls to him and throws himself flat in the dust at his feet. He hauls himself up, pulling on his father's motionless, dangling arms. Barely standing, he presses himself into his father's body, holds him around the shoulders and lifts his legs up across this body like a cradled infant, like the broken Christ. At last his father brings his arms up under the boy, takes his weight, accepts him.
In an authentic way, Prodigal Son fills a need in the ABT repertory that, say, Glen Tetley's pointless
Le Sacre du Printemps failed to do. Sacre was glamorous, filled with daredevil feats and showy muscular display, plenty of the kind of dancing that can be satisfying for dancers to do because it's so hard, you can really feel it. But Sacre was ultimately - that is, after the first few minutes - an example of waste and dissipation. Prodigal has the ballsiness, the passion and honesty, the weight, that Sacre missed. Like any great ballet, the high points are always powerful. But in this production they're not in isolation against a spotty background. The ballet is one piece; all its various elements have their proper weight and proportion in the whole, so you don't wonder about this or that oddness, you're caught in the sweep of the ballet. And it's a rough, rough ride.
At Metropolitan Opera House (Season April 20 to June 13). Staged by John Taras.
Baryshnikov's decision to secure Balanchine's The Prodigal Son for American Ballet Theatre was brilliant. It might have seemed odd: why bother when the guys next door at New York City Ballet already do it, and do it well? But NYCB has been doing Prodigal Son with a certain sense of remove, a tacit recognition that it's a sort of relic. Maybe they're not very interested in it anymore. But at ABT, the dancers have restored its immediacy; on their bodies, driven by their enthusiasm, it no longer looks 50-odd years old. It might have been made yesterday. And it's a dramatic juggernaut.
Prodigal's not pretty; it has an ugly, brute harshness that's a big part of its truth, and the ABT dancers don't skirt or smooth over any of that ugliness. They enjoy it. I'm thinking mostly of the nine male Drinking Companions (even the Servants), bald, bullet-headed trolls who react as one to any stimulus, like nine creatures governed by the same instinctual brain, or a community of an exceedingly low form of social organism. Throughout the long middle section of the ballet, you're aware of them skulking, dozing, maybe ganging up, friendly this minute, but liable to turn any time. And they create a general, impersonal sense of the world as a place of stupid, erratic dangers. They don't seem particularly malicious, though they're always threatening in their mindlessness. They may be eunuchs or drones; even when their sport has a sexual edge, that only seems like a color of heir incipient violence.
Cynthia Gregory is a born Siren, stalking with the elegance and icy power of a mantis. Robert LaFosse is spectacular in the role of the Prodigal Son, as anyone must be who dances it. His attack is sharp, exact; those amazing leaps are powerful, steely. You see his initial impatience, his anger, his eagerness to bolt, but in some way he's slow to catch fire. He seems almost thick-skinned, unfeeling, until all that is stripped away in adversity. And his energy is wonderful, on the very borderline of control and abandon, once the situation heats up. When he leaps on the table, the Drinking Companions heave up one end as he races along it. Unable to beat the extreme incline, he's forced to slide down and lands with a thunk. LaFosse shows you the moment is real, not safe; it was impossible to continue up the table, his turn was just in time to give him some faint control of his descent. If this were a contemporary movie, once the Prodigal Son's wrung out, the trolls would try to turn him into one of themselves through some horrid potion that would rot his brain and make his hair fall out. Here, they shove him against the table, turned upright, scourge him with their hands, strip him, rob him. The centipede-like motion of their fingers over his body has a delicacy that suggests using him sexually. Saint Sebastian, beautiful, studded with arrows. The end of Prodigal Son is one of the most moving moments in any ballet. He has crawled home on his knees and collapsed at his father's gate. When his father appears and stands impassive, LaFosse crawls to him and throws himself flat in the dust at his feet. He hauls himself up, pulling on his father's motionless, dangling arms. Barely standing, he presses himself into his father's body, holds him around the shoulders and lifts his legs up across this body like a cradled infant, like the broken Christ. At last his father brings his arms up under the boy, takes his weight, accepts him.
In an authentic way, Prodigal Son fills a need in the ABT repertory that, say, Glen Tetley's pointless
Le Sacre du Printemps failed to do. Sacre was glamorous, filled with daredevil feats and showy muscular display, plenty of the kind of dancing that can be satisfying for dancers to do because it's so hard, you can really feel it. But Sacre was ultimately - that is, after the first few minutes - an example of waste and dissipation. Prodigal has the ballsiness, the passion and honesty, the weight, that Sacre missed. Like any great ballet, the high points are always powerful. But in this production they're not in isolation against a spotty background. The ballet is one piece; all its various elements have their proper weight and proportion in the whole, so you don't wonder about this or that oddness, you're caught in the sweep of the ballet. And it's a rough, rough ride.
At Metropolitan Opera House (Season April 20 to June 13). Staged by John Taras.