Reviews 1981
Their refinement consists partly in the way their concentration and commitment allows them to appear to us with all the polish rubbed off. Raw, but not crude. They reveal a kind of brutalized consciousness, the unhappiness of a beast just awake enough to know himself to be soulless. They have, I think, an uncanny ability to lock themselves in a kind of creative darkness and to stay there, and then to reenact the ritual they have found.
Intensity for One
November 18
Peter Sparling danced with the Martha Graham company and illuminated her works from 1973 to 1979. That technique still dorms the basis of his own dances, which include a lexicon of sharp contractions, sweeping legs, flexed feet, and cupped hands, angular shapes, soft arching falls backwards, curving phrases that swoop to the floor. And all kinds of turns and whirls which almost form the glue binding the other movements together.
But in his program at Riverside Church, there were significant differences between his four duets and group works, and A Fearful Symmetry, a long solo for himself set to Hindemith's Sonata for Unaccompanied Viola, Opus 25, No. 1, and excerpts from letters of Van Gogh. In the solo, Sparling engages material that must be close to his heart. The other works, even when they're composed of several solo sections, are more conventional and decorous, with notions of arbitrary drama and coy, self-conscious humor. The ideas they contain are formal conceits, and sometimes very thin. The dancing tends to lock into the music, to reliably accent on its accents, to heel to its beat. Sometimes this is so regular, with the dancers posing momentarily at the end of each bar, that it seems like slide show of a dance. One of Sparling's gifts is an imaginative feeling for a range of slightly curious gestures that slip past identification but that strike enough recognition to color and inflame the dancing. But now he seems to be using more literal, mimetic gestures, and they're irritatingly like baby talk, like explaining a joke you don't need or want explained.
The dancing is excellent in many ways - pleasing in the way it's organized in space, smooth, supple and dynamic; and with a vivid, outlined, even carved quality that makes it stand out with great clarity. But not much depth shows through this enameled surface; physically, the dancers are quite distinct, yet anonymous. What's lovely but eventually maddening, is that the quality of all the movement, the degree of elasticity and tension, is constant. A movement that's attacked will have extra force and abruptness, but its tone tends to be the same as everything else. A fall or a droop won't have a whit more weight. Everything's at the same pitch, and under perfect control.
Unlike the other dances, A Fearful Symmetry is thoroughly expressive. It is structured and designed in a formal way, but Sparling pursues a subject that compels him. Even though the movement is keyed to the music (interspersed with a tape of Sparling's enthused, usually rapid reading of excerpts from Van Gogh's letters) and parallel to it, it has its own independent dramatic life.
Sparling is framed by a pair of flat-topped, ladder-like easels. His moves are governed by an off-center twisting tension. Often the movements are strong, as if forced: sharp half-wheels of the body, arms snapping back, turns that wind into flat-palmed throws, stops in big, angular, frontal configurations. Some of Sparling's gestures are related to the tasks of painting, like carrying a canvas to or from the easel, and these are often jolting because of their literalness, like the unwelcome bumps of in-flight turbulence. He keeps dropping us out of his dream. Occasionally, his gestures are feebler, like a sort of melting, distracted drift or a mild nodding wobble of the head, a strange prone shrug like an etiolated spasm. Out of an attacking whirl, he'll come slicing and scooping great chunks out of space, or with a vague daintiness or defiance he'll clear away darkness or cloudiness from his path.
The strongest moment of all is nearly still: he pushes himself onstage, backwards, across the floor, and locks himself within one of the easels. The cord that prevents the back and front from spreading to far apart is clenched in his teeth. As the dance develops, his movements become increasingly fragmented and isolated. Short walks change direction incessantly. Skittering runs are pulled back by the arms, the whole body deeply bent by the inward drive of an elbow. He snatches and paws at, maybe, the stars. He shifts from passionate pleading to fight. He's restless, suspicious, confused. His gestures become more and more a language. We understand clearly his urgency and pain. But what he chooses to say in those gestures is plainly, and rightly, in an alien tongue of private experience.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (November 11 to 15)
Peter Sparling danced with the Martha Graham company and illuminated her works from 1973 to 1979. That technique still dorms the basis of his own dances, which include a lexicon of sharp contractions, sweeping legs, flexed feet, and cupped hands, angular shapes, soft arching falls backwards, curving phrases that swoop to the floor. And all kinds of turns and whirls which almost form the glue binding the other movements together.
But in his program at Riverside Church, there were significant differences between his four duets and group works, and A Fearful Symmetry, a long solo for himself set to Hindemith's Sonata for Unaccompanied Viola, Opus 25, No. 1, and excerpts from letters of Van Gogh. In the solo, Sparling engages material that must be close to his heart. The other works, even when they're composed of several solo sections, are more conventional and decorous, with notions of arbitrary drama and coy, self-conscious humor. The ideas they contain are formal conceits, and sometimes very thin. The dancing tends to lock into the music, to reliably accent on its accents, to heel to its beat. Sometimes this is so regular, with the dancers posing momentarily at the end of each bar, that it seems like slide show of a dance. One of Sparling's gifts is an imaginative feeling for a range of slightly curious gestures that slip past identification but that strike enough recognition to color and inflame the dancing. But now he seems to be using more literal, mimetic gestures, and they're irritatingly like baby talk, like explaining a joke you don't need or want explained.
The dancing is excellent in many ways - pleasing in the way it's organized in space, smooth, supple and dynamic; and with a vivid, outlined, even carved quality that makes it stand out with great clarity. But not much depth shows through this enameled surface; physically, the dancers are quite distinct, yet anonymous. What's lovely but eventually maddening, is that the quality of all the movement, the degree of elasticity and tension, is constant. A movement that's attacked will have extra force and abruptness, but its tone tends to be the same as everything else. A fall or a droop won't have a whit more weight. Everything's at the same pitch, and under perfect control.
Unlike the other dances, A Fearful Symmetry is thoroughly expressive. It is structured and designed in a formal way, but Sparling pursues a subject that compels him. Even though the movement is keyed to the music (interspersed with a tape of Sparling's enthused, usually rapid reading of excerpts from Van Gogh's letters) and parallel to it, it has its own independent dramatic life.
Sparling is framed by a pair of flat-topped, ladder-like easels. His moves are governed by an off-center twisting tension. Often the movements are strong, as if forced: sharp half-wheels of the body, arms snapping back, turns that wind into flat-palmed throws, stops in big, angular, frontal configurations. Some of Sparling's gestures are related to the tasks of painting, like carrying a canvas to or from the easel, and these are often jolting because of their literalness, like the unwelcome bumps of in-flight turbulence. He keeps dropping us out of his dream. Occasionally, his gestures are feebler, like a sort of melting, distracted drift or a mild nodding wobble of the head, a strange prone shrug like an etiolated spasm. Out of an attacking whirl, he'll come slicing and scooping great chunks out of space, or with a vague daintiness or defiance he'll clear away darkness or cloudiness from his path.
The strongest moment of all is nearly still: he pushes himself onstage, backwards, across the floor, and locks himself within one of the easels. The cord that prevents the back and front from spreading to far apart is clenched in his teeth. As the dance develops, his movements become increasingly fragmented and isolated. Short walks change direction incessantly. Skittering runs are pulled back by the arms, the whole body deeply bent by the inward drive of an elbow. He snatches and paws at, maybe, the stars. He shifts from passionate pleading to fight. He's restless, suspicious, confused. His gestures become more and more a language. We understand clearly his urgency and pain. But what he chooses to say in those gestures is plainly, and rightly, in an alien tongue of private experience.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (November 11 to 15)
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 he 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 see,m tot 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 he 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 see,m tot 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).
Loose Joints
October 14
Dutch choreographer Pauline de Groot's Yellow Whale looked smooth and at home in the Cunningham studio. With the dancers in sweat pants and loose shirts of pale yellow and acidy mustards, and beautifully lit, the piece, in many distinct but smoothly linked sections, moved periodically from stillness into spurts of activity and subsidence, from the dancer rooted in place to clear and generous use of the studio's ample space. Percussionists Bart Rennie and Mettieu Keyzer created a rumbling, thrumming, chiming sea of sensitive sound beneath the movement.
In the beginning the dancers - de Groot, Julyen Hamilton David Woodberry, and Sara Vogeler - move quietly, inwardly and alone, though physically they're standing not far apart. They make small shifts in weight, loosen their joins with little sinking or lifting moves, and slowly expand into larger movements - longer reaches of the arms, or a shallow, flattened lunge. What seems significant - more than whatever particular thing they're doing - is simply where they are and that they're moving. The movements generate into light twists , and modest undulations forward and back, or sideways, or spiraling through the body.
But there's a quality of apparent caution or timidity, in this early part (it returns later, too). Partly, they're just warming to their work, getting into it, and we're aware of a reasonable but curious privacy. They hold their heads somewhat stiffly in relation to their torsos for a while, not shifting their attention even when someone's action seems to demand some acknowledgment, some seeing, from the others. This thoughtful quality - which partly involves coming in line with their own energies and doesn't have anything to do with thinking - makes them seem, oddly, not fully present, even to each other, except as sculptural, kinetic objects. Certainly, they're not inhabiting the same moment, the same kind of time, we are.
Clustered, they reach their arms out sideways,front and back with a twist of the torso, then hold them out to the side, playing a joking game of erratic, twitchy, flipping-over hands. Then into a sequence of broad moves with a hard bounce and hopping/skipping steps, millions of swiveling motions, rhythmic slides and swings.
Woodberry and de Groot bend over standing on hands and feet, animal walk a bit. They settle lower, to their knees, fold up, wobble their heads, nuzzle heads and necks, cross paw over paw. With a sudden shift, they're half-erect. Woodberry balances on de Groot's calf (she'd own in a lunge with weight on her hands). Moments later, she slowly tumbles sideways on the thin edge of her body, across his back. Straight, belly down, he slides over her. He vaults onto her, clasped vertically against her back, and she carries him off. All this, and much more throughout Yellow Whale, happens very smoothly, and with almost invisible transitions; half the time at least, you miss seeing any decision. If any of this is improvised, it's miracle, because the usual moments of fuzziness or awkwardness are missing. Woodberry, in particular, is a master of physical surprise. Sometimes you don't see him do something until it's over.
Lots of swinging turns, turning leaps, glides and swivels and half-flung phrases that never climax and never exactly finish, are like movement jottings, half thoughts, unfinished, dotted with pauses. A flurry of dynamic suggestions. Never a full sentence. Momentum is hardly ever allowed to govern the flow.
The women move into bold swinging turns, deliciously but rarely smacking their feet loudly on the floor. They swing their bodies open, reaching, without strain. But the movement isn't often plain and open in quite this way: usually, it turns back on itself somewhat. It gloried in its indirection, in savoring ways, when an arm opens -all the joints recoil. But this evokes also a kind of self-protecting, cushiony quality. And it's curious, too, how if the dancers are, for example, using their hands in a flattish way, or holding their fingers delicately apart, they'll avoid grabbing each other even when this seems the instinctively apt move, the one suited to self-preservation and one would that would bounce free of dependency soonest. I guess de Groot prefers to inhabit a kind of neutral realm of movement where her dancers can ride uncertainty; she avoids certain grittier uses of force.
Woodberry rolls sideways, comes up into sitting. He balances on one knee, sits, flips over. He thrusts himself upwards on the tops of his feet, and unleashes a dizzy chain of shifting, swiveling moves, crawls, jerks, flings into leaps, spattered with sudden pauses. The women, close together, move in unison., describing a small circle, open it with tilted hopping turns. Woodberry stands, then crouches on the kneeling Hamilton's back, then tops forward to hang down over his shoulder. There's a vigorous, lilting grapevine phrase that fills the space, with the dancers dropping out, latching back on, as it moves from side to side, front and back. Solo, Hamilton writhes as if juggling some unimaginable object with every part of his body.
What all this fails to convey is a sense of the easy quietness of the work overall; of how pleasing are its nourishing sequences, of flowing out, pulling in resting; of its spaciousness.
Dutch choreographer Pauline de Groot's Yellow Whale looked smooth and at home in the Cunningham studio. With the dancers in sweat pants and loose shirts of pale yellow and acidy mustards, and beautifully lit, the piece, in many distinct but smoothly linked sections, moved periodically from stillness into spurts of activity and subsidence, from the dancer rooted in place to clear and generous use of the studio's ample space. Percussionists Bart Rennie and Mettieu Keyzer created a rumbling, thrumming, chiming sea of sensitive sound beneath the movement.
In the beginning the dancers - de Groot, Julyen Hamilton David Woodberry, and Sara Vogeler - move quietly, inwardly and alone, though physically they're standing not far apart. They make small shifts in weight, loosen their joins with little sinking or lifting moves, and slowly expand into larger movements - longer reaches of the arms, or a shallow, flattened lunge. What seems significant - more than whatever particular thing they're doing - is simply where they are and that they're moving. The movements generate into light twists , and modest undulations forward and back, or sideways, or spiraling through the body.
But there's a quality of apparent caution or timidity, in this early part (it returns later, too). Partly, they're just warming to their work, getting into it, and we're aware of a reasonable but curious privacy. They hold their heads somewhat stiffly in relation to their torsos for a while, not shifting their attention even when someone's action seems to demand some acknowledgment, some seeing, from the others. This thoughtful quality - which partly involves coming in line with their own energies and doesn't have anything to do with thinking - makes them seem, oddly, not fully present, even to each other, except as sculptural, kinetic objects. Certainly, they're not inhabiting the same moment, the same kind of time, we are.
Clustered, they reach their arms out sideways,front and back with a twist of the torso, then hold them out to the side, playing a joking game of erratic, twitchy, flipping-over hands. Then into a sequence of broad moves with a hard bounce and hopping/skipping steps, millions of swiveling motions, rhythmic slides and swings.
Woodberry and de Groot bend over standing on hands and feet, animal walk a bit. They settle lower, to their knees, fold up, wobble their heads, nuzzle heads and necks, cross paw over paw. With a sudden shift, they're half-erect. Woodberry balances on de Groot's calf (she'd own in a lunge with weight on her hands). Moments later, she slowly tumbles sideways on the thin edge of her body, across his back. Straight, belly down, he slides over her. He vaults onto her, clasped vertically against her back, and she carries him off. All this, and much more throughout Yellow Whale, happens very smoothly, and with almost invisible transitions; half the time at least, you miss seeing any decision. If any of this is improvised, it's miracle, because the usual moments of fuzziness or awkwardness are missing. Woodberry, in particular, is a master of physical surprise. Sometimes you don't see him do something until it's over.
Lots of swinging turns, turning leaps, glides and swivels and half-flung phrases that never climax and never exactly finish, are like movement jottings, half thoughts, unfinished, dotted with pauses. A flurry of dynamic suggestions. Never a full sentence. Momentum is hardly ever allowed to govern the flow.
The women move into bold swinging turns, deliciously but rarely smacking their feet loudly on the floor. They swing their bodies open, reaching, without strain. But the movement isn't often plain and open in quite this way: usually, it turns back on itself somewhat. It gloried in its indirection, in savoring ways, when an arm opens -all the joints recoil. But this evokes also a kind of self-protecting, cushiony quality. And it's curious, too, how if the dancers are, for example, using their hands in a flattish way, or holding their fingers delicately apart, they'll avoid grabbing each other even when this seems the instinctively apt move, the one suited to self-preservation and one would that would bounce free of dependency soonest. I guess de Groot prefers to inhabit a kind of neutral realm of movement where her dancers can ride uncertainty; she avoids certain grittier uses of force.
Woodberry rolls sideways, comes up into sitting. He balances on one knee, sits, flips over. He thrusts himself upwards on the tops of his feet, and unleashes a dizzy chain of shifting, swiveling moves, crawls, jerks, flings into leaps, spattered with sudden pauses. The women, close together, move in unison., describing a small circle, open it with tilted hopping turns. Woodberry stands, then crouches on the kneeling Hamilton's back, then tops forward to hang down over his shoulder. There's a vigorous, lilting grapevine phrase that fills the space, with the dancers dropping out, latching back on, as it moves from side to side, front and back. Solo, Hamilton writhes as if juggling some unimaginable object with every part of his body.
What all this fails to convey is a sense of the easy quietness of the work overall; of how pleasing are its nourishing sequences, of flowing out, pulling in resting; of its spaciousness.
One Track Minds
September 2
There's an unstressed athleticism, rhythmic steadiness and straightforward, rather sensual physicality in Charlie Vernon's dances - imported from Chicago on DTW's Out-of-Towners series - that made them quite pleasant to watch. Text is an important feature of three of the four works presented: Snowy Evening Variations rang changes on the Frost poem: a single voice giving a flat delivery; a babyish, rhythmic ticktock rendition; choral variations with the number of voices increasing and decreasing sung to a tune so familiar I can't think what it is; and jumbling the test. Five and Dime and That Fall both have spoken texts in which their humor resides: Five and Dime tells the tale of a teenage True Romance, and in That Fall the narration conjures another adolescent,comradely atmosphere ("That fall coach had us working on fundamentals...").
There are lovely things in Snowy Evening Variations (1979) performed by Vernon and Jan Bartoszek: their springy resilience and precision, their brisk attack, and the full-bodied quality of the slow, heavy moves that involve them occasionally with each other, like the way he'll nudge her neck with his head or she lugs him around. The piece starts with this sort of activity. Section by section, the dancers add to the long johns and hiking boots they wear - woolly caps overalls, down vests - becoming more and more spool shaped, and later dispose of the clothing: the hats hung up on unseen wires downstage, the vests hung in the middle ground (they have to climb on chairs to reach these), he overalls further back. The movement sharpens and brightens with strides, walks, swings, turns, slaps, snappy reversals of direction. One section (the second) is to The Nutcracker overture, with Vernon and Bartoszek taking big strides around, dropping into an occasional crouch as a mirror ball whirls snowflakes of light. Some people laughed but I thought that joke was flat. And it reminded me of the way David Gordon had used the familiar music from La Bayadere for a patient walk on entrance of company members, managed to strike a humorous note yet invoke the resonance of the original.
Vernon and Bartoszek were cheerful and nice to watch, but Snowy Evening Variations had a dry, exercise quality in its structure It added and subtracted elements (clothing, chair, etc.), altered in complexity and temper, but never became dimensional.
On the other hand, That Fall (1981) was substantial and satisfying. Even though ---and bob along on regular rhythms, what gives That Fall a significant thrust is the way these little modules submit to the larger breathing of the whole piece.
There is naive humor and a dreamy sentiment to the narration that's appealing, but the dance itself, in several sections, for five well-matched men, generates a warm and solid feeling of real teamwork. How plainly and strongly these five - Vernon, Franklin Folino, Phil Martini, John Nawn, Richard Woodbury - work together, with the same understanding of that they're doing! The narration, describing events some time past, adds a vein of mild sadness to the activity, simply because the way they move together now seems so right. Four men come in, lie down, and rolling, speed the fifth, lying on them, half-way across the space. They get up, and with a softly striding walk, move to the other corner and repeat those rolls. In a group, they move through a pattern of curtailed swings, crouches, turns, throwing movements, reaches. The brief pattern winds down, steps, repeats several times. In a circle, the men individually do a series of abruptly shifting poses (ear to the ground, one arm lifted), sharing the same vocabulary of moves and gestures.
Chairs enter the plot. First a single one. One at a time each man comes in, sort of crab-walks backwards to the chair, pushes up onto it, maybe stands on it, crouches, bends, hangs over..More chairs are pushed in when they're getting about halfway through this. Eventually, they're set two by two in that same corner, facing front, and the seated men go through a series of gestures while the fifth man, who kes changing, bumps one of the other four off his chair, slipping smoothly into the pattern without any alteration. Later on, more things happen with the chairs, like a repeat of some of that gestural pattern, only with the chairs in the diagonally opposite corner, facing back, and the men twisting the gestures to direct them towards the audience. Four men on chairs spring on them, move them around, cuddle them: a fifth, chairless, does it all solo. Something very eloquent about the way all these gestures are executed - although used in rather emotionally neutral designs and sequences, they're quite specific and full of feeling.
Near the end, coats become part of the dance. They're all tossed in the air, thrown one at a time from the wings by the owner. We're moving toward separation, I guess. The chairs are in, and out, and back in. The men, clustering, lift one another gently up in the air.
Their energy and understanding connects the men so surely An energy that sometimes fades, pauses, and is restored - akin to a real working rhythm that can be sustained because its variations don't drive it toward burn-out.
At American Theatre Lab (August 20 to 21).
There's an unstressed athleticism, rhythmic steadiness and straightforward, rather sensual physicality in Charlie Vernon's dances - imported from Chicago on DTW's Out-of-Towners series - that made them quite pleasant to watch. Text is an important feature of three of the four works presented: Snowy Evening Variations rang changes on the Frost poem: a single voice giving a flat delivery; a babyish, rhythmic ticktock rendition; choral variations with the number of voices increasing and decreasing sung to a tune so familiar I can't think what it is; and jumbling the test. Five and Dime and That Fall both have spoken texts in which their humor resides: Five and Dime tells the tale of a teenage True Romance, and in That Fall the narration conjures another adolescent,comradely atmosphere ("That fall coach had us working on fundamentals...").
There are lovely things in Snowy Evening Variations (1979) performed by Vernon and Jan Bartoszek: their springy resilience and precision, their brisk attack, and the full-bodied quality of the slow, heavy moves that involve them occasionally with each other, like the way he'll nudge her neck with his head or she lugs him around. The piece starts with this sort of activity. Section by section, the dancers add to the long johns and hiking boots they wear - woolly caps overalls, down vests - becoming more and more spool shaped, and later dispose of the clothing: the hats hung up on unseen wires downstage, the vests hung in the middle ground (they have to climb on chairs to reach these), he overalls further back. The movement sharpens and brightens with strides, walks, swings, turns, slaps, snappy reversals of direction. One section (the second) is to The Nutcracker overture, with Vernon and Bartoszek taking big strides around, dropping into an occasional crouch as a mirror ball whirls snowflakes of light. Some people laughed but I thought that joke was flat. And it reminded me of the way David Gordon had used the familiar music from La Bayadere for a patient walk on entrance of company members, managed to strike a humorous note yet invoke the resonance of the original.
Vernon and Bartoszek were cheerful and nice to watch, but Snowy Evening Variations had a dry, exercise quality in its structure It added and subtracted elements (clothing, chair, etc.), altered in complexity and temper, but never became dimensional.
On the other hand, That Fall (1981) was substantial and satisfying. Even though ---and bob along on regular rhythms, what gives That Fall a significant thrust is the way these little modules submit to the larger breathing of the whole piece.
There is naive humor and a dreamy sentiment to the narration that's appealing, but the dance itself, in several sections, for five well-matched men, generates a warm and solid feeling of real teamwork. How plainly and strongly these five - Vernon, Franklin Folino, Phil Martini, John Nawn, Richard Woodbury - work together, with the same understanding of that they're doing! The narration, describing events some time past, adds a vein of mild sadness to the activity, simply because the way they move together now seems so right. Four men come in, lie down, and rolling, speed the fifth, lying on them, half-way across the space. They get up, and with a softly striding walk, move to the other corner and repeat those rolls. In a group, they move through a pattern of curtailed swings, crouches, turns, throwing movements, reaches. The brief pattern winds down, steps, repeats several times. In a circle, the men individually do a series of abruptly shifting poses (ear to the ground, one arm lifted), sharing the same vocabulary of moves and gestures.
Chairs enter the plot. First a single one. One at a time each man comes in, sort of crab-walks backwards to the chair, pushes up onto it, maybe stands on it, crouches, bends, hangs over..More chairs are pushed in when they're getting about halfway through this. Eventually, they're set two by two in that same corner, facing front, and the seated men go through a series of gestures while the fifth man, who kes changing, bumps one of the other four off his chair, slipping smoothly into the pattern without any alteration. Later on, more things happen with the chairs, like a repeat of some of that gestural pattern, only with the chairs in the diagonally opposite corner, facing back, and the men twisting the gestures to direct them towards the audience. Four men on chairs spring on them, move them around, cuddle them: a fifth, chairless, does it all solo. Something very eloquent about the way all these gestures are executed - although used in rather emotionally neutral designs and sequences, they're quite specific and full of feeling.
Near the end, coats become part of the dance. They're all tossed in the air, thrown one at a time from the wings by the owner. We're moving toward separation, I guess. The chairs are in, and out, and back in. The men, clustering, lift one another gently up in the air.
Their energy and understanding connects the men so surely An energy that sometimes fades, pauses, and is restored - akin to a real working rhythm that can be sustained because its variations don't drive it toward burn-out.
At American Theatre Lab (August 20 to 21).
Dutch Treat
July 15
Watching Jiri Kylian's Symphony of Psalms, the first piece on the opening night program of the Netherlands Dance Theater at the Metropolitan, I was struck by the force and clarity of the dancing, the sense of sweep these dancers can sustain. NDT has long been a haven for fine dancers, but Kylian has welded them into a highly refined instrument of his own aesthetic. And the abandon with which they danced that opening night, and their control, made the physicality of the dancing itself unutterably delicious, no matter what the mood.
Of the three works presented here for the first time, Soldier's Mass (1980) was the most powerful. Kylian has a real affinity for the choral statement. He can be broad and direct, without puffing up or turning soppy or rhetorical. In other contexts, he'll weave movements for pairs, trios, etc. that are convoluted and interestingly fickle, that give several often independent or contradictory messages at once. But in this sort of communal piece the patterns of movement across the stage, of who's still and who's moving, who's on the floor, or on a chair, or running, or flung, or flown, or crushed, are always instantly readable. You see everything.
Some elements turn up in many of his pieces. You can't help but notice the way everyone will cross the stage and several soloists drop out, or peel off, or melt back into the group. The way he'll face the whole ensemble away from the audience at the beginning or the end of a piece. But these things seem more like signatures of his style at this time than limitations.
The other two premieres, Dream Dances (1979) and Overgrown Path (1980), are suites of mostly duets and small group dances. Dream Dances consists of 11 unconnected dancers, for one to four people, to Luciano Berio's Folk Songs setting, various in spirit and in very different sorts of costumes by Willa Kim. In the first, "Black is the Color", Jeanne Solan and Nils Christe mingled in aduet that was so lyrical and stretchy that one had the feeling that even the floor of the stage had become just slightly soft. ---------- featured Marly Knoben and James Vincent in a fast duet like a pair of goldfinches looping and bantering in midair.
Overgrown Path was a more somber work to a Janacek piano cycle with 10 interlinked dances that have something to do with loving and loss. It starts as a lament, when half a dozen women bourree in backwards. A group of men run through, conjuring with their arms. They're gone. The women reach out, then drop their arms, give up. The men are in and out again, but one - you almost don't realize it - stays for a brief embrace as the others go. Beautiful as some of the subsequent sections and passages were, Overgrown Path seemed long, rubbing over and over in the same groove.
But Soldier's Mass simply picked me up and carried me along. The cast, a dozen men, face back. They're spread out over the stage, weaving from side to side, and face a thin magenta curve of a horizon that parts areas of black and deep blues. It's as if they're looking out to the edge of the world or even over its lip. The first rap of percussion snaps them erect; others make them glance sharply right , left, flinch, contract. The movement sometimes carries them into held gestures of anguish - like hands clasping the head with the body swung sideways - but without the heaviness of despair. And some of the swinging, pushing, thrusting, striking movement may be remote kin to exercises and combat weapon drills. But few of these movements or gestures are quite literal or used in a strictly literal or narrative way.
The main force of the piece is in the surging or percussive movement of the mass of men, all together or in interpenetrating groups of three or four, out of which individual lyric gestures arise. Bohuslav Martinu's 1951 Polni Mse, conducted superbly by David Porcelijn and movingly sung by Bernard Kruysen, matches, supports and governs all this. In the dancing, there's a strong feeling of brotherliness, a sense of common purpose and common fate, a virility that doesn't depend on pretense or self-aggrandizement. It's partly the quality of this sense of purpose - unsentimental, unfanatical, and so quickly shaped - that makes Soldier's Mass stirring. It evokes something we in America have been missing for some time.
The men surge across the stage flinging one line through another, or hurling a second line over the back of the first. They wash across the stage and quietly back to its edge. One after another they race across and back and across like the lash of a huge whip. Out of the mass, from time to time, one or two emerge to dance on their own. One smooth duet veers toward sleep as the other men lie curled on the floor. Another time, a single dancer, supported by two others, hangs from their shoulders in a tender way reminiscent of the descent from the cross, but indelible and vibrant in its own particular way. Holding his legs together, he dips them gently down to one side and the other; somehow, that exquisite and poignant movement far surpasses the icon.
The ensemble keeps breaking up and recomposing. Throughout, there are times when the men fall, remain motionless, maybe die; then they continue. We grow accustomed to their resurrection. There's a sense of nobility and exaltation, too. The nobility has to do with the comradely way in which the men are together, nothing to do with the purpose for which they are gathered. There's something apt in the passive voice too, because there's no senses of volition here, of anyone choosing anything. They act and react, innocent from start to finish.
At the end, the men stand and join the chorus singing. Then facing away, they suddenly whip off their shirts, ball and drop them. The Amen is sung; the men suddenly flinch and seem to freeze for a split second. The mass has ended. One by one, almost randomly, they drop to the floor as if the sand has run out of them.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 6 to 11).
Watching Jiri Kylian's Symphony of Psalms, the first piece on the opening night program of the Netherlands Dance Theater at the Metropolitan, I was struck by the force and clarity of the dancing, the sense of sweep these dancers can sustain. NDT has long been a haven for fine dancers, but Kylian has welded them into a highly refined instrument of his own aesthetic. And the abandon with which they danced that opening night, and their control, made the physicality of the dancing itself unutterably delicious, no matter what the mood.
Of the three works presented here for the first time, Soldier's Mass (1980) was the most powerful. Kylian has a real affinity for the choral statement. He can be broad and direct, without puffing up or turning soppy or rhetorical. In other contexts, he'll weave movements for pairs, trios, etc. that are convoluted and interestingly fickle, that give several often independent or contradictory messages at once. But in this sort of communal piece the patterns of movement across the stage, of who's still and who's moving, who's on the floor, or on a chair, or running, or flung, or flown, or crushed, are always instantly readable. You see everything.
Some elements turn up in many of his pieces. You can't help but notice the way everyone will cross the stage and several soloists drop out, or peel off, or melt back into the group. The way he'll face the whole ensemble away from the audience at the beginning or the end of a piece. But these things seem more like signatures of his style at this time than limitations.
The other two premieres, Dream Dances (1979) and Overgrown Path (1980), are suites of mostly duets and small group dances. Dream Dances consists of 11 unconnected dancers, for one to four people, to Luciano Berio's Folk Songs setting, various in spirit and in very different sorts of costumes by Willa Kim. In the first, "Black is the Color", Jeanne Solan and Nils Christe mingled in aduet that was so lyrical and stretchy that one had the feeling that even the floor of the stage had become just slightly soft. ---------- featured Marly Knoben and James Vincent in a fast duet like a pair of goldfinches looping and bantering in midair.
Overgrown Path was a more somber work to a Janacek piano cycle with 10 interlinked dances that have something to do with loving and loss. It starts as a lament, when half a dozen women bourree in backwards. A group of men run through, conjuring with their arms. They're gone. The women reach out, then drop their arms, give up. The men are in and out again, but one - you almost don't realize it - stays for a brief embrace as the others go. Beautiful as some of the subsequent sections and passages were, Overgrown Path seemed long, rubbing over and over in the same groove.
But Soldier's Mass simply picked me up and carried me along. The cast, a dozen men, face back. They're spread out over the stage, weaving from side to side, and face a thin magenta curve of a horizon that parts areas of black and deep blues. It's as if they're looking out to the edge of the world or even over its lip. The first rap of percussion snaps them erect; others make them glance sharply right , left, flinch, contract. The movement sometimes carries them into held gestures of anguish - like hands clasping the head with the body swung sideways - but without the heaviness of despair. And some of the swinging, pushing, thrusting, striking movement may be remote kin to exercises and combat weapon drills. But few of these movements or gestures are quite literal or used in a strictly literal or narrative way.
The main force of the piece is in the surging or percussive movement of the mass of men, all together or in interpenetrating groups of three or four, out of which individual lyric gestures arise. Bohuslav Martinu's 1951 Polni Mse, conducted superbly by David Porcelijn and movingly sung by Bernard Kruysen, matches, supports and governs all this. In the dancing, there's a strong feeling of brotherliness, a sense of common purpose and common fate, a virility that doesn't depend on pretense or self-aggrandizement. It's partly the quality of this sense of purpose - unsentimental, unfanatical, and so quickly shaped - that makes Soldier's Mass stirring. It evokes something we in America have been missing for some time.
The men surge across the stage flinging one line through another, or hurling a second line over the back of the first. They wash across the stage and quietly back to its edge. One after another they race across and back and across like the lash of a huge whip. Out of the mass, from time to time, one or two emerge to dance on their own. One smooth duet veers toward sleep as the other men lie curled on the floor. Another time, a single dancer, supported by two others, hangs from their shoulders in a tender way reminiscent of the descent from the cross, but indelible and vibrant in its own particular way. Holding his legs together, he dips them gently down to one side and the other; somehow, that exquisite and poignant movement far surpasses the icon.
The ensemble keeps breaking up and recomposing. Throughout, there are times when the men fall, remain motionless, maybe die; then they continue. We grow accustomed to their resurrection. There's a sense of nobility and exaltation, too. The nobility has to do with the comradely way in which the men are together, nothing to do with the purpose for which they are gathered. There's something apt in the passive voice too, because there's no senses of volition here, of anyone choosing anything. They act and react, innocent from start to finish.
At the end, the men stand and join the chorus singing. Then facing away, they suddenly whip off their shirts, ball and drop them. The Amen is sung; the men suddenly flinch and seem to freeze for a split second. The mass has ended. One by one, almost randomly, they drop to the floor as if the sand has run out of them.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 6 to 11).