1982 CONTINUED
Bali High, Bali Low
July 13
Night Shadow, choreographed by Islene Pinder for her Balinese American Dance Theater, combines many wonderful theatrical elements, exquisite, expressive masks, evocative music by Barbara Benary and Gamelan Son of Lion, dramatic lighting and a bastard dance vocabulary that effectively joins and juxtaposes elements of modern and Balinese dance. There are the familiar steps of ballet-influenced modern dance, the oppositional energy of the body stretched through the limbs, a full use of the stage space for dancing, and a free use of entrances and exits, This combines with a delicate and sharp use of the hands, fingers, neck and head, or contrasts with the centered, inward-focused, often sinuous and subtle use of the body around which the limbs flow and shimmer.
The story of Night Shadow is of a kind of dream journey, told by a rustic philosopher, Manusya, and his sidekick, Bungkuk (his unconscious self, says the program), who turns out to be his more active aspect. The Goddess of Beauty, Uma, is ravaged by a demon who throws away her precious pearls. Manusya and Bungkuk recover the pearls through their ancestor. At the end, Uma and the demon fight, and "Bungkuk and Manusya realize the Daemon is part of themselves and kill the Daemon, restoring Beauty harmony and light." The piece opens with a deep gonging - an audio massage. Five white-masked bird-girls sweep in and out with brisk runs and jumps, twiddling feathery fingers and uttering birdlike cries. Then a weighty, solemn figure enters. Night, masked like an elderly bearded man with masses of black hair. But then we see, as the head turns, the face of a woman, and a third, monstrous one. A huge, double train is held vertically behind the figure, log long curtain/walls, and five masked heads, then five more skull-like ones, skitter and bob and glide along the top edges of the cloths which heave and breathe up and down in waves. We meet Manusya, and the dumpy hunchback, Bungkuk, with carmine hair, bug eyes, a fat snub nose, and apple cheeks that swerve down to a double chin. Sort of a Judy Garland caricature.
The Goddess of Beauty is your regular Balinese princess; her handmaidens whirl on and off stage rippling scarves. Durga, red and black, is a wild-eyed, buck-toothed demon who sends three maidens into stylized swoons and convulsions as she runs among them. As usual, the bad guys have the juicy parts. Well, that's not quite true. Bungkuk is wonderful, sensitive and alert, with delicately jerking movements that bespeak thoughtfulness and intelligence and a kind of inquisitive sweetness of character. Innocence, who follows the leaning, heavy-treading Ancestor, is a puffy-faced, skinny-limbed pearl child, the mask a baby version of Bungkuk's face. There's a frowning One-Eyed Leyak, a huge eye in her forehead. Leyak squats, turns slowly around, and when she faces us again, she has flipped a new mask over the old, one with chattering teeth and combining sinister qualities of both snake and monkey. The awkwardnesses of dance-drama are rarely familiar enough to become routine.
Proceeding at a slow, formal pace, Night Shadow is not exactly dramatic in form - it is a vehicle for a series of dance numbers, narrative disquisitions, and elaborate entrances of singular personages. There are dramatic actions, illustrative as well as meditative dances, and poetical-philosophical foreshadowings and comments, We enjoy the danced character expositions and the enactments of their conflicts because of their cleverness and their aesthetic and comic qualities. But the narrative (by Eva Burch, spoken by Steven Snow as Manusya), inflates and interprets what we see in a lofty way. It's expensive language, and it doesn't elucidate much in the plot, doesn't tell us much we don't learn from the dancing. It's tricky to spout this stuff about life's journey, good and evil, etc., because there's so much to mistrust in any facile cosmic view.
If the text is to talk about how we are to perceive the universe and identify the forces operating in it, then it must expand upon what we see. What's in front of us is the only justification, the only reliable support for the philosophy. The narration doesn't jump us ahead in the action or flash us back. It's not only philosophical, but atmospheric - as introspective and ornamental as some of the dancing. It should be diverting, it should help to rivet us to the progress of the drama; instead it wafts around and thunks us on the head.
Another narration problem has to do with the varying amounts of information we need. I'm happy to know nothing about One-Eyed Leyak - the image is strong and mysterious - any explanation would pigeonhole and diminish the image. But if Bungkuk has acquired his hunchback because he saw something he shouldn't have seen - two snakes copulating - then I must know why that's forbidden, what the harm is, and how that affects the rest of the story. The snakes seem to be important somehow, since, later on, we get to see the snake-girls curling and humping in their duet. I’m content, seeing a traditional oriental dance-drama, to be told what I'm supposed to understand about the meaning of the action. Very likely, the symbology can have little resonance for me, except by accident. But in a modern work I resent having to make that accommodation. I want my experience f what I see to jibe with the talk. I may see, for example, that Bungkuk and Manusya realize something before Bungkuk kills the demon, but I have no way of knowing what. Maybe he just wants to save the pretty lady from the monster. It would take more than a note in the program, or the intoning of a hayseed academic, to convince me I've seen something more Significant.
Night Shadow, choreographed by Islene Pinder for her Balinese American Dance Theater, combines many wonderful theatrical elements, exquisite, expressive masks, evocative music by Barbara Benary and Gamelan Son of Lion, dramatic lighting and a bastard dance vocabulary that effectively joins and juxtaposes elements of modern and Balinese dance. There are the familiar steps of ballet-influenced modern dance, the oppositional energy of the body stretched through the limbs, a full use of the stage space for dancing, and a free use of entrances and exits, This combines with a delicate and sharp use of the hands, fingers, neck and head, or contrasts with the centered, inward-focused, often sinuous and subtle use of the body around which the limbs flow and shimmer.
The story of Night Shadow is of a kind of dream journey, told by a rustic philosopher, Manusya, and his sidekick, Bungkuk (his unconscious self, says the program), who turns out to be his more active aspect. The Goddess of Beauty, Uma, is ravaged by a demon who throws away her precious pearls. Manusya and Bungkuk recover the pearls through their ancestor. At the end, Uma and the demon fight, and "Bungkuk and Manusya realize the Daemon is part of themselves and kill the Daemon, restoring Beauty harmony and light." The piece opens with a deep gonging - an audio massage. Five white-masked bird-girls sweep in and out with brisk runs and jumps, twiddling feathery fingers and uttering birdlike cries. Then a weighty, solemn figure enters. Night, masked like an elderly bearded man with masses of black hair. But then we see, as the head turns, the face of a woman, and a third, monstrous one. A huge, double train is held vertically behind the figure, log long curtain/walls, and five masked heads, then five more skull-like ones, skitter and bob and glide along the top edges of the cloths which heave and breathe up and down in waves. We meet Manusya, and the dumpy hunchback, Bungkuk, with carmine hair, bug eyes, a fat snub nose, and apple cheeks that swerve down to a double chin. Sort of a Judy Garland caricature.
The Goddess of Beauty is your regular Balinese princess; her handmaidens whirl on and off stage rippling scarves. Durga, red and black, is a wild-eyed, buck-toothed demon who sends three maidens into stylized swoons and convulsions as she runs among them. As usual, the bad guys have the juicy parts. Well, that's not quite true. Bungkuk is wonderful, sensitive and alert, with delicately jerking movements that bespeak thoughtfulness and intelligence and a kind of inquisitive sweetness of character. Innocence, who follows the leaning, heavy-treading Ancestor, is a puffy-faced, skinny-limbed pearl child, the mask a baby version of Bungkuk's face. There's a frowning One-Eyed Leyak, a huge eye in her forehead. Leyak squats, turns slowly around, and when she faces us again, she has flipped a new mask over the old, one with chattering teeth and combining sinister qualities of both snake and monkey. The awkwardnesses of dance-drama are rarely familiar enough to become routine.
Proceeding at a slow, formal pace, Night Shadow is not exactly dramatic in form - it is a vehicle for a series of dance numbers, narrative disquisitions, and elaborate entrances of singular personages. There are dramatic actions, illustrative as well as meditative dances, and poetical-philosophical foreshadowings and comments, We enjoy the danced character expositions and the enactments of their conflicts because of their cleverness and their aesthetic and comic qualities. But the narrative (by Eva Burch, spoken by Steven Snow as Manusya), inflates and interprets what we see in a lofty way. It's expensive language, and it doesn't elucidate much in the plot, doesn't tell us much we don't learn from the dancing. It's tricky to spout this stuff about life's journey, good and evil, etc., because there's so much to mistrust in any facile cosmic view.
If the text is to talk about how we are to perceive the universe and identify the forces operating in it, then it must expand upon what we see. What's in front of us is the only justification, the only reliable support for the philosophy. The narration doesn't jump us ahead in the action or flash us back. It's not only philosophical, but atmospheric - as introspective and ornamental as some of the dancing. It should be diverting, it should help to rivet us to the progress of the drama; instead it wafts around and thunks us on the head.
Another narration problem has to do with the varying amounts of information we need. I'm happy to know nothing about One-Eyed Leyak - the image is strong and mysterious - any explanation would pigeonhole and diminish the image. But if Bungkuk has acquired his hunchback because he saw something he shouldn't have seen - two snakes copulating - then I must know why that's forbidden, what the harm is, and how that affects the rest of the story. The snakes seem to be important somehow, since, later on, we get to see the snake-girls curling and humping in their duet. I’m content, seeing a traditional oriental dance-drama, to be told what I'm supposed to understand about the meaning of the action. Very likely, the symbology can have little resonance for me, except by accident. But in a modern work I resent having to make that accommodation. I want my experience f what I see to jibe with the talk. I may see, for example, that Bungkuk and Manusya realize something before Bungkuk kills the demon, but I have no way of knowing what. Maybe he just wants to save the pretty lady from the monster. It would take more than a note in the program, or the intoning of a hayseed academic, to convince me I've seen something more Significant.
Five Sides of a Gentleman
October 19
Bertram Ross, who originated over 25 roles in the Graham repertory, was one of the mainstays of the Martha Graham company until 1973 when the directors purged the older dancers who'd been holding the company together. He has been out on his own since then - dancing, teaching and making dances. Naturally, his dances were for a long time very much in the psychological/dramatic idiom he'd devoted himself to for more than 20 years, but there's less "dancing" in his recent work.
With age and independence, with the development of his own acting skills, Ross, at least in his solos, is cutting lose, following the more humorous bent of his own character. He presented five solos in concert at Riverside Church. The oldest, from 1980, Vanya: Three Pastels, comprised three complaining or strident monologues from Chekhov's play dovetailed with dance episodes of fidgety ambivalence and anguish. In these, Ross reminded me too much of some of the kvetchy older clientele and waiters you might find in the Second Avenue Delicatessen. My Last Duchess, a recital of the Browning poem with slimy gestures and insinuating tones, never managed to develop the Duke's character so much as a caricature that grossly magnified his cold repulsiveness. Those were the weakest pieces.
Central in the program was Wallace Stevens' brief play Carlos Among the Candles, an ideal piece for a dancer who can speak. Ross's physical demeanor, like an elegant but comic Mozartean servant, complements his philosophizing as he lights one long taper after another, discussing the solitude of a single one, the social atmosphere of two, the splendor of many and, eventually, after lighting two dozen, extinguishes all but one. He's courtly, dainty, often fussy, and his feet underscore his manner, with small, dithery, criss-crossing steps. Ross builds the play nicely through the magical lighting up when the play is wittiest, finally teasing himself relentlessly over which of the last two candles to light first. But, as he effectively measures the time and marks the extinguishing of each candle with a muted double tap of his heels, Carlos drags, because Ross allows his speech to drone into a single lamenting tone.
The choicest works, both beautifully suited to Ross, were portraits of Gordon Craig, theater designer and father of Isadora Duncan's first child, and Raymond Duncan, Isadora's brother. They opened and closed the program. Both used delectable texts, authentic words of Craig and Duncan, and Ross's raspy, very particular voice suited them well. I wondered, particularly during Gordon Craig, if Ross had modeled his speech patterns on a recording of Craig's voice.
In Gordon Craig Ross stalks across the stage several times in hat and cape, tapping his cane with authority with every pair of steps. He removes his outer garments, sets the cane on a chair, and, in a suit that was, in fact, part of Craig's wardrobe, speaks wonderfully and with eccentric flair, about Isadora Duncan ("She was the first and only dancer I ever saw, except for some I saw in a street in Genoa, and some in a barn in New York"), her character (paraphrasing: she has calm, no vanity, no cleverness, very little understanding of the arts, and a great comprehension of nature, and perhaps rather too much ambition), the weight of her presence, and her unique magic. In this, through his stance, his address, the evocative power of his poses and the gestures of his superb hands, Ross manages to recreate Isadora as well as Craig. But when, in the enthusiasm of description, Craig/Ross runs around, leaps, enlarges his gestures, flings himself into images we hold of Isadora, the piece temporarily disintegrates into silly imitation and its authority evaporates. It's too much out of character. Perhaps Ross worried that there was too little movement in the piece.
In Raymond, however, Ross wafts through passages of sort of Duncan movement that serve the character beautifully. Raymond Duncan lived in Paris till his death in 1966, an oddball figure in long hair, sandals, and peasanty "Greek" robes of handwoven cloth. Raymond/Ross is impossibly daffy, as he discusses his yearly Carnegie Hall presentations of spontaneous "plays". He doesn't know what the last one was about because he hasn't listened to the recording of it yet. He wanders inexplicably offstage ("You'll excuse me for a moment..."), returns to explain his disappearance as an "expression of Actionism," raves about the fascinating work that goes on all the time, like fingernails growing. I guess that should be sufficient action for any performance. He speaks with awe and force about Isadora ("Isadora danced, but she wasn't a dancer. She preached, she talked, she spoke in dancing"), and moves like a flamboyant, helter-skelter caricature of her. This adds to his dimension. Ross handles all the foolishness - that of a man proud to assert that he was determined, from a very young age, to set himself against whatever other people did - with the tender care of a master clown. And from Raymond, at the very end - as he speaks about having lived through five wars and discovered that it is not armaments and destruction that win wars, but teaching the enemy fear - emerges a quality that is stern and impressive and not at all silly. He no longer flails about, but is focused, contained, as suddenly solemn and dignified as the most deservedly respected old chief.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (October 6 to 10).
Bertram Ross, who originated over 25 roles in the Graham repertory, was one of the mainstays of the Martha Graham company until 1973 when the directors purged the older dancers who'd been holding the company together. He has been out on his own since then - dancing, teaching and making dances. Naturally, his dances were for a long time very much in the psychological/dramatic idiom he'd devoted himself to for more than 20 years, but there's less "dancing" in his recent work.
With age and independence, with the development of his own acting skills, Ross, at least in his solos, is cutting lose, following the more humorous bent of his own character. He presented five solos in concert at Riverside Church. The oldest, from 1980, Vanya: Three Pastels, comprised three complaining or strident monologues from Chekhov's play dovetailed with dance episodes of fidgety ambivalence and anguish. In these, Ross reminded me too much of some of the kvetchy older clientele and waiters you might find in the Second Avenue Delicatessen. My Last Duchess, a recital of the Browning poem with slimy gestures and insinuating tones, never managed to develop the Duke's character so much as a caricature that grossly magnified his cold repulsiveness. Those were the weakest pieces.
Central in the program was Wallace Stevens' brief play Carlos Among the Candles, an ideal piece for a dancer who can speak. Ross's physical demeanor, like an elegant but comic Mozartean servant, complements his philosophizing as he lights one long taper after another, discussing the solitude of a single one, the social atmosphere of two, the splendor of many and, eventually, after lighting two dozen, extinguishes all but one. He's courtly, dainty, often fussy, and his feet underscore his manner, with small, dithery, criss-crossing steps. Ross builds the play nicely through the magical lighting up when the play is wittiest, finally teasing himself relentlessly over which of the last two candles to light first. But, as he effectively measures the time and marks the extinguishing of each candle with a muted double tap of his heels, Carlos drags, because Ross allows his speech to drone into a single lamenting tone.
The choicest works, both beautifully suited to Ross, were portraits of Gordon Craig, theater designer and father of Isadora Duncan's first child, and Raymond Duncan, Isadora's brother. They opened and closed the program. Both used delectable texts, authentic words of Craig and Duncan, and Ross's raspy, very particular voice suited them well. I wondered, particularly during Gordon Craig, if Ross had modeled his speech patterns on a recording of Craig's voice.
In Gordon Craig Ross stalks across the stage several times in hat and cape, tapping his cane with authority with every pair of steps. He removes his outer garments, sets the cane on a chair, and, in a suit that was, in fact, part of Craig's wardrobe, speaks wonderfully and with eccentric flair, about Isadora Duncan ("She was the first and only dancer I ever saw, except for some I saw in a street in Genoa, and some in a barn in New York"), her character (paraphrasing: she has calm, no vanity, no cleverness, very little understanding of the arts, and a great comprehension of nature, and perhaps rather too much ambition), the weight of her presence, and her unique magic. In this, through his stance, his address, the evocative power of his poses and the gestures of his superb hands, Ross manages to recreate Isadora as well as Craig. But when, in the enthusiasm of description, Craig/Ross runs around, leaps, enlarges his gestures, flings himself into images we hold of Isadora, the piece temporarily disintegrates into silly imitation and its authority evaporates. It's too much out of character. Perhaps Ross worried that there was too little movement in the piece.
In Raymond, however, Ross wafts through passages of sort of Duncan movement that serve the character beautifully. Raymond Duncan lived in Paris till his death in 1966, an oddball figure in long hair, sandals, and peasanty "Greek" robes of handwoven cloth. Raymond/Ross is impossibly daffy, as he discusses his yearly Carnegie Hall presentations of spontaneous "plays". He doesn't know what the last one was about because he hasn't listened to the recording of it yet. He wanders inexplicably offstage ("You'll excuse me for a moment..."), returns to explain his disappearance as an "expression of Actionism," raves about the fascinating work that goes on all the time, like fingernails growing. I guess that should be sufficient action for any performance. He speaks with awe and force about Isadora ("Isadora danced, but she wasn't a dancer. She preached, she talked, she spoke in dancing"), and moves like a flamboyant, helter-skelter caricature of her. This adds to his dimension. Ross handles all the foolishness - that of a man proud to assert that he was determined, from a very young age, to set himself against whatever other people did - with the tender care of a master clown. And from Raymond, at the very end - as he speaks about having lived through five wars and discovered that it is not armaments and destruction that win wars, but teaching the enemy fear - emerges a quality that is stern and impressive and not at all silly. He no longer flails about, but is focused, contained, as suddenly solemn and dignified as the most deservedly respected old chief.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (October 6 to 10).
France Dance Transplant
November 9
Modern dance has been largely an American invention, an American province. But since Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan took themselves to Europe, many Americans have found more generous and wholehearted support for their work abroad than at home. As for the traffic heading our way, European and other foreign dancers come to work at established schools and studios like Graham, Cunningham, Ailey, Nikolais, approved for people eligible for student visas - as well as to learn whatever they can from post-modern and experimental choreographers who may not teach on any regular basis and who aren't exactly swimming in grants. Western Europeans are also interested in developing their own modern dance companies, but, whatever it is, modern dance isn't easily transplanted or adapted. When it's lively, it tends to militate against the traditional as a repository of values. It's not a matter of learning techniques and choreographic principles and applying them. It's a more personal matter - of wanting, of disciplines, of following one's intuitions with determination.
In 1978, the French government established the Centre Nationale de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in cooperation with Angers, a rather well-to-do city by the look of it, straddling the river Maine near its confluence with the Loire, close to the heart of the chateau country. Alwin Nikolai was invited to be its first artistic director, for a three-year stint. The Ministere de la Culture wanted to set up a place that would train choreographers, and composition is an important part of Nikolais's teaching. In 1981,
Viola Farber took over. Farber was well-known and highly esteemed in France, and was familiar to Angers through her work with the Ballet Theatre Contemporaine which was based there.
Farber, however, had no intention of training choreographers. "I have no idea how to do it," she says. Many choreographers share this feeling, and are dead set against courses that purport to teach choreography. "And I think to be a good dancer is terrific", she adds. Farber does teach composition classes, but the inescapable nut is that problem solving "has nothing much to do with what I do when I make dances. If you want to make a dance happen, you make a dance. But how can you train someone to his or her own vision?" What Farber agreed to do - apart from the students - was to establish a company and a repertory. She asked to start with the students, and form the company out of them, but the ministry said, "No, you have a performance December 18." It was decided, too, that Farber would bring her own company, to integrate her dances with the French to accelerate the process, since the situation was already pressured.
"I wouldn't have done it if I couldn't have brought my dancers," she says. "I was happy with my company. I didn't want to smash everything in order to do this." Four of her dancers came along: Michael Cichetti, Joel Luecht, Anne Koren and Robert Foltz. A fifth, Mary Good, came in January. The sixth, Karen Levey, didn't want to spend so much time away from her teenage daughters, but she came for a few weeks before performances to take up the teaching burden, and returned in the spring for the same purpose. Patrick Le Leve, assistant director and, in fact responsible for the well-being of the participants (stagiaires) at the CNDC, explained that, in France, in any field - if you're a baker, an electrician, etc. - it's possible, when you finish your training, to enter a special center to "perfect your abilities."
In 1978, through an agreement between the Ministere de la Culture and the Ministere du Travail, this was extended to dancers. The students selected for the eight-month stage (course, workshop) are paid a minimum salary. They can't be paid more, up to 90 per cent of their previous salary if the were teaching or engaged by a company. A significant aspect of this is the official recognition that a dancer is also a worker, integral to society, not some marginal, unnecessary creature. And for dancers, whose training and careers are largely a hand-to-mouth struggle, to be paid a salary to study seems ideal. Farber auditioned about 200 people in four days. There were no call-backs. No distinction was made between dancers with classical or modern backgrounds.
"I'm not used to picking dancers from auditions," she says. "I'm used to seeing them around the studio for a while." She chose 25 dancers for the stage, six for the company. Late last year, I watched her give company class, a lyrical one, though another day it might have been raw and raunchy. Even in class, in the smallish studio, I could see that the French and American dancers enjoyed each other, were generous, were...a company. Dominique Lofficial, who played piano for class, was marvelous. He was with Farber, attuned to her, didn't have to be told what to play or how to play it. Out of his fingers flowed swinging, torchy ballads that were irresistibly danceable. Karen Levey, who was teaching the stagiaires and took company class whenever she could, reveres Farber's teaching.
"The first time I look at Viola do something, I'm in awe of it. I see the dancing. Her movement is so dramatic. Then she breaks it down and wants it done technically correctly, and the challenge then is to dance it. She takes it as her responsibility, but she wants that quality that moves, not just shape and line. If you work hard, even if you can't do it, you can still dance. Claire Verlet [one of the French company members] said that every day she was so happy to be here because "every day there's something to learn, even if I can't learn it'".
The company proved a joy, but the stagiaires proved problematic. Their schedules are heavy, with class in the early morning, work on composition afterward, time in the afternoons to rehearse or work on their own projects. Levey was impressed with them but like many teachers, found them maddeningly undisciplined, sometimes recalcitrant. "I think they want to work, but they have to learn how. In America it's taken for granted that you don't come late, you don't fool around, you don't chatter." People take dancing seriously. Notoriously, many young French dancers don't seem to have developed any basic discipline, or they're lazy and proud if it, as if they feel it's incumbent upon them to assert what they imagine to be independence. But, of course, they cover a whole spectrum, from the ones who are talented and work like dogs, to the not-so-talented ones who don't work either.
This year, two of the men from last year's stage have been admitted to the company. And Farber saw that many of the stagiaires hadn't wasted their time. About half a dozen are in companies now. Many asked to stay for a second year. (Farber is permitted to keep 10). "It's very seductive," she says sourly, "spend another year and earn money without doing much. And the people I let stay are only staying if they work. When I'd ask them why they weren't in class on time, they'd say, 'well, we might be having an interesting conversation, or drinking a cup of coffee...it's difficult for me to respond to that because there's such a basic misunderstanding."
"But it will work better this year. For one thing, there won't be so many. I told the minister that that just didn't work. The place is too small. And I think it's much better to work well with fewer people than to produce quantities of nothing very much." This year there are 15 stagiaires instead of 25.
"At first, I was not going to keep anybody. Clean slate. And then when I had auditions for the new stagiaires, I saw that the ones at the center did pretty well. The center is such a shock for new people. Most of them have never had the opportunity to work daily, never ,mind daily for eight months, And I felt that I'd rather continue with people who knew what they were getting into, and knowing that, wanted it, than to start with new people who would have to go through that same very difficult adjustment.
"This year, I'd like to spend more time, when the company is on tour, just with the stagiaires, because they felt - unjustifiably, I think - like stepchildren. I want them to learn dances. The company had very specific work to do, and I want to make it more that way for the stagiaires. Ideally, they'd be like a second company, and it would objectify what they're accomplishing. Actually, they did a good deal of that in the spring. They'd give animations - the company was too busy - and the last one was in a horrible room not at all conducive to dancing, and they were beautiful.
"Perhaps I took things for granted last year that I shouldn't have. For instance, I thought that you wouldn't even become a candidate for this kind of situation unless you really wanted to do it. That wasn't really true. Or maybe the stagiaires thought it would be something else." Maybe some of them thought of their acceptance at the center more as a validation of their abilities than as an opportunity to learn. "Now," she continues "I must be very clear about what's expected. I'll send people away if they don’t work. It's a waste of time for them. Bad for the others. Bad for me.
I was in Long Beach this summer, working with Jeff [Slayton]. It was wonderful for me - six weeks of bright sunshine! Angers is gray, gray, gray. I hadn't performed in over a year. I broke a rib the first week - but it wasn't serious. I played four hands with a friend. That's something I need to get in Angers to keep my sanity - a piano! "Anyway, in Long Beach I made a dance for 22 people. It ended up a 30-minute piece. We were working together, there was not this antagonistic thing. We were there to make something, and they were delighted to be challenged, to do things that were difficult for them. But I guess a six-week situation is very different from something that goes on for eight months, You don't have to plateau.
"I really think that this thing of their being paid salaries, in France, to do this, is a kind of trap. It's a nice idea, but the way that it works is not that helpful. Ideally, I think you'd have to start out, for a year or two, just teaching classes and having people come. And then, from those people, choose. And they too would be making an intelligent choice that, yes, that is what we want to do and we want to do more of it. But it's too late for that. "To me," says Farber, the whole idea of dancing, if you don't really want to very badly, is entirely a mystery." Farber's schedule in Angers the first year was killing: building the company and the repertory, running the school, dealing with organizational red tape. And dealing with practical gaps - like no publicity budget - all the things that make the difference between the idea of a national dance center and the actuality of one that works. Because the center is supported by the national and city governments,"there's a complicated 'sensibilization' to make people in the city aware of dance. Lots of time is spent talking to people, giving lecture-demonstrations.
"Schools ask us to come. I taught a class for the ladies of Angers at the Maison de la Culture one evening a week. Art students come and sketch. There are constantly people to see and people who insist on talking to me when it would really serve them better to talk to someone else.
""All this is important. But I get tired. I want to say just let me do my work. But there are people here who don't know that music and dance exist, and they should. Then they can do what they want." Because Angers is such a small city, things are possible that wouldn't be somewhere larger. From the museum she could borrow books of 19th century fashion engravings, which inspired one of the pieces she made that first season: Villa-Nuage. There's superb technical help. The regisseur of all the theater spaces in Angers wangled permission to do her lighting. There's the incomparable luxury of plenty of stage time, with all the technical elements in place.
"People welcome the opportunity to work on something," Farber remarks, "because it is a small place. And the quality of their involvement is superior. If they say they'll do something, they do it from A to Z." "I'd asked when I first arrived, if I could ever work with the orchestra, and they said yes. Well, finally, they wanted to do something in June, for a festival called Angers-en-Fete, with events all over town. The conductor gave me a choice of music, and one of the things was Rhapsody in Blue, which I adore, so I said we'll do that. And then they said no because they didn't have a pianist available. The managers of the orchestra then suggested a guitar concerto - they did have a guitarist - and someone sang a little piece of it and I thought, well, all right.
"Well, it turned out the concerto was the one by Rodrigo that one hears on Muzak here and on Muzak in every restaurant in Angers. I really couldn't get very interested but I had to make this thing, and by this time I had only about three weeks. And then, I think it was Dominique who told me that Rodrigo had been General Franco's sort of official composer, which made me unhappier still. But it gave me something to hang on to, so the piece is full of little salutes and clicking of heels. The second movement, which actually has some nice melodies, has very much to do with that, and the third movement, which I really couldn't bear...Anyway, I ended up loving what I’d made. And I'd like to use some of it again to some other music."
So. Viola Farber took over the CNDC officially as of September 1981. In three months she'd welded together a company of four Americans and six French dancers she'd judged quickly and never worked with, and whipped up a concert with three premieres. The first piece, Attente, was a serene, courtly, romantic piece, full of long, hovering balances ad tender sporadic duets - the kind of piece in which they steps aren't terribly complex, but where there's no place for fumbling. The dancers are out there naked.
Karen, who wished she could have danced in it, said "It should have been called Eat Your Heart Out, Karen." "I was going to use old repertory," said Farber. "But I thought it's not a nice way to start. They should have a piece of their own." To give the stagiaires a chance to perform she redid her 1978 Dandelion (originally for six) for 35 people - the stagiaires plus the company - and it turned into a spirited,jostling, gamboling stampede. The fourth piece was one of Farber's mysterious, creepy works, Villa-Nuage, a dreamy limbo of spinsterish ladies (usually wafty, but headache-ridden and given to fits) and dashing, debonair, vampirish men. Watching this time and again in rehearsal, I grew to love its layers of impeccable detail: the dancers had developed their characters so beautifully.
What intrigued me too were the ways the piece threw its shadows back and forth. Like Anne Koren, delicately sewing in her lap. She extends the needle slowly in the air, smiling distantly. Suddenly, she pulls the thread taut; Sylvain Richard, somewhere behind her, claps his hand to his shoulder as if he's been struck, turns his palm to us to exhibit the imaginary blood. Later on, Anne does stab him. I loved the self-absorbed solos of the women, but I especially loved the piece's exquisitely managed amorous murders. Claire leans back, offers Didier Deschamos her vulnerable neck Smiling with malice, Didier draws her to him, caresses her face, then crushes her windpipe. Michael Cichetti embraces Monique Monnier, chokes her quickly, and abruptly bends her backward to the floor, which is beginning to drift with fog. Sylvain enfolds Chantal de Launay with the utmost tenderness, cradles her head. He presses one hand on her temple. For a moment, you see a flicker of surprise, puzzlement, fear cross her face at being held immobile. Then, with the smallest suggestion of a twist, he breaks her neck and gently sets her down. You can almost hear a crunch.
All told, Farber made eight or nine dances for the company last year. "I've never made so many is so short a time. The pressure was unpleasant, but to receive the kind of response that the dancers in the company made is very exciting. To work with dancers who are paid to do that, who don't have any other jobs they have to go to, that's the only way it could have been accomplished. One piece, Exchanges, was the most difficult they had to do. They have to choose among given material, it's a little more...spontaneous, and it's very difficult technically. I made it for them - but without concession."
"The company has become one that could dance anywhere. They could perform on Broadway and I wouldn't be ashamed. They just kept on and on under the pressure of learning all this stuff. Since you saw them last December, they look like a different group. Like Claire. I don't know if you remember her..." "Big eyes?" "Yeah. She still has her beautiful big eyes, but her face and body - she's become very sort of streamlined. Not gaunt. She has real daring. She'll try anything. And Mathilde has become extraordinary - not just technically - she always had a nice body, but she has a presence along with that now. And the two men, Didier and Sylvain." I remember Didier's facility and suppleness, and Sylvain, who, though technically a little rough, breathed through his movement. "He's not a virtuoso, but he is musical!" she says almost adoringly.
This year, Farber's got eight of the same people - all the French dancers, plus Anne Koren and Joel Luecht, and the two men from last year's stage. "Everyone except Anne is French or European Common Mark," says Farber. "I've gotten them to take them as stagiaires and as company people because I want to internationalize it a little. It's not so much an anti-French move It's a pro-mixing things up move. "This year, I won't be there as much as last, I'll come back and forth and stay here longer. I don't want to become an expatriate. I've spent the past year giving the company something to perform and training them so they could, and now they must perform or it's all ridiculous. And they'll do works other than mine"
In the spring, Francois Verret will come. His work is very contained, concentrated. At the same time, it bursts open. Eventually, the idea is for someone there to take it over. "Last year was very, very hard. Partly because I feel I had about four jobs to do. Every day was like two weeks before performances. I can't give that kind of dailydailydaily energy to it. But I've planned things so that, hopefully, Anne Koren will assist me. Jumay Chu and Ande Peck [both of them used to dance with Farber, more recently with Lucinda Childs] are coming to teach. Ande will be in Paris, with the third aspect of the CNDC, which has to do with training teachers. I've told the ministry that you can't make teachers out of people, but you can perhaps discover teachers. So he'll simply be teaching dance, But Jumay will be in Angers. The stagiaires need one consistent person to work with. "The company is very good, and it will be hard, I think, to bring the new people up to their standard. Plus which there are eight or nine dances in repertory, which have to be learned. And I want to make two more for the end of December.
"They did ask me," she says, "that is, Didier asked me - in fear and trembling - "Are you going to make as many ballets this year as you did last year?"
"Nope," she said.
Modern dance has been largely an American invention, an American province. But since Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan took themselves to Europe, many Americans have found more generous and wholehearted support for their work abroad than at home. As for the traffic heading our way, European and other foreign dancers come to work at established schools and studios like Graham, Cunningham, Ailey, Nikolais, approved for people eligible for student visas - as well as to learn whatever they can from post-modern and experimental choreographers who may not teach on any regular basis and who aren't exactly swimming in grants. Western Europeans are also interested in developing their own modern dance companies, but, whatever it is, modern dance isn't easily transplanted or adapted. When it's lively, it tends to militate against the traditional as a repository of values. It's not a matter of learning techniques and choreographic principles and applying them. It's a more personal matter - of wanting, of disciplines, of following one's intuitions with determination.
In 1978, the French government established the Centre Nationale de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in cooperation with Angers, a rather well-to-do city by the look of it, straddling the river Maine near its confluence with the Loire, close to the heart of the chateau country. Alwin Nikolai was invited to be its first artistic director, for a three-year stint. The Ministere de la Culture wanted to set up a place that would train choreographers, and composition is an important part of Nikolais's teaching. In 1981,
Viola Farber took over. Farber was well-known and highly esteemed in France, and was familiar to Angers through her work with the Ballet Theatre Contemporaine which was based there.
Farber, however, had no intention of training choreographers. "I have no idea how to do it," she says. Many choreographers share this feeling, and are dead set against courses that purport to teach choreography. "And I think to be a good dancer is terrific", she adds. Farber does teach composition classes, but the inescapable nut is that problem solving "has nothing much to do with what I do when I make dances. If you want to make a dance happen, you make a dance. But how can you train someone to his or her own vision?" What Farber agreed to do - apart from the students - was to establish a company and a repertory. She asked to start with the students, and form the company out of them, but the ministry said, "No, you have a performance December 18." It was decided, too, that Farber would bring her own company, to integrate her dances with the French to accelerate the process, since the situation was already pressured.
"I wouldn't have done it if I couldn't have brought my dancers," she says. "I was happy with my company. I didn't want to smash everything in order to do this." Four of her dancers came along: Michael Cichetti, Joel Luecht, Anne Koren and Robert Foltz. A fifth, Mary Good, came in January. The sixth, Karen Levey, didn't want to spend so much time away from her teenage daughters, but she came for a few weeks before performances to take up the teaching burden, and returned in the spring for the same purpose. Patrick Le Leve, assistant director and, in fact responsible for the well-being of the participants (stagiaires) at the CNDC, explained that, in France, in any field - if you're a baker, an electrician, etc. - it's possible, when you finish your training, to enter a special center to "perfect your abilities."
In 1978, through an agreement between the Ministere de la Culture and the Ministere du Travail, this was extended to dancers. The students selected for the eight-month stage (course, workshop) are paid a minimum salary. They can't be paid more, up to 90 per cent of their previous salary if the were teaching or engaged by a company. A significant aspect of this is the official recognition that a dancer is also a worker, integral to society, not some marginal, unnecessary creature. And for dancers, whose training and careers are largely a hand-to-mouth struggle, to be paid a salary to study seems ideal. Farber auditioned about 200 people in four days. There were no call-backs. No distinction was made between dancers with classical or modern backgrounds.
"I'm not used to picking dancers from auditions," she says. "I'm used to seeing them around the studio for a while." She chose 25 dancers for the stage, six for the company. Late last year, I watched her give company class, a lyrical one, though another day it might have been raw and raunchy. Even in class, in the smallish studio, I could see that the French and American dancers enjoyed each other, were generous, were...a company. Dominique Lofficial, who played piano for class, was marvelous. He was with Farber, attuned to her, didn't have to be told what to play or how to play it. Out of his fingers flowed swinging, torchy ballads that were irresistibly danceable. Karen Levey, who was teaching the stagiaires and took company class whenever she could, reveres Farber's teaching.
"The first time I look at Viola do something, I'm in awe of it. I see the dancing. Her movement is so dramatic. Then she breaks it down and wants it done technically correctly, and the challenge then is to dance it. She takes it as her responsibility, but she wants that quality that moves, not just shape and line. If you work hard, even if you can't do it, you can still dance. Claire Verlet [one of the French company members] said that every day she was so happy to be here because "every day there's something to learn, even if I can't learn it'".
The company proved a joy, but the stagiaires proved problematic. Their schedules are heavy, with class in the early morning, work on composition afterward, time in the afternoons to rehearse or work on their own projects. Levey was impressed with them but like many teachers, found them maddeningly undisciplined, sometimes recalcitrant. "I think they want to work, but they have to learn how. In America it's taken for granted that you don't come late, you don't fool around, you don't chatter." People take dancing seriously. Notoriously, many young French dancers don't seem to have developed any basic discipline, or they're lazy and proud if it, as if they feel it's incumbent upon them to assert what they imagine to be independence. But, of course, they cover a whole spectrum, from the ones who are talented and work like dogs, to the not-so-talented ones who don't work either.
This year, two of the men from last year's stage have been admitted to the company. And Farber saw that many of the stagiaires hadn't wasted their time. About half a dozen are in companies now. Many asked to stay for a second year. (Farber is permitted to keep 10). "It's very seductive," she says sourly, "spend another year and earn money without doing much. And the people I let stay are only staying if they work. When I'd ask them why they weren't in class on time, they'd say, 'well, we might be having an interesting conversation, or drinking a cup of coffee...it's difficult for me to respond to that because there's such a basic misunderstanding."
"But it will work better this year. For one thing, there won't be so many. I told the minister that that just didn't work. The place is too small. And I think it's much better to work well with fewer people than to produce quantities of nothing very much." This year there are 15 stagiaires instead of 25.
"At first, I was not going to keep anybody. Clean slate. And then when I had auditions for the new stagiaires, I saw that the ones at the center did pretty well. The center is such a shock for new people. Most of them have never had the opportunity to work daily, never ,mind daily for eight months, And I felt that I'd rather continue with people who knew what they were getting into, and knowing that, wanted it, than to start with new people who would have to go through that same very difficult adjustment.
"This year, I'd like to spend more time, when the company is on tour, just with the stagiaires, because they felt - unjustifiably, I think - like stepchildren. I want them to learn dances. The company had very specific work to do, and I want to make it more that way for the stagiaires. Ideally, they'd be like a second company, and it would objectify what they're accomplishing. Actually, they did a good deal of that in the spring. They'd give animations - the company was too busy - and the last one was in a horrible room not at all conducive to dancing, and they were beautiful.
"Perhaps I took things for granted last year that I shouldn't have. For instance, I thought that you wouldn't even become a candidate for this kind of situation unless you really wanted to do it. That wasn't really true. Or maybe the stagiaires thought it would be something else." Maybe some of them thought of their acceptance at the center more as a validation of their abilities than as an opportunity to learn. "Now," she continues "I must be very clear about what's expected. I'll send people away if they don’t work. It's a waste of time for them. Bad for the others. Bad for me.
I was in Long Beach this summer, working with Jeff [Slayton]. It was wonderful for me - six weeks of bright sunshine! Angers is gray, gray, gray. I hadn't performed in over a year. I broke a rib the first week - but it wasn't serious. I played four hands with a friend. That's something I need to get in Angers to keep my sanity - a piano! "Anyway, in Long Beach I made a dance for 22 people. It ended up a 30-minute piece. We were working together, there was not this antagonistic thing. We were there to make something, and they were delighted to be challenged, to do things that were difficult for them. But I guess a six-week situation is very different from something that goes on for eight months, You don't have to plateau.
"I really think that this thing of their being paid salaries, in France, to do this, is a kind of trap. It's a nice idea, but the way that it works is not that helpful. Ideally, I think you'd have to start out, for a year or two, just teaching classes and having people come. And then, from those people, choose. And they too would be making an intelligent choice that, yes, that is what we want to do and we want to do more of it. But it's too late for that. "To me," says Farber, the whole idea of dancing, if you don't really want to very badly, is entirely a mystery." Farber's schedule in Angers the first year was killing: building the company and the repertory, running the school, dealing with organizational red tape. And dealing with practical gaps - like no publicity budget - all the things that make the difference between the idea of a national dance center and the actuality of one that works. Because the center is supported by the national and city governments,"there's a complicated 'sensibilization' to make people in the city aware of dance. Lots of time is spent talking to people, giving lecture-demonstrations.
"Schools ask us to come. I taught a class for the ladies of Angers at the Maison de la Culture one evening a week. Art students come and sketch. There are constantly people to see and people who insist on talking to me when it would really serve them better to talk to someone else.
""All this is important. But I get tired. I want to say just let me do my work. But there are people here who don't know that music and dance exist, and they should. Then they can do what they want." Because Angers is such a small city, things are possible that wouldn't be somewhere larger. From the museum she could borrow books of 19th century fashion engravings, which inspired one of the pieces she made that first season: Villa-Nuage. There's superb technical help. The regisseur of all the theater spaces in Angers wangled permission to do her lighting. There's the incomparable luxury of plenty of stage time, with all the technical elements in place.
"People welcome the opportunity to work on something," Farber remarks, "because it is a small place. And the quality of their involvement is superior. If they say they'll do something, they do it from A to Z." "I'd asked when I first arrived, if I could ever work with the orchestra, and they said yes. Well, finally, they wanted to do something in June, for a festival called Angers-en-Fete, with events all over town. The conductor gave me a choice of music, and one of the things was Rhapsody in Blue, which I adore, so I said we'll do that. And then they said no because they didn't have a pianist available. The managers of the orchestra then suggested a guitar concerto - they did have a guitarist - and someone sang a little piece of it and I thought, well, all right.
"Well, it turned out the concerto was the one by Rodrigo that one hears on Muzak here and on Muzak in every restaurant in Angers. I really couldn't get very interested but I had to make this thing, and by this time I had only about three weeks. And then, I think it was Dominique who told me that Rodrigo had been General Franco's sort of official composer, which made me unhappier still. But it gave me something to hang on to, so the piece is full of little salutes and clicking of heels. The second movement, which actually has some nice melodies, has very much to do with that, and the third movement, which I really couldn't bear...Anyway, I ended up loving what I’d made. And I'd like to use some of it again to some other music."
So. Viola Farber took over the CNDC officially as of September 1981. In three months she'd welded together a company of four Americans and six French dancers she'd judged quickly and never worked with, and whipped up a concert with three premieres. The first piece, Attente, was a serene, courtly, romantic piece, full of long, hovering balances ad tender sporadic duets - the kind of piece in which they steps aren't terribly complex, but where there's no place for fumbling. The dancers are out there naked.
Karen, who wished she could have danced in it, said "It should have been called Eat Your Heart Out, Karen." "I was going to use old repertory," said Farber. "But I thought it's not a nice way to start. They should have a piece of their own." To give the stagiaires a chance to perform she redid her 1978 Dandelion (originally for six) for 35 people - the stagiaires plus the company - and it turned into a spirited,jostling, gamboling stampede. The fourth piece was one of Farber's mysterious, creepy works, Villa-Nuage, a dreamy limbo of spinsterish ladies (usually wafty, but headache-ridden and given to fits) and dashing, debonair, vampirish men. Watching this time and again in rehearsal, I grew to love its layers of impeccable detail: the dancers had developed their characters so beautifully.
What intrigued me too were the ways the piece threw its shadows back and forth. Like Anne Koren, delicately sewing in her lap. She extends the needle slowly in the air, smiling distantly. Suddenly, she pulls the thread taut; Sylvain Richard, somewhere behind her, claps his hand to his shoulder as if he's been struck, turns his palm to us to exhibit the imaginary blood. Later on, Anne does stab him. I loved the self-absorbed solos of the women, but I especially loved the piece's exquisitely managed amorous murders. Claire leans back, offers Didier Deschamos her vulnerable neck Smiling with malice, Didier draws her to him, caresses her face, then crushes her windpipe. Michael Cichetti embraces Monique Monnier, chokes her quickly, and abruptly bends her backward to the floor, which is beginning to drift with fog. Sylvain enfolds Chantal de Launay with the utmost tenderness, cradles her head. He presses one hand on her temple. For a moment, you see a flicker of surprise, puzzlement, fear cross her face at being held immobile. Then, with the smallest suggestion of a twist, he breaks her neck and gently sets her down. You can almost hear a crunch.
All told, Farber made eight or nine dances for the company last year. "I've never made so many is so short a time. The pressure was unpleasant, but to receive the kind of response that the dancers in the company made is very exciting. To work with dancers who are paid to do that, who don't have any other jobs they have to go to, that's the only way it could have been accomplished. One piece, Exchanges, was the most difficult they had to do. They have to choose among given material, it's a little more...spontaneous, and it's very difficult technically. I made it for them - but without concession."
"The company has become one that could dance anywhere. They could perform on Broadway and I wouldn't be ashamed. They just kept on and on under the pressure of learning all this stuff. Since you saw them last December, they look like a different group. Like Claire. I don't know if you remember her..." "Big eyes?" "Yeah. She still has her beautiful big eyes, but her face and body - she's become very sort of streamlined. Not gaunt. She has real daring. She'll try anything. And Mathilde has become extraordinary - not just technically - she always had a nice body, but she has a presence along with that now. And the two men, Didier and Sylvain." I remember Didier's facility and suppleness, and Sylvain, who, though technically a little rough, breathed through his movement. "He's not a virtuoso, but he is musical!" she says almost adoringly.
This year, Farber's got eight of the same people - all the French dancers, plus Anne Koren and Joel Luecht, and the two men from last year's stage. "Everyone except Anne is French or European Common Mark," says Farber. "I've gotten them to take them as stagiaires and as company people because I want to internationalize it a little. It's not so much an anti-French move It's a pro-mixing things up move. "This year, I won't be there as much as last, I'll come back and forth and stay here longer. I don't want to become an expatriate. I've spent the past year giving the company something to perform and training them so they could, and now they must perform or it's all ridiculous. And they'll do works other than mine"
In the spring, Francois Verret will come. His work is very contained, concentrated. At the same time, it bursts open. Eventually, the idea is for someone there to take it over. "Last year was very, very hard. Partly because I feel I had about four jobs to do. Every day was like two weeks before performances. I can't give that kind of dailydailydaily energy to it. But I've planned things so that, hopefully, Anne Koren will assist me. Jumay Chu and Ande Peck [both of them used to dance with Farber, more recently with Lucinda Childs] are coming to teach. Ande will be in Paris, with the third aspect of the CNDC, which has to do with training teachers. I've told the ministry that you can't make teachers out of people, but you can perhaps discover teachers. So he'll simply be teaching dance, But Jumay will be in Angers. The stagiaires need one consistent person to work with. "The company is very good, and it will be hard, I think, to bring the new people up to their standard. Plus which there are eight or nine dances in repertory, which have to be learned. And I want to make two more for the end of December.
"They did ask me," she says, "that is, Didier asked me - in fear and trembling - "Are you going to make as many ballets this year as you did last year?"
"Nope," she said.
From the People Who Brought You Flower Arranging
August 10
Dairakudakan, a 25-member ensemble founded in 1972 by Akaji Maro, presented an impressive something-or-other called Sea-Dappled Horse at SUNY's Purchase as part of PepsiCo's Summerfare '82 festival. It was a powerful, grotesque, beautiful, incomprehensible spectacle. Some of the audience dribbled out from the middle on; the ones who stayed clapped and roared at the end even though no one was sure it was the end and the music was still blaring and Maro - choreographer, set designer and star - sprawled in languorous humility among his disciples.
The performance is a sequence of eight segments that open with brilliant images which are then elaborated but rarely developed and never transformed. The strongest statement of each episode is usually in its first moments; some episodes drag on indulgently. There are no transitions from one to the next, though many thematic links and stylistic threads hold the evening together: persistent images of people distorted, enfeebles, victimized, brutalized; images of sexual ambiguity and threat; movements that twist and shake and wobble and implore, combined with a graceful "weakness" in the joints that is always slipping the body into odd curves; music that gathers to overwhelming loudness through the course of each section. The perimeter of the stage is hung with 16 long wooden panels compose of old doors. In front of them are the dancers - the men bald, the women with shocks of black hair - clad only in G-strings, with their bodies white and ashy, almost powdery. A rope connects them. They stand, softly crumpled, like martyrs, and pull at the rope like stabled animals. With clawlike hands, drooping heads, blind eyes, their moves are small, exact, and intense. In the next section, a man (Maro) staggers in, battering his way out of an enclosure of flapping wood panels. Crouching, bloody, speechifying in guttural tones, he creeps forward on mousy feet an falls over repeatedly, half pitiful and half a joke. When he disappears, another man, in a voluminous white robe with its hem curled up winglike, shoves himself out of a similar enclosure, eventually crosses the stage, invades the other's places and throws him out...a storm howls. Ten wild-haired women enter, their mouths open, heads and hands trembling.
Within the large groups, like this group of women, there is great variety among the performers, even when everyone is doing roughly the same thing. Many of the most interesting moments are when the stage scene is relatively still and you can take in the individual contrasts and subtleties of the performers unassailed. They never have the sameness of a chorus; each embodies a different character and exhibits different moods (from silliness to gravity to madness) in fine detail, though all combine to convey an overall sense of, say, fearfulness, or idiocy. Almost everyone seems wounded or deranged, in habitual reaction to unidentified sources of affliction or stress. The women especially seem damaged and bruised. So often in theater, the Japanese seem extraordinarily fascinated by the grotesque, the ill, the hurt, the inarticulate, the casually brutal. Perhaps being closer to the brutalities of their feudal history, to the horrors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, they find this closer to man's ordinary state than the middle-class aspirations and domestic problems we consider normal.
Whatever the reasons, or cultural differences, I tire quickly under the continuous pressure of watching demented women or men shaking, shrieking, giggling, with only slight alterations in the mood. A tall, lean figure, as sinister as Fu Manchu, peers from behind the panels at the back. In white makeup, smooth head, and in a patchwork kimono, he (Maro) walks slowly forward, towering in his geta (wooden platform sandals). The panels around the stage sway and sway. His arms keep shrinking back into his sleeves. His eyes shift, he twists his hands, turns them over and over. His body curves, hunches, stoops, his head juts forward. It's wonderful to watch his concentrated progress, the way the shape of his body changes with thoughtfulness, rage, impotence - though you never have a clue what it's all about. He falls over sideways, from the great height of his sandals' extra inches, and tumbles into the orchestra pit. The most beautiful moments of the piece are next, when men enter with an intensely light, springy, almost bounding walk, their hands delicately poised to front as if they're riding. They come in among pillowy, bent-over, blanket-wrapped figures that are the animals they ride or herd.
Nilotic and elegant, the men wear fragile-seeming fold headdresses that shiver and jiggle. Their heads seem Chaldean, maybe because of the shape of their beards. The men's bodies are painted slate, with white designs (white "socks", white lines down their noses, white beards). On their backs are white elliptical or diamondlike shapes that suggest that the charcoal skin may be a kind of envelope that can be pulled open from the back. The whole entrance is paradisiacal; then the men shake, do sit-ups. What's happening? After a while, they exit toward the audience with that gorgeous levitating walk, across narrow bridges over the orchestra pit. The animals throw off their blankets, and reveal themselves as girls with pink dresses and flopping red bows in their hair. They wriggle about, flipflop their hands, dance as if they were frolicking in the ocean. Maro, dressed as they are, appears at the back, and, alone, at the end of the section, sets himself against one of the panels like the broken martyrs of the first section. These "herdsmen" return, wearing long, narrow red trains from their shoulders. Three women in while kneel upstage, facing back. They look sacrificial, but they're not. As the men approach, with sinuous moves and flopping jumps, the women run front, show us their deformed , twisted faces. Maro, in his red girly bow, his penis hidden, clutched between his thighs, androgynous or castrated, stands, amid the red-trains. "The river of death," someone says to me later. Oh? Oh.
At PepsiCo Summerfare '82 Festival at SUNY Purchase (July 17 and 18).
Dairakudakan, a 25-member ensemble founded in 1972 by Akaji Maro, presented an impressive something-or-other called Sea-Dappled Horse at SUNY's Purchase as part of PepsiCo's Summerfare '82 festival. It was a powerful, grotesque, beautiful, incomprehensible spectacle. Some of the audience dribbled out from the middle on; the ones who stayed clapped and roared at the end even though no one was sure it was the end and the music was still blaring and Maro - choreographer, set designer and star - sprawled in languorous humility among his disciples.
The performance is a sequence of eight segments that open with brilliant images which are then elaborated but rarely developed and never transformed. The strongest statement of each episode is usually in its first moments; some episodes drag on indulgently. There are no transitions from one to the next, though many thematic links and stylistic threads hold the evening together: persistent images of people distorted, enfeebles, victimized, brutalized; images of sexual ambiguity and threat; movements that twist and shake and wobble and implore, combined with a graceful "weakness" in the joints that is always slipping the body into odd curves; music that gathers to overwhelming loudness through the course of each section. The perimeter of the stage is hung with 16 long wooden panels compose of old doors. In front of them are the dancers - the men bald, the women with shocks of black hair - clad only in G-strings, with their bodies white and ashy, almost powdery. A rope connects them. They stand, softly crumpled, like martyrs, and pull at the rope like stabled animals. With clawlike hands, drooping heads, blind eyes, their moves are small, exact, and intense. In the next section, a man (Maro) staggers in, battering his way out of an enclosure of flapping wood panels. Crouching, bloody, speechifying in guttural tones, he creeps forward on mousy feet an falls over repeatedly, half pitiful and half a joke. When he disappears, another man, in a voluminous white robe with its hem curled up winglike, shoves himself out of a similar enclosure, eventually crosses the stage, invades the other's places and throws him out...a storm howls. Ten wild-haired women enter, their mouths open, heads and hands trembling.
Within the large groups, like this group of women, there is great variety among the performers, even when everyone is doing roughly the same thing. Many of the most interesting moments are when the stage scene is relatively still and you can take in the individual contrasts and subtleties of the performers unassailed. They never have the sameness of a chorus; each embodies a different character and exhibits different moods (from silliness to gravity to madness) in fine detail, though all combine to convey an overall sense of, say, fearfulness, or idiocy. Almost everyone seems wounded or deranged, in habitual reaction to unidentified sources of affliction or stress. The women especially seem damaged and bruised. So often in theater, the Japanese seem extraordinarily fascinated by the grotesque, the ill, the hurt, the inarticulate, the casually brutal. Perhaps being closer to the brutalities of their feudal history, to the horrors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, they find this closer to man's ordinary state than the middle-class aspirations and domestic problems we consider normal.
Whatever the reasons, or cultural differences, I tire quickly under the continuous pressure of watching demented women or men shaking, shrieking, giggling, with only slight alterations in the mood. A tall, lean figure, as sinister as Fu Manchu, peers from behind the panels at the back. In white makeup, smooth head, and in a patchwork kimono, he (Maro) walks slowly forward, towering in his geta (wooden platform sandals). The panels around the stage sway and sway. His arms keep shrinking back into his sleeves. His eyes shift, he twists his hands, turns them over and over. His body curves, hunches, stoops, his head juts forward. It's wonderful to watch his concentrated progress, the way the shape of his body changes with thoughtfulness, rage, impotence - though you never have a clue what it's all about. He falls over sideways, from the great height of his sandals' extra inches, and tumbles into the orchestra pit. The most beautiful moments of the piece are next, when men enter with an intensely light, springy, almost bounding walk, their hands delicately poised to front as if they're riding. They come in among pillowy, bent-over, blanket-wrapped figures that are the animals they ride or herd.
Nilotic and elegant, the men wear fragile-seeming fold headdresses that shiver and jiggle. Their heads seem Chaldean, maybe because of the shape of their beards. The men's bodies are painted slate, with white designs (white "socks", white lines down their noses, white beards). On their backs are white elliptical or diamondlike shapes that suggest that the charcoal skin may be a kind of envelope that can be pulled open from the back. The whole entrance is paradisiacal; then the men shake, do sit-ups. What's happening? After a while, they exit toward the audience with that gorgeous levitating walk, across narrow bridges over the orchestra pit. The animals throw off their blankets, and reveal themselves as girls with pink dresses and flopping red bows in their hair. They wriggle about, flipflop their hands, dance as if they were frolicking in the ocean. Maro, dressed as they are, appears at the back, and, alone, at the end of the section, sets himself against one of the panels like the broken martyrs of the first section. These "herdsmen" return, wearing long, narrow red trains from their shoulders. Three women in while kneel upstage, facing back. They look sacrificial, but they're not. As the men approach, with sinuous moves and flopping jumps, the women run front, show us their deformed , twisted faces. Maro, in his red girly bow, his penis hidden, clutched between his thighs, androgynous or castrated, stands, amid the red-trains. "The river of death," someone says to me later. Oh? Oh.
At PepsiCo Summerfare '82 Festival at SUNY Purchase (July 17 and 18).
In the Penal Colony
December 7
Twyla Tharp's two new pieces, premiered on the company's fall West Coast tour, couldn't be more unlike. Nine Sinatra Songs purls along in silky ballroom style. Bad Smells is a brutal and grotesque end-of-the-world blitz.
There's something very satisfying about Sinatra's overall plain form: three duets to the first three songs, followed by triple duets to the fourth ("My Way"), four more duets to the next four songs, and a finale of seven duets to a reprise of "My Way". And the song's slow triumphant climb does nicely for finaletto and finale. What I admired most about Nine Sinatra Songs was the way the dancing made you hear the music in the music. I detest "Strangers in the Night", but Gary Chryst and Mary Ann Kellogg's tango, with its picky, straight-up lifts, quick turns and reverses, its deft, Spanishy feet, deflected the song's stupid sentiments, and illuminated its rhythms, phrasing, the aural spaciousness in the arrangement. Each duet has quite a different flavor.
In the opener, "Softly as I Leave You", Shelley Washington and Keith Young - with a kind of modesty that flashes briefly in split leaps, opens into gently gliding lifts, settles into quiet leanings - articulate the careful, faithful interdependency that permeates Nine Sinatra Songs and creates its atmosphere. "That's Life", with Shelley Freydont and Tom Rawe, has a low-key and lowdown Apache snap to it; "Forget Domani" (Jennifer Way and William Whitener) a certain impetuousness. Richard Colton and Christine Uchida skip and sail as fresh as a bride and groom just off the wedding cake to "I'm Not Afraid". Sara Rudner flips over John Carrafa, slides under him, curls up knees to chest, saunters away, returns. Their duet, third in the lineup, to Sinatra's great "One for My Baby", is the wryest, most gymnastic, least romantic section, drifting again and again into half-hearted, incomplete partings. On the whole, Sinatra's steady pace and beautifully smooth suspension made it seem a little bland, without enough edge. But even when Tharp doesn't make me totally happy with her pieces, she still unreels marvelous dancing.
In Bad Smells, to an intimidating score by Glenn Branca that really beats on you, Tom Rawe plays cameraman for the live video that blisters the screen above and behind the dancers. Rawe is a beautifully integrated, alien presence, as innocuous as "invisible" Japanese stagehands. But what he's videotaping is gruesome stuff. The theater's back all is exposed. The seven other dancers wear torn guerrilla grab - shorts, partsof shirts, ragged headbands - and they're smeared gray-white as if blasted with grease and plaster dust. Their faces are distorted with furious, stylized emotion, their bodies clawing, crippled, locked in attitudes of rage. The choral variations in what we see are frantic, frustrated, becoming paralytic and robotlike. It's unremittingly and appropriately ugly.
The audience was hot for Bad Smells, but it mostly left me cold. The extremes of feeling and non-feeling, multiplications of Shelley Washington's facial fit in Tharp's The Catherine Wheel, and as inexplicably savage, tribal and closed as Eliot Feld's Over the Pavement, seemed a blind alley. For me, the video was a distraction, a disintegrating agent. Between the force of the music and the giant, twisted faces on the screen, the dancers themselves seemed miniature. And those giant screen faces were blurry, less detailed, less strong than the dancers themselves When the video worked best, I think, was when it was most abstract, when the figures were projected sideways, or upside down, when we were seeing largely quivering rhythmic patterns and reflections.
Part of the problem of Bad Smells is that feelings as violent and terrible and crowded as these are never so relentless, so frozen, except perhaps in some psychotic frenzy. Eve the Hulk poops out quickly by comparison. Not that such feelings need justification - there's enough political, totalitarian, post-nuke resonance to Bad Smells for context. But it seems unfocused, unprocessed. I don’t know why Tharp's showing me this. It's not just that I don't want to be faced with these driven, dehumanized beings. But Tharp is often weirdly naive - as in The Catherine Wheel - in the way she rigs heavily emotional material. I don't trust Tharp enough to let her guide me through this scene. She finally did suck me in though, with the stolidly brutal and subtle final duet of domination and submission for Raymond Kurshals and Mary Ann Kellogg. That began to get to me, like Tharp's brilliant and vicious Short Stories, with feelings of panic and exhilaration and shame. But the keys to the duet are in its imprisoning isolation, in its small forbidding gestures, in the aroma of fear it radiates - and the fact that it portrays a relationship. It doesn't scream at you. It has its own smothered silence. It couldn't care less about the audience.
At Huntington Hartford Theater, Los Angeles (Nov 3 to 13).
Twyla Tharp's two new pieces, premiered on the company's fall West Coast tour, couldn't be more unlike. Nine Sinatra Songs purls along in silky ballroom style. Bad Smells is a brutal and grotesque end-of-the-world blitz.
There's something very satisfying about Sinatra's overall plain form: three duets to the first three songs, followed by triple duets to the fourth ("My Way"), four more duets to the next four songs, and a finale of seven duets to a reprise of "My Way". And the song's slow triumphant climb does nicely for finaletto and finale. What I admired most about Nine Sinatra Songs was the way the dancing made you hear the music in the music. I detest "Strangers in the Night", but Gary Chryst and Mary Ann Kellogg's tango, with its picky, straight-up lifts, quick turns and reverses, its deft, Spanishy feet, deflected the song's stupid sentiments, and illuminated its rhythms, phrasing, the aural spaciousness in the arrangement. Each duet has quite a different flavor.
In the opener, "Softly as I Leave You", Shelley Washington and Keith Young - with a kind of modesty that flashes briefly in split leaps, opens into gently gliding lifts, settles into quiet leanings - articulate the careful, faithful interdependency that permeates Nine Sinatra Songs and creates its atmosphere. "That's Life", with Shelley Freydont and Tom Rawe, has a low-key and lowdown Apache snap to it; "Forget Domani" (Jennifer Way and William Whitener) a certain impetuousness. Richard Colton and Christine Uchida skip and sail as fresh as a bride and groom just off the wedding cake to "I'm Not Afraid". Sara Rudner flips over John Carrafa, slides under him, curls up knees to chest, saunters away, returns. Their duet, third in the lineup, to Sinatra's great "One for My Baby", is the wryest, most gymnastic, least romantic section, drifting again and again into half-hearted, incomplete partings. On the whole, Sinatra's steady pace and beautifully smooth suspension made it seem a little bland, without enough edge. But even when Tharp doesn't make me totally happy with her pieces, she still unreels marvelous dancing.
In Bad Smells, to an intimidating score by Glenn Branca that really beats on you, Tom Rawe plays cameraman for the live video that blisters the screen above and behind the dancers. Rawe is a beautifully integrated, alien presence, as innocuous as "invisible" Japanese stagehands. But what he's videotaping is gruesome stuff. The theater's back all is exposed. The seven other dancers wear torn guerrilla grab - shorts, partsof shirts, ragged headbands - and they're smeared gray-white as if blasted with grease and plaster dust. Their faces are distorted with furious, stylized emotion, their bodies clawing, crippled, locked in attitudes of rage. The choral variations in what we see are frantic, frustrated, becoming paralytic and robotlike. It's unremittingly and appropriately ugly.
The audience was hot for Bad Smells, but it mostly left me cold. The extremes of feeling and non-feeling, multiplications of Shelley Washington's facial fit in Tharp's The Catherine Wheel, and as inexplicably savage, tribal and closed as Eliot Feld's Over the Pavement, seemed a blind alley. For me, the video was a distraction, a disintegrating agent. Between the force of the music and the giant, twisted faces on the screen, the dancers themselves seemed miniature. And those giant screen faces were blurry, less detailed, less strong than the dancers themselves When the video worked best, I think, was when it was most abstract, when the figures were projected sideways, or upside down, when we were seeing largely quivering rhythmic patterns and reflections.
Part of the problem of Bad Smells is that feelings as violent and terrible and crowded as these are never so relentless, so frozen, except perhaps in some psychotic frenzy. Eve the Hulk poops out quickly by comparison. Not that such feelings need justification - there's enough political, totalitarian, post-nuke resonance to Bad Smells for context. But it seems unfocused, unprocessed. I don’t know why Tharp's showing me this. It's not just that I don't want to be faced with these driven, dehumanized beings. But Tharp is often weirdly naive - as in The Catherine Wheel - in the way she rigs heavily emotional material. I don't trust Tharp enough to let her guide me through this scene. She finally did suck me in though, with the stolidly brutal and subtle final duet of domination and submission for Raymond Kurshals and Mary Ann Kellogg. That began to get to me, like Tharp's brilliant and vicious Short Stories, with feelings of panic and exhilaration and shame. But the keys to the duet are in its imprisoning isolation, in its small forbidding gestures, in the aroma of fear it radiates - and the fact that it portrays a relationship. It doesn't scream at you. It has its own smothered silence. It couldn't care less about the audience.
At Huntington Hartford Theater, Los Angeles (Nov 3 to 13).
Modern Problems
December 21
Stuart Pimsleur's duets, Glory Portraits, and the new Indicators, never clicked for me. Glory Portraits is partly about the good, bad old U.S.A., referring to the atomic bomb, the Pentagon and chemical warfare. Pimsleur and his partner, Suzanne Costello - a clean, sprightly dancer - pose with a doll for a series of formal portraits, then drop the "baby" back in the basket she came out of. So much for family life.
On tape, R. Reagan does a bit of dramatic recitation about Revolutionary War battles around New York City. There are some wavering songs from Penguin Cafe Orchestra sounding like the tape's stretched. With white dust masks over their noses and mouths, Pimsleur and Costello do some stiff, erect social dancing - first apart, then facing, then touching. Truman repeats that there's "no law against the dropping of the atomic bomb" as the dancing briefly gets sharper and the legwork twistier. The difficulty with Glory Portraits and Indicators is that Pimsleur's vision isn't strong or clear or wild enough to unify the disparate collage elements he uses, or for them to strike sparks in a zanier way by their unlikely juxtaposition. The bits and phrases are very short, and stopped short, so little momentum can develop Because the movement itself tends to be plain, it's not particularly vivid in fragments, and it doesn't build to anything. The one longish duet, in a strolling pace - he swings and wraps her over his back several times, she pulls him along the floor, she falls trustingly backward and he catches her, she flings herself forward into his arms - was pleasing if only because they stuck with one thing for a while. It was one of the few times the piece had any flow or impetus. Otherwise, it seemed both vague and didactic.
Indicators, designed by Ronald Kajiwara, features up to five ironing boards, along with Pimsleur and Costello. They wear white outfits with one black shoulder so they look, against the back drop, as if a corner's been bitten out of them. (The costumes are by Denise Mitchell.) The piece is more coherent and interesting than the first simply because the props can be flattened, erected,tilted, pushed. They can be arrows, missiles, little propeller planes (like Snoopy flies) when they're carried sideways, or just big Xs with lids. So - the ironing boards have several kinds of impact as signs, and they're flexible props. Now what? The movement, when separate from the ironing board manipulation, is plain and neutral. When Costello laboriously pushes and ironing board across the space while Pimsleur's dancing, she's the one you watch because her activity reeks with purpose. Pimsleur's dancing here, in contrast, is kinetic decor. The problem is that the two activities don't do anything for each other, don't have any meaning together. So you choose one to watch and judge the other by it. A handsome stage picture is created at the end, and perhaps the piece is most interesting as a purely visual exercise. There are five ironing boards onstage. With the dancers in white, white ironing boards, and black curtain behind, Pimsleur hangs a red nylon rope across the back of the space. One by one he drapes 11 red neckties over it. What's black, white and red all over?
At Parkfast Dance Stadium (December 8 to 12).
Stuart Pimsleur's duets, Glory Portraits, and the new Indicators, never clicked for me. Glory Portraits is partly about the good, bad old U.S.A., referring to the atomic bomb, the Pentagon and chemical warfare. Pimsleur and his partner, Suzanne Costello - a clean, sprightly dancer - pose with a doll for a series of formal portraits, then drop the "baby" back in the basket she came out of. So much for family life.
On tape, R. Reagan does a bit of dramatic recitation about Revolutionary War battles around New York City. There are some wavering songs from Penguin Cafe Orchestra sounding like the tape's stretched. With white dust masks over their noses and mouths, Pimsleur and Costello do some stiff, erect social dancing - first apart, then facing, then touching. Truman repeats that there's "no law against the dropping of the atomic bomb" as the dancing briefly gets sharper and the legwork twistier. The difficulty with Glory Portraits and Indicators is that Pimsleur's vision isn't strong or clear or wild enough to unify the disparate collage elements he uses, or for them to strike sparks in a zanier way by their unlikely juxtaposition. The bits and phrases are very short, and stopped short, so little momentum can develop Because the movement itself tends to be plain, it's not particularly vivid in fragments, and it doesn't build to anything. The one longish duet, in a strolling pace - he swings and wraps her over his back several times, she pulls him along the floor, she falls trustingly backward and he catches her, she flings herself forward into his arms - was pleasing if only because they stuck with one thing for a while. It was one of the few times the piece had any flow or impetus. Otherwise, it seemed both vague and didactic.
Indicators, designed by Ronald Kajiwara, features up to five ironing boards, along with Pimsleur and Costello. They wear white outfits with one black shoulder so they look, against the back drop, as if a corner's been bitten out of them. (The costumes are by Denise Mitchell.) The piece is more coherent and interesting than the first simply because the props can be flattened, erected,tilted, pushed. They can be arrows, missiles, little propeller planes (like Snoopy flies) when they're carried sideways, or just big Xs with lids. So - the ironing boards have several kinds of impact as signs, and they're flexible props. Now what? The movement, when separate from the ironing board manipulation, is plain and neutral. When Costello laboriously pushes and ironing board across the space while Pimsleur's dancing, she's the one you watch because her activity reeks with purpose. Pimsleur's dancing here, in contrast, is kinetic decor. The problem is that the two activities don't do anything for each other, don't have any meaning together. So you choose one to watch and judge the other by it. A handsome stage picture is created at the end, and perhaps the piece is most interesting as a purely visual exercise. There are five ironing boards onstage. With the dancers in white, white ironing boards, and black curtain behind, Pimsleur hangs a red nylon rope across the back of the space. One by one he drapes 11 red neckties over it. What's black, white and red all over?
At Parkfast Dance Stadium (December 8 to 12).
Motor Magician
June 29
Kenneth King is a critical agent and mediator. He no longer practices as an oracular mouthpiece transmitting cryptic messages from the universe, but he focuses that and relays a sense of the forces that impinge on us. He may be a magician, the old, essential kind, like the ones who ensured the rebirth of the sun at the end of the year. Nothing to do with tricks, and sublimely optimistic. You wouldn't call King's work ritual, but it can have its life resolving power. He's not, I think, worried about keeping the stars in their courses, but he seems to pull together strident, rasping energies, take them on, use them for impulsion, bind them and dispel them.
His recent concert, a continuous, four-part evening, fuses four works. It starts with Bridge/S-C-A-N (Dance Motor), which combines elements from older works into a new group work partly evolved out of the solo King does ---- rhythmic rap by performance artist/poet Bob Holman (with a resilient, upbeat backup by Vito Ricci) which picks up the energy of the preceding sections, trips it into a warmer, more slaphappy vein. Holman's joined by King as the piece slides into S-C-A-N/2, for everybody, with Holman dancing too. Most of the music is by Williams-John Tudor - rich, pulsing sonorities, throbbing hums, thinner quiet stretches that feel safe but riddled with expectancy. Tudor is also responsible for the projections that fill a small screen through much of the early part of the evening: slowly changing slides of aspects of the grid of the George Washington bridge, other bridges, in various phases of construction and at different times of day. Sometimes you might as well be looking at facets of some microscopic but of matter as the intricacies of a giant construction. The slides progress to other fantastical engineering artifacts, like hemispherical constructions turned to the heavens, as artful and ornamental sometimes as the catacombed ceilings of the Alhambra.
The evening opens with a mirror ball turning slowly one way, then the other. Tudor's music is a deep, chordal hum then, and there's a curious, shifting ruby light up on the distant stage that may have something to do with the musical equipment. The effect is ridiculously simple, but, in the vast space of the La Mama Annex, it's hushing, astral, like being amid a silent swirl of stars. The spots of light whirl and whisper, "Pegasus", "Cassiopeia", other names of constellations and zodiacal signs, cities and architectural sites, "Phoenix," and "Versailles". Later the voices slide over each other with scratchier words, "etch, echo, edge..." The projections appear. The dancing takes place in front of the stage, on the big open floor. Four or five dancers enter, and later their numbers thin from time to time. They're in gray jumpsuits that seem vaguely military by virtue of what appear to be narrow, shiny, leather strips in odd places (but maybe they're just innocent zippers). The movement is calm, rather straight and tight colored by little bends, plain arabesques, contractions of the upper chest, cutting sweeps of the arm, terse, delicately angles movements of the head and shoulders. Nobody touches anybody. The movement, back and forth, revs smoothly and determinedly, becoming more insistent, more penetrating, with a hectic undercurrent. Beams of light crisscross n the middle of the floor, and seem to govern the pattern of the dancing. The dancers stay very much in their own tracks, nearly interfering as their movement gets denser or faster or acquires more spatial sweep. They almost clump from time to time as their simple patterns converge. But there's no bumping, or even the danger of it. They seem as sensitive as bats. Meanwhile, the overall patterns they describe seem to be wearing out permanent grooves and gas in the air. King, lean and nervy, mild and introspective too, is most urgent and sharp.
Partly, it's as if he wants to take up no more space with his body, maybe no more space on the planet, than he absolutely must. In a curious way it's as if, in dancing, he were instantly fitting his body into slots that open momentarily in the space around him, drawn into them, subject to some particular space-warp quirk. He is the most compelled of dancers, but the compulsion doesn't seem to be personal; it comes from out there. A friend said she liked King's work because it makes her think. And I agreed. But I don't want to try to be reasonable about it. Its immediate effect is emotional. You felt, anyway I do, that he articulates a deep-rooted distress in the world that we dumbly suffer or wrestle with in a daily way. But King takes the evil on differently, transforms the bludgeoning stress into fragments the way a prism breaks up light.
At La Mama Annex (June 9-11).
Kenneth King is a critical agent and mediator. He no longer practices as an oracular mouthpiece transmitting cryptic messages from the universe, but he focuses that and relays a sense of the forces that impinge on us. He may be a magician, the old, essential kind, like the ones who ensured the rebirth of the sun at the end of the year. Nothing to do with tricks, and sublimely optimistic. You wouldn't call King's work ritual, but it can have its life resolving power. He's not, I think, worried about keeping the stars in their courses, but he seems to pull together strident, rasping energies, take them on, use them for impulsion, bind them and dispel them.
His recent concert, a continuous, four-part evening, fuses four works. It starts with Bridge/S-C-A-N (Dance Motor), which combines elements from older works into a new group work partly evolved out of the solo King does ---- rhythmic rap by performance artist/poet Bob Holman (with a resilient, upbeat backup by Vito Ricci) which picks up the energy of the preceding sections, trips it into a warmer, more slaphappy vein. Holman's joined by King as the piece slides into S-C-A-N/2, for everybody, with Holman dancing too. Most of the music is by Williams-John Tudor - rich, pulsing sonorities, throbbing hums, thinner quiet stretches that feel safe but riddled with expectancy. Tudor is also responsible for the projections that fill a small screen through much of the early part of the evening: slowly changing slides of aspects of the grid of the George Washington bridge, other bridges, in various phases of construction and at different times of day. Sometimes you might as well be looking at facets of some microscopic but of matter as the intricacies of a giant construction. The slides progress to other fantastical engineering artifacts, like hemispherical constructions turned to the heavens, as artful and ornamental sometimes as the catacombed ceilings of the Alhambra.
The evening opens with a mirror ball turning slowly one way, then the other. Tudor's music is a deep, chordal hum then, and there's a curious, shifting ruby light up on the distant stage that may have something to do with the musical equipment. The effect is ridiculously simple, but, in the vast space of the La Mama Annex, it's hushing, astral, like being amid a silent swirl of stars. The spots of light whirl and whisper, "Pegasus", "Cassiopeia", other names of constellations and zodiacal signs, cities and architectural sites, "Phoenix," and "Versailles". Later the voices slide over each other with scratchier words, "etch, echo, edge..." The projections appear. The dancing takes place in front of the stage, on the big open floor. Four or five dancers enter, and later their numbers thin from time to time. They're in gray jumpsuits that seem vaguely military by virtue of what appear to be narrow, shiny, leather strips in odd places (but maybe they're just innocent zippers). The movement is calm, rather straight and tight colored by little bends, plain arabesques, contractions of the upper chest, cutting sweeps of the arm, terse, delicately angles movements of the head and shoulders. Nobody touches anybody. The movement, back and forth, revs smoothly and determinedly, becoming more insistent, more penetrating, with a hectic undercurrent. Beams of light crisscross n the middle of the floor, and seem to govern the pattern of the dancing. The dancers stay very much in their own tracks, nearly interfering as their movement gets denser or faster or acquires more spatial sweep. They almost clump from time to time as their simple patterns converge. But there's no bumping, or even the danger of it. They seem as sensitive as bats. Meanwhile, the overall patterns they describe seem to be wearing out permanent grooves and gas in the air. King, lean and nervy, mild and introspective too, is most urgent and sharp.
Partly, it's as if he wants to take up no more space with his body, maybe no more space on the planet, than he absolutely must. In a curious way it's as if, in dancing, he were instantly fitting his body into slots that open momentarily in the space around him, drawn into them, subject to some particular space-warp quirk. He is the most compelled of dancers, but the compulsion doesn't seem to be personal; it comes from out there. A friend said she liked King's work because it makes her think. And I agreed. But I don't want to try to be reasonable about it. Its immediate effect is emotional. You felt, anyway I do, that he articulates a deep-rooted distress in the world that we dumbly suffer or wrestle with in a daily way. But King takes the evil on differently, transforms the bludgeoning stress into fragments the way a prism breaks up light.
At La Mama Annex (June 9-11).
Nature Girl
March 2
Barbara Roan has a wonderful kind of upfront quality, a smiling vigor: when she reaches out, you expect she'll take hold of something. Remy Charlip's Red Towel Dance (1980), opening Roan's mostly-solo program, shows the flip side: it's intent and hermetic, a grave and precisely measured tease, which Roan performs in gentleman's formal attire and a red terrycloth bath towel. In a dark blue, star-spattered costume, Roan dances her own Knut (1981), suggested by the Egyptian sky goddess. The dance is full of quick, darting gestures and jumping turns. With her hands, Roan quickly and decisively sketches closed and open forms and orbits around herself. I see her describing, drawing, smoothly constructing, like some high-speed architect with a gang of builders. Or maybe she's depicting the characters of the constellations. I like the unstressed, unfussy boldness of her arms, her womanly strength. Somewhere around the middle of the dance, Roan, on the floor, deftly extracts threads from the legs, arms, shoulders of the costume: the front detaches and reveals a paler front emblazoned with a metallic sun. The transformation is lovely, though I don't feel much difference between the night and day aspects of the dance There's a tight, too-bright quality of reined-in energy. No expansiveness to it. And the gleaming costume, handsome as it is, amplifies this.
Phoebe Neville's Nada por Nada is a severe, interestingly ambiguous dance of motherhood and loss (or perhaps wished for motherhood and childlessness), which she handles with control and conviction, in a mostly traditional way. Roan wears a long somber dress, makes cradling scooping gestures, and moves her hands close to her belly. From a wide, bent-kneed stance, Roan repeatedly feeds onto a leg she flings in a giantstep, and plants herself anew. At the deepest point of the dance, Roan kneels with fists and forearms on the floor, her head resting on them, and shifts her body from side to side, as if trying to blot out or evade some fixed fate. And that impossible evasion persist to the end, in an averted face and a hand pushing away. Don't look at me. I don't see you.
In Roan's Taghkanic, the costume (by Sally Ann Parsons and Roan) is something special: a loose, mannish suit of cut-up landscape paintings (by Marjorie Portnow) - lots of blue sky and greenery - on a translucent material. The effect is a cheerful, open light. Roan smiles her juicy smile. The three sections of the dance are subtitled, "stream, mountain, waterfall," but the dance isn't as literally imagistic as it sounds. The first part is full of skipping, skittering footwork, springiness, little buzzing jumps, with a glide to the energy,that underlies the chatter of its small bright moves. Roan's hands are eager and precise in sharp, rhythmic gestures that amplify the gaiety and suggest the curling splashiness of a fast-moving watery surface. The third section uses similar material, more compressed and frenzied, with the roiling watery suggestions of the arms made bolder. The middle section is a rest: Roan reclines, sleeps, curls up, sits, looks up, listens to the ground, locks herself tight as a zoomorphic stone.
Roan choreographed her first "parade" upstate in 1971. And two parades were presented between the solos. At Home, the second, is a parade of personal clutter drawn in on a clothesline, with a narration by Roan to tell you what's what. But the first, The Red Parade, Yellow and Stars, is fresh and witty. An endless string of 10 brisk people keeps crossing, left to right, carrying red objects: a red heart, a red wagon, red sunglasses, red socks, a red hot water bottle...The yellow section starts more slowly, with the lines winding up in a roughly triangular clump, facing back settling to the floor like a set of billiard balls ready for the break. They turn front, gaze upward, collapse slowly, then sort of spill offstage. Of course, there's a yellow parade too: a man with bananas, a man with a lemon, someone with a pineapple...And the final cross, with the paraders tilting and flashing reflective cutouts of stars.
At DTW's Bessie Schonberg Theater (February 11 to 14).
Barbara Roan has a wonderful kind of upfront quality, a smiling vigor: when she reaches out, you expect she'll take hold of something. Remy Charlip's Red Towel Dance (1980), opening Roan's mostly-solo program, shows the flip side: it's intent and hermetic, a grave and precisely measured tease, which Roan performs in gentleman's formal attire and a red terrycloth bath towel. In a dark blue, star-spattered costume, Roan dances her own Knut (1981), suggested by the Egyptian sky goddess. The dance is full of quick, darting gestures and jumping turns. With her hands, Roan quickly and decisively sketches closed and open forms and orbits around herself. I see her describing, drawing, smoothly constructing, like some high-speed architect with a gang of builders. Or maybe she's depicting the characters of the constellations. I like the unstressed, unfussy boldness of her arms, her womanly strength. Somewhere around the middle of the dance, Roan, on the floor, deftly extracts threads from the legs, arms, shoulders of the costume: the front detaches and reveals a paler front emblazoned with a metallic sun. The transformation is lovely, though I don't feel much difference between the night and day aspects of the dance There's a tight, too-bright quality of reined-in energy. No expansiveness to it. And the gleaming costume, handsome as it is, amplifies this.
Phoebe Neville's Nada por Nada is a severe, interestingly ambiguous dance of motherhood and loss (or perhaps wished for motherhood and childlessness), which she handles with control and conviction, in a mostly traditional way. Roan wears a long somber dress, makes cradling scooping gestures, and moves her hands close to her belly. From a wide, bent-kneed stance, Roan repeatedly feeds onto a leg she flings in a giantstep, and plants herself anew. At the deepest point of the dance, Roan kneels with fists and forearms on the floor, her head resting on them, and shifts her body from side to side, as if trying to blot out or evade some fixed fate. And that impossible evasion persist to the end, in an averted face and a hand pushing away. Don't look at me. I don't see you.
In Roan's Taghkanic, the costume (by Sally Ann Parsons and Roan) is something special: a loose, mannish suit of cut-up landscape paintings (by Marjorie Portnow) - lots of blue sky and greenery - on a translucent material. The effect is a cheerful, open light. Roan smiles her juicy smile. The three sections of the dance are subtitled, "stream, mountain, waterfall," but the dance isn't as literally imagistic as it sounds. The first part is full of skipping, skittering footwork, springiness, little buzzing jumps, with a glide to the energy,that underlies the chatter of its small bright moves. Roan's hands are eager and precise in sharp, rhythmic gestures that amplify the gaiety and suggest the curling splashiness of a fast-moving watery surface. The third section uses similar material, more compressed and frenzied, with the roiling watery suggestions of the arms made bolder. The middle section is a rest: Roan reclines, sleeps, curls up, sits, looks up, listens to the ground, locks herself tight as a zoomorphic stone.
Roan choreographed her first "parade" upstate in 1971. And two parades were presented between the solos. At Home, the second, is a parade of personal clutter drawn in on a clothesline, with a narration by Roan to tell you what's what. But the first, The Red Parade, Yellow and Stars, is fresh and witty. An endless string of 10 brisk people keeps crossing, left to right, carrying red objects: a red heart, a red wagon, red sunglasses, red socks, a red hot water bottle...The yellow section starts more slowly, with the lines winding up in a roughly triangular clump, facing back settling to the floor like a set of billiard balls ready for the break. They turn front, gaze upward, collapse slowly, then sort of spill offstage. Of course, there's a yellow parade too: a man with bananas, a man with a lemon, someone with a pineapple...And the final cross, with the paraders tilting and flashing reflective cutouts of stars.
At DTW's Bessie Schonberg Theater (February 11 to 14).
Overeager Beaver
March 23 The glittering smiles and agonized grimaces integral to Gary Davis's eight solos at the Cunningham studio were only the first thing to drive me up the wall. Davis's dances are conglomerates of heroic positions, twisted ecstatic shapes, clumsily difficult jumps, and gymnastic stunts hooked together by mere will, without any rhythmic finesse.
Poem, linked in temper to the narrative of Dylan Thomas's Lament, starts out with Davis frolicking and grinning. He skips and leaps around, then picks up pairs of sticks, held in V's, smacking them on the ground and whirring them through the air. Later, things get more serious, becoming momentarily feline, then angry. One of the sticks gets snapped. The cherubic Davis has a thick, powerful body which he constantly uses in a muscular way. The overall effect is pushy and cute - physically effortful and emotionally ridiculous. Finicky, rococo hands an insinuating glances at the audience are intended to be humorous and conspiratorial, but I'd rather keep my distance from Davis's notions of wit.
In Dog - a cartoon dog imitation done in a colorful cap and a perky black tail - Davis growls and howls in various moods, sticks his tongue out, chases himself. He capers with broken-wristed giddiness, carries a ball in his mouth, even rolls the ball up his arm and bounces it off the bicep. A tail wagging, overeager quality is one bane of the other dances as well. Faun, partly mimetic, begins and ends with Davis - in a shredding, off-the-shoulder leotard - asleep on his side with his arms knotted through folded legs. He goes through yawn-stretch-wake up to rehash the familiar Nijinsky positions, profile walks with diagonal arms and hands tilted down, head thrown back in ecstasy, the familiar stuff from old photos.
In Gymnopedie, Davis lies on a black platform and slowly folds and unfolds his arms and legs from the wrists, elbows, ankles knees, hips. He continues from an angles sitting position, looking like Es and Ws and most of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Bourree includes those slanting Paul Tayloresque jumps that sail down to a squat. Chair plays with lots of things you can do with a body and a chair, but...so what? Solitary Rite, to moaning Yoko One music, is Sagittarian, with Davis often posing as an archer or making bowlike shapes with his body. Usually he seems to wear the aspect of a hunter, although he winds up a victim. He fusses with his costume, rolls down the top of his leotard, unwinds a cloth vine that twines up one thigh, and uses it to pull around himself, make designs, and hoist up his leg. He cries, bites his fists, looking sometimes like one of Martha Graham's overblown jocks engaging in gymnastic grotesqueries - like a jaw-and-hand stand - and knotting himself in ecstatic contortions. Eventually, he hangs himself under a red spotlight.
Davis's dances are dreadfully naive: they're cluttered with gimmickry and fuss and evidence little rationale. Davis bumps from one well-intentioned feat or contrivance to the next with no transitions, n sense to his emotional flipflops, no thread to the movement except whatever might be in his head. I had forgotten what bad was. I had it temporarily confused with dull. Now I remember.
At the Cunningham Studio (March 9 and 10).
Poem, linked in temper to the narrative of Dylan Thomas's Lament, starts out with Davis frolicking and grinning. He skips and leaps around, then picks up pairs of sticks, held in V's, smacking them on the ground and whirring them through the air. Later, things get more serious, becoming momentarily feline, then angry. One of the sticks gets snapped. The cherubic Davis has a thick, powerful body which he constantly uses in a muscular way. The overall effect is pushy and cute - physically effortful and emotionally ridiculous. Finicky, rococo hands an insinuating glances at the audience are intended to be humorous and conspiratorial, but I'd rather keep my distance from Davis's notions of wit.
In Dog - a cartoon dog imitation done in a colorful cap and a perky black tail - Davis growls and howls in various moods, sticks his tongue out, chases himself. He capers with broken-wristed giddiness, carries a ball in his mouth, even rolls the ball up his arm and bounces it off the bicep. A tail wagging, overeager quality is one bane of the other dances as well. Faun, partly mimetic, begins and ends with Davis - in a shredding, off-the-shoulder leotard - asleep on his side with his arms knotted through folded legs. He goes through yawn-stretch-wake up to rehash the familiar Nijinsky positions, profile walks with diagonal arms and hands tilted down, head thrown back in ecstasy, the familiar stuff from old photos.
In Gymnopedie, Davis lies on a black platform and slowly folds and unfolds his arms and legs from the wrists, elbows, ankles knees, hips. He continues from an angles sitting position, looking like Es and Ws and most of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Bourree includes those slanting Paul Tayloresque jumps that sail down to a squat. Chair plays with lots of things you can do with a body and a chair, but...so what? Solitary Rite, to moaning Yoko One music, is Sagittarian, with Davis often posing as an archer or making bowlike shapes with his body. Usually he seems to wear the aspect of a hunter, although he winds up a victim. He fusses with his costume, rolls down the top of his leotard, unwinds a cloth vine that twines up one thigh, and uses it to pull around himself, make designs, and hoist up his leg. He cries, bites his fists, looking sometimes like one of Martha Graham's overblown jocks engaging in gymnastic grotesqueries - like a jaw-and-hand stand - and knotting himself in ecstatic contortions. Eventually, he hangs himself under a red spotlight.
Davis's dances are dreadfully naive: they're cluttered with gimmickry and fuss and evidence little rationale. Davis bumps from one well-intentioned feat or contrivance to the next with no transitions, n sense to his emotional flipflops, no thread to the movement except whatever might be in his head. I had forgotten what bad was. I had it temporarily confused with dull. Now I remember.
At the Cunningham Studio (March 9 and 10).
Plus Ca Change
September 14
I barely remember the oranges in Montreal choreographer Edouard Lock's Oranges. I definitely remember seeing them somewhere. I hope they weren't really important.
Oranges is a generally low-key, methodical dance in many episodes, with lots of small switches of costume accessories, lots of props, ad periodic changes in the color of the paper backdrops which are torn off piecemeal. The usual look of the four dancers and musicians is sort of pared-down punk, nothing outrageous, nothing rank, perfectly near - white shirts, black pants, just a bit severe. The movement's light tight, shivery, sometimes aggressive and pushy, but not very. Subtitled "the search for paradise", Oranges refers to a journey with paper boats, flash cameras, spray-painted words (VOYAGE, BOAT) and there are elements that suggest a possible narrative underpinning, but most of that was too obscure even to puzzle me.
The dancing and music are beautifully interlocked. Composer-musician Michel Lemieux's harsh, rhythmic guitar hooks tightly onto the dancing, sometimes drives it. He prowls the stage, becomes part of the dancing, or stands aside from it. First, Miryam Moutillet in a black feathered hat, black gloves, shoes pants and white shirt walks forward, looking snooty as a fashion model looking like a "lady". She delineates a coolly exact series of gestures that may tell a story. Against the orange paper backdrop, Lock spray-paints a crude outline of Moutillet, and goes on to paint OH TRISTE AMOUR, which may comment on Moutillet's possible story. Shakes his ass as he squeezes those words out. Moutillet returns - no hat, no gloves - and in the same spot does a shaking, convulsing version of the same gestural statement. There's a stink of paint. The episodes proceed. Louise Le Cavalier, inscrutable in narrow sunglasses, throws herself into a rough, lobsterlike, jitterbuggy duet with Louis Guillemette, with abrupt lifts in which she's got diagonally upside down, that sometimes tumble them both to the floor. Lemieux plays his guitar with a screwdriver. There's a frequent element of cross-dressing for the men, who, along with the women, don feathered hats with partial veils and gloves in various colors. They all look attractive in a curious, dated way, in the hats and gloves, but the sexual crossing doesn't appear to make any particular point or have any clear relationship to the other aspects of the piece. It has a very muted, neutral feel.
That, in a way, is the problem with Oranges - obscured relationships and lack of contrast and tension. Even the order in which things happen probably doesn't matter much, since there doesn't seem to be any progress or development. The underlying attitude may be "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Not that there aren't contrasts in Oranges. Some of the movement is restricted to the arms and hands and is clean, even finicky and gestural; sometimes the movements are full - shaky, flinging and loose - though never abandoned. Then there are the milk bottle events, which are quiet and concentrated. The guitarist and Moutillet walk carefully atop a double row of milk bottles. Lock pats the guitarist's sneakers to calm his jittery feet. One of the men sails a paper hat along imaginary waves nearby. When the bottlewalkers meet, they drink milk while the bottles are slowly removed until each is left with only one precarious foot on two bottles. One bottle spills, which is lovely, because, till then, even the disarray has been too pristine. Near the end, Lock hunkers down on four bottles and drinks milk from different ones he alternately lifts out from underfoot. The orange paper is ripped down first through small precut slashes, which permits a bright blue to show in regular patches, then the whole sheet comes down, is thrown aside, and dived into. Wearing a white feathered hat, Lock sticks red roses in slits in the blue backdrop Another guy follows him and tears the paper at each slit so the roses fall one at a time. Then the blue is ripped off, revealing yello. A shot lifting twisting duet for Le Cavalier and Guillemette grows wilder and knocks down the guitarist. And Lock who had hidden himself in the crushed paper backdrops, rocks up out of the crumpled blue sea in a white hat. The yellow, torn off wholesale, exposes white. And at the very end, the five performers stick their heads through it backwards.
Lock is fascinating to watch: his absorption, his half-dreamy look compels you to believe that something's going on. The other dancers, excellent as they are, seem flatter: Moutillet seems as if nothing could discompose her or muss her makeup; Le Cavalier is blank in sunglasses, amiable otherwise; Guillemette is forceful and intense, but about what? They're betrayed by a slight self-conscious edge an awareness of effect. Lock convinces you that he's in a mysterious dream and that the dream is real - but Oranges is his dream, so he's got an advantage.
At the Performing Garage.
I barely remember the oranges in Montreal choreographer Edouard Lock's Oranges. I definitely remember seeing them somewhere. I hope they weren't really important.
Oranges is a generally low-key, methodical dance in many episodes, with lots of small switches of costume accessories, lots of props, ad periodic changes in the color of the paper backdrops which are torn off piecemeal. The usual look of the four dancers and musicians is sort of pared-down punk, nothing outrageous, nothing rank, perfectly near - white shirts, black pants, just a bit severe. The movement's light tight, shivery, sometimes aggressive and pushy, but not very. Subtitled "the search for paradise", Oranges refers to a journey with paper boats, flash cameras, spray-painted words (VOYAGE, BOAT) and there are elements that suggest a possible narrative underpinning, but most of that was too obscure even to puzzle me.
The dancing and music are beautifully interlocked. Composer-musician Michel Lemieux's harsh, rhythmic guitar hooks tightly onto the dancing, sometimes drives it. He prowls the stage, becomes part of the dancing, or stands aside from it. First, Miryam Moutillet in a black feathered hat, black gloves, shoes pants and white shirt walks forward, looking snooty as a fashion model looking like a "lady". She delineates a coolly exact series of gestures that may tell a story. Against the orange paper backdrop, Lock spray-paints a crude outline of Moutillet, and goes on to paint OH TRISTE AMOUR, which may comment on Moutillet's possible story. Shakes his ass as he squeezes those words out. Moutillet returns - no hat, no gloves - and in the same spot does a shaking, convulsing version of the same gestural statement. There's a stink of paint. The episodes proceed. Louise Le Cavalier, inscrutable in narrow sunglasses, throws herself into a rough, lobsterlike, jitterbuggy duet with Louis Guillemette, with abrupt lifts in which she's got diagonally upside down, that sometimes tumble them both to the floor. Lemieux plays his guitar with a screwdriver. There's a frequent element of cross-dressing for the men, who, along with the women, don feathered hats with partial veils and gloves in various colors. They all look attractive in a curious, dated way, in the hats and gloves, but the sexual crossing doesn't appear to make any particular point or have any clear relationship to the other aspects of the piece. It has a very muted, neutral feel.
That, in a way, is the problem with Oranges - obscured relationships and lack of contrast and tension. Even the order in which things happen probably doesn't matter much, since there doesn't seem to be any progress or development. The underlying attitude may be "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Not that there aren't contrasts in Oranges. Some of the movement is restricted to the arms and hands and is clean, even finicky and gestural; sometimes the movements are full - shaky, flinging and loose - though never abandoned. Then there are the milk bottle events, which are quiet and concentrated. The guitarist and Moutillet walk carefully atop a double row of milk bottles. Lock pats the guitarist's sneakers to calm his jittery feet. One of the men sails a paper hat along imaginary waves nearby. When the bottlewalkers meet, they drink milk while the bottles are slowly removed until each is left with only one precarious foot on two bottles. One bottle spills, which is lovely, because, till then, even the disarray has been too pristine. Near the end, Lock hunkers down on four bottles and drinks milk from different ones he alternately lifts out from underfoot. The orange paper is ripped down first through small precut slashes, which permits a bright blue to show in regular patches, then the whole sheet comes down, is thrown aside, and dived into. Wearing a white feathered hat, Lock sticks red roses in slits in the blue backdrop Another guy follows him and tears the paper at each slit so the roses fall one at a time. Then the blue is ripped off, revealing yello. A shot lifting twisting duet for Le Cavalier and Guillemette grows wilder and knocks down the guitarist. And Lock who had hidden himself in the crushed paper backdrops, rocks up out of the crumpled blue sea in a white hat. The yellow, torn off wholesale, exposes white. And at the very end, the five performers stick their heads through it backwards.
Lock is fascinating to watch: his absorption, his half-dreamy look compels you to believe that something's going on. The other dancers, excellent as they are, seem flatter: Moutillet seems as if nothing could discompose her or muss her makeup; Le Cavalier is blank in sunglasses, amiable otherwise; Guillemette is forceful and intense, but about what? They're betrayed by a slight self-conscious edge an awareness of effect. Lock convinces you that he's in a mysterious dream and that the dream is real - but Oranges is his dream, so he's got an advantage.
At the Performing Garage.
Satyrs in Squaresville
December 14
John Paul Vroom's spare, pale, grid-decor is a perfect metaphor for the dull geometry of
Hans Van Manen's Songs without Words. The dancers go through the usual balletic litany of positions in combinations that take them through the usual vague moods of before-and-after some ecstatic moment (usually, some swanny lift), but the walkaround rhythmic patterns are straight out of some modern dance class. Blah blah blah, up, blah, blah, blah, to the floor. Van Manen provides a rhythmic base that is unvarying predictable. Step on every accent. If the music goes aaah, somebody's leg sweeps ahhh.
The dance has lovely moments, and the Ailey dancers do it with conviction and simplicity, but the result is like a suite of methodically clean, empty rooms. The most literal empty room is the pretentious section just before the final one, in which all four couples, having drifted onstage, stand listening to the music forever. I did like Sharrell Mesh and Ronald Brown, Mesh and Nat Orr, Maxine Sherman and Rodney Nugent in their duets. Mesh has a kind of firmness, a self-containment that's pert and elegant. She was attentive to her partner without showiness. More extravagantly dramatic, Sherman and Nugent brought an emotional pitch to their duet that managed to override Van Manen's rhythmic obviousness. Too bad that in its abstract, academic way, Song Without Words, is as routine as "I'm a Little Teapot."
Johnson's Fontessa and Friends is one of those junkshop pieces in which a lot of odds and ends are pushed together, highlighted by a couple of lively ideas. Donna Wood comes on, to the cool, chiming music of the Modern Jazz Quartet, as a classy, mannered, black-gowned lady - the kind who waits for some guy in a tux to open the back door of her limo. There's a batch of half-a-dozen male clowns in white caps, ruffles, briefs and flimsy, loose tops that sometimes come off altogether, sometimes slide down to become skirts, when, accompanying a pair of lovers (Deborah Chase and Kevin Brown) the members of this chunky corps turn into dopey swanmaiden/Wili parodies. Masazumi Chaya has a great time preening his feathers, as his feet twitter with fear, and essays just enough fouettes to make a point. Gary DeLoatch is good in an embarrassingly cute clown role, which requires a lot of hideous playing up to the audience. Now there's this great Oriental box (decor by Edward Burbridge): black and red and gold. It's pushed onstage and just sits there in the glow. It's bigger than a sarcophagus, but probably should be filled with silk robes and rose petals. But it's a muscleboy (Keith McDaniel) who pushes up the lid and bathes in the gold light (the inside of the lid is gilt too). Donna Wood could go for this guy, but, nose to biceps, he's his only love. Only when she pointedly ignores him does she get a rise out of him. Then everything in Fontessa starts to jam together. The lovers rush in and out. Muscles strikes a pose at the thrilling, soapy peak of some Khachaturian (Spartacus). He invites Wood into his gold box; we know what they're doing in there, even if the box doesn't jiggle. But it does tactfully roll itself offstage. The clowns turn up again, and then again in armless dress coats. Wood comes back for a snazzy turn in a bejeweled Vegas bikini. The choreographer tosses in finale after finale; the piece ends, so you think, again, again, again.
Billy Wilson's Concerto in F, which I saw for the first time, is pretty fine, particularly the percussive choral parts. For example, in the first movement, you'll have a group of women - a small, close bunch - moving fast, all wriggly-hips and shoulders and sharp, flashing hands as they zip into lightning arcs, half-circles and tight turns. The movement in much of the piece seems to generate its own excitement, create its own impetus, which just happens to match the Gershwin music The choreography never needs prompting, never waits for the music to set the tone. Against a dark, peaceful set of tree trunks and treetops (by Carol Vollet Garner), three nymphs awaken. They're definitely Botticelli ladies. They've just started to dance together lightly, when three goatish men, adorned with spiraling horns, strike fierce poses in the back. This is Ailey's new Satyriade, a trivial but rather charming powderpuff piece to Ravel's Introduction and Allegro. The satyrs surround the women, who brush them off with the mildest discouragement. It's all as genteel as could be, and a shade more romantic than sexy. There's no brutish ravishment, or even a threat of it; it's more a game of "Let's Pretend." Keith McDaniel goes for Mari Kajiwara and they disport themselves in a dainty pas de deux while the other four fiddle around in back. Gary De Loatch grabs Maxine Sherman in a pretense at assault (Eee! Oooh! Oh!). Then Donna Wood and Kevin Brown engage in a playful, teasing encounter. (Brown brought a beautiful easy grace and sensitive attack to every role.) Everyone intermingles in a brief sextet, the satyrs disappear, the ladies fall into a swoony doze, and we're back to the beginning.
New to the company, Kathryn Posin's Waves was stiff and unsure in its premiere. Only close to the end were the dancers able to work as a unit. Before, each seemed to operate in isolation, doing disconnected steps. The movement impulses in Waves need to keep sparking in a continuity until the gather to a total force, but here he impetus kept knotting up. The tension and difficulty of Waves seemed to tie up the dancers individually; that tension needs to spread around so the dancers become part of the same ring of energy. I was sorry to hear so much canned music at the Ailey performances - except for pianist Lawrence Wolf playing Songs Without Words. The Ailey repertory is becoming more and more varied. But though the dancers a re wonderfully skilled and personable, few seem able to get inside their roles to show more than a glossy surface. There's a high polish, but not much light and show.
At City Center (December 1 to 19).
John Paul Vroom's spare, pale, grid-decor is a perfect metaphor for the dull geometry of
Hans Van Manen's Songs without Words. The dancers go through the usual balletic litany of positions in combinations that take them through the usual vague moods of before-and-after some ecstatic moment (usually, some swanny lift), but the walkaround rhythmic patterns are straight out of some modern dance class. Blah blah blah, up, blah, blah, blah, to the floor. Van Manen provides a rhythmic base that is unvarying predictable. Step on every accent. If the music goes aaah, somebody's leg sweeps ahhh.
The dance has lovely moments, and the Ailey dancers do it with conviction and simplicity, but the result is like a suite of methodically clean, empty rooms. The most literal empty room is the pretentious section just before the final one, in which all four couples, having drifted onstage, stand listening to the music forever. I did like Sharrell Mesh and Ronald Brown, Mesh and Nat Orr, Maxine Sherman and Rodney Nugent in their duets. Mesh has a kind of firmness, a self-containment that's pert and elegant. She was attentive to her partner without showiness. More extravagantly dramatic, Sherman and Nugent brought an emotional pitch to their duet that managed to override Van Manen's rhythmic obviousness. Too bad that in its abstract, academic way, Song Without Words, is as routine as "I'm a Little Teapot."
Johnson's Fontessa and Friends is one of those junkshop pieces in which a lot of odds and ends are pushed together, highlighted by a couple of lively ideas. Donna Wood comes on, to the cool, chiming music of the Modern Jazz Quartet, as a classy, mannered, black-gowned lady - the kind who waits for some guy in a tux to open the back door of her limo. There's a batch of half-a-dozen male clowns in white caps, ruffles, briefs and flimsy, loose tops that sometimes come off altogether, sometimes slide down to become skirts, when, accompanying a pair of lovers (Deborah Chase and Kevin Brown) the members of this chunky corps turn into dopey swanmaiden/Wili parodies. Masazumi Chaya has a great time preening his feathers, as his feet twitter with fear, and essays just enough fouettes to make a point. Gary DeLoatch is good in an embarrassingly cute clown role, which requires a lot of hideous playing up to the audience. Now there's this great Oriental box (decor by Edward Burbridge): black and red and gold. It's pushed onstage and just sits there in the glow. It's bigger than a sarcophagus, but probably should be filled with silk robes and rose petals. But it's a muscleboy (Keith McDaniel) who pushes up the lid and bathes in the gold light (the inside of the lid is gilt too). Donna Wood could go for this guy, but, nose to biceps, he's his only love. Only when she pointedly ignores him does she get a rise out of him. Then everything in Fontessa starts to jam together. The lovers rush in and out. Muscles strikes a pose at the thrilling, soapy peak of some Khachaturian (Spartacus). He invites Wood into his gold box; we know what they're doing in there, even if the box doesn't jiggle. But it does tactfully roll itself offstage. The clowns turn up again, and then again in armless dress coats. Wood comes back for a snazzy turn in a bejeweled Vegas bikini. The choreographer tosses in finale after finale; the piece ends, so you think, again, again, again.
Billy Wilson's Concerto in F, which I saw for the first time, is pretty fine, particularly the percussive choral parts. For example, in the first movement, you'll have a group of women - a small, close bunch - moving fast, all wriggly-hips and shoulders and sharp, flashing hands as they zip into lightning arcs, half-circles and tight turns. The movement in much of the piece seems to generate its own excitement, create its own impetus, which just happens to match the Gershwin music The choreography never needs prompting, never waits for the music to set the tone. Against a dark, peaceful set of tree trunks and treetops (by Carol Vollet Garner), three nymphs awaken. They're definitely Botticelli ladies. They've just started to dance together lightly, when three goatish men, adorned with spiraling horns, strike fierce poses in the back. This is Ailey's new Satyriade, a trivial but rather charming powderpuff piece to Ravel's Introduction and Allegro. The satyrs surround the women, who brush them off with the mildest discouragement. It's all as genteel as could be, and a shade more romantic than sexy. There's no brutish ravishment, or even a threat of it; it's more a game of "Let's Pretend." Keith McDaniel goes for Mari Kajiwara and they disport themselves in a dainty pas de deux while the other four fiddle around in back. Gary De Loatch grabs Maxine Sherman in a pretense at assault (Eee! Oooh! Oh!). Then Donna Wood and Kevin Brown engage in a playful, teasing encounter. (Brown brought a beautiful easy grace and sensitive attack to every role.) Everyone intermingles in a brief sextet, the satyrs disappear, the ladies fall into a swoony doze, and we're back to the beginning.
New to the company, Kathryn Posin's Waves was stiff and unsure in its premiere. Only close to the end were the dancers able to work as a unit. Before, each seemed to operate in isolation, doing disconnected steps. The movement impulses in Waves need to keep sparking in a continuity until the gather to a total force, but here he impetus kept knotting up. The tension and difficulty of Waves seemed to tie up the dancers individually; that tension needs to spread around so the dancers become part of the same ring of energy. I was sorry to hear so much canned music at the Ailey performances - except for pianist Lawrence Wolf playing Songs Without Words. The Ailey repertory is becoming more and more varied. But though the dancers a re wonderfully skilled and personable, few seem able to get inside their roles to show more than a glossy surface. There's a high polish, but not much light and show.
At City Center (December 1 to 19).
The Patter of Little Feet
August 17
Gail Conrad got her tap group going about four years ago. Then she did lots of performances on the streets, where tap grew up - though those original streets were uptown, and hers downtown. More recently, she's been working in another of tap's natural venues, an intimate loft club, Jazz Forum. From the first, she's avoided canned music, even though her choreography is set, and the interplay with a live five-man band makes a profound impact on the freshness of performance.
Of the five old, revised and new pieces Conrad offered, three had narrative premises. She treats narrative lightly, as a whimsical or humorous thread that allows her a lot of leeway in the shape of the piece. It's such a nice security blanket. She can permit the dancing to slide into fantasy because she can so easily reel it in. Conrad may lull you with enough familiarity to spring a surprise, but the story element never becomes constraining or serious enough to demand resolution. It's a charming excuse.
Rialto is a droll piece with the women (Conrad, Cheryl Wawro, Mary Clare Ditton) in little capes, umbrella hats, setting picnic, toasting each other, with red and blue plastic cokes. David Parker slides in and whams down to join the party with a jump. Love Street, a series of blackout vignettes with the dancers in various boy-girl duet and trio groupings is in familiar territory, but it's handled with beautiful enthusiasm and naivete. Like when Tony Scopino - a small guy wearing a fat, very short tie - comes in, radiating optimism. The women just won't notice him. He faints, but no dice. He collapses in their path, and they step over him. When Wawro finally does go to help him up, Parker approaches and, dazzled, she drops the other guy. The dancers (Thomas Sinibaldi's the sixth) work wonderfully with each other, with vivacity and precision. I'm particularly intrigued by Wawro, who gives an elegant spaciousness to her movement, and the tall long-limbed Parker. You expect him to be loose and gangly, but he's snappy, put-together, beautifully focused and intent.
Conrad's dances have a brightness and a vehement, sharply punctuated clarity. There's enough breath in the rhythm and dynamic variation, from breezy to battering - and in the "melody" of sounds from clatter to thump to brush - that you could happily watch with your eyes closed. But you'd miss the handsome line of the dancers, the detailed expression and commentary in the way their hands toss or push, their eyes gleam or dart, their lips purse or smile. Traditional black tap doesn't bother to take much account of the stage space. And Conrad's opener, Line Dance, is just as plain about it. On Broadway, the closing number, is uncomplicated too, though it blasts into exuberant use of the space as it builds. But Conrad usually differentiates the stage areas thoroughly. It matters very much whether the dancers are in front or back, in the middle or in a corner, silhouetted or facing away, offstage or caught in a pose during someone else's turn. Tap often uses the upper body loosely, casually, with a "look ma, no hands" magical ease. Or with the upper body more erect and formally presentational, offers the arms floating or framing the body while the feet chatter away under their own steam. Conrad shapes the whole body, including arms, in a more pointedly dramatic and gestural way. The feet are dramatic too, besides being musically clever, in the sounds they make, in the force with which they drive at the floor, in the speed and size of the steps.
Conrad integrates balletic, ballroom and other popular elements into a clean tap style. She hasn't tried to class up the steps in any phony way, but to amplify them, to give them size when she needs to without having to shift gears into an alien style. Don't forget the band. Michael Blair on drums, Walter Hackett, Jr. on piano, John Hagen on sax, Jesus Perez, Jr. on percussion and Ernesto Provencher on bass and guitar.
At Jazz Forum (July 9 to 31).
Translating from a Modern Language
June 25
Merce Cunningham's Duets has just slipped into American Ballet Theatre's repertory. Almost incidentally, without much advance hoohah. Composed of six short, sequential duets, it's challenging in subtle ways. It's not opulent. It's fast, amusing and goes zip, zap, zop. ABT asked Cunningham for a work but, like other choreographers busy with their own companies and obligations, Cunningham had neither the time nor the energy, nor, probably, the inclination to devise a new work for dancers unacquainted with his style.
Duets was "one of the pieces I thought might be possible," says Cunningham. "it's the easiest in its shape and in everything about it. Much easier to translate than one of my more complex numbers. And the music - for their audience, for whom the idea of music and dance being independent might be quite strange - is not that odd or confusing. I could easily have given them something that would just have been an odd experience, but that doesn't interest me very much. Then, of course, you go through all the shenanigans about when we can rehearse and when they can rehearse. But finally we managed except for the injuries. They must be using understudies of understudies this season."
The rehearsal period has been long, but scattershot. The dancers started learning it in the fall, before going on tour in October, and then again in December, wen they went off again. Each time, they practically had to start from scratch. "Each duet is only two or three minutes long," says Chris Komar of the Cunningham company, who has been rehearsing the dancers, "The material's foreign to begin with, so over two months, you forget it."
"It's a piece," says ABT's Christine Spizzo, "that they fit into some slot that doesn't need to go for Swan Lake or a more involved production. So we haven't sent a lot of hours on the piece, enough to get close to it. We haven't come to the full appreciation of it. I don't feel I'm bringing any insight to it. I'm waiting for this blossoming experience."
Most of the time, in rehearsal, somebody's missing. Sick or hurt of left the company. For example as Cunningham relates, "originally the second duet was to be Martine van Hamel and Kevin MacKenzie. We started to work with Martine - Kevin was injured or something. So we had somebody substitute for him. We rehearsed, and then we went away, and suddenly Martine was injured and we'd never seen Kevin and at some point, we rehearsed with Lisa de Ribere, who now does it, and Kevin was still not around. And there was a fellow names Larry Pech - is that right? - and he learned it. And then we'd go back and Chris would say, "well, Kevin was there today." But I wasn't there so I still hadn't seen him. And the time I went last week Kevin wasn't there, but Larry and de Ribere, and I asked, "Is this who's going to do it?" and they said, "oh, no," Kevin would be there tomorrow and you're never sure who's going to be in the dance.
"I've tried to devise ways of choreographing so if somebody isn't there I could still do the dances. And some dances we can do on our own even if someone is ill, without that person in it. Just like in a landscape if one of the trees were moved. And then you put it back. But some dances don't work that way, and you have to have people there to take the parts."
"Not only did I not see Duets when the Cunningham company was at City Center," says Spizzo, "but I've never seen the company. I have no frame of reference for what we're doing. It's a totally unfamiliar way of moving Extremely foreign. Well, actually no...it's his approach to putting it all together that's so strange. Like the contrast between the rhythms and tempos being at once aggressive and free, yet conscientiously controlled and tight. He said that the other day.
"I think, basically - I'm not just speaking for myself - we all approached Duets initially like children, open and ready for anything. Then, as we learned bits and pieces of it, and saw each other work, and saw how it fit together, we developed some negative responses. The unfamiliarities and difficulties became negative forces for us. And we had to deal with that, and in a short time. Now, most of us are at the point where we have to break even farther through to appreciate the difficulties of it. It feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And we have to make that a learning experience to enjoy."
"I don't think it's fair to the dancers," Cunningham remarks, "if there isn't enough time to work out something, if something is strange for the and they feel uncomfortable with it. What's the point to that? "What happens mostly," he suggests, "is that accents are changed simply because the ABT people are trained to think another way. Things that my dancers do that aren't as strongly accented are things that ballet dancers know how to do, so they automatically accent those things. And, I think, some dancers think that if they can't make something work for themselves immediately, that it's not right. If something isn't going to be beautiful immediately, they back away. They don't see the possibility of working at something and then it can become part of them."
"If dancers work at something - and most really do try to figure out what they're doing - they can make something grow on them. As they do it, they find more and more how to. Like when you have a new piece of clothing, you have to wear it a while before it fits. The ones who haven't had a chance to work at it enough feel slightly uncomfortable. They don't know where to place themselves because the steps don't seem that unfamiliar in one way, but they are, because the rhythms are all different, and the accents. With the two or three couples who've been at this the longest with us, it strikes me that the dances begin to "come out" on them.'
"I told them dancing's like walking a tightrope. One side is that you want to do the steps properly, clearly, or whatever they're supposed to be. The other side is a kind of abandon. You have to have both. So it isn't just doing a step properly. It's also that you amplify that. Small steps, even though they're small, you have to make them big. Large. So they come out. The step will remain small by its nature. But if you struggle to make it big, then it has more energy, more life."
Everyone agrees that the dancers have been pretty adaptable and venturesome. But, according to Komar, the hardest things have been "dancing big. Taking space. Using all the space they have and, along with that, doing movements fast, and sill keeping them big. A lot of that has to do with being used to having musical boundaries, which pretty much state how big your movement can be, or ow small. You have this musical time that you do the movement inside of. Without that, the movement can be anything. So they have a tendency, when they want to do fast things, to rush through them, ba-boom, ba-boom, rather than making the time themselves."
"In the beginning, when we learned it," says Spizzo, "Cunningham was stressing more of the way he wanted the body shapes to work - like initiating movement from the bottom of the spine. Then we dropped it. We remember what he was talking about, but we didn't practice it enough, and lost the natural feeling for it. When we came back to the piece, he wasn't emphasizing that so much. "Originally, we videotaped each couple after discussing the action of the lower back. And I really thought I was doing what he said. I consciously was applying it, trying to move from the base of the spine, and you couldn't tell. It was as if I hadn't tried at all. For me it was so depressing. Maybe that's why when he came back to us in April, he seemed to have let it go. We're just sort of adapting to our own way of moving. And he doesn't seem unhappy about that."
"We could absorb it eventually! But you can't just be taught to do it and do it. It's something internal. You have to find it. That's what happened with Paul Taylor's Airs. I was fighting it all the way because I hurt so bad and every time we'd do a rehearsal and repeat and repeat and repeat and the taut thighs would ache, and the kneecaps, and the bare skin against the linoleum...you'd look like you just fell off your bike. The Cunningham's not like that. Anyway, it wasn't till I performed it that I began to enjoy it, and after I'd done it 10 times, I really enjoyed it. I learned how to pace it, how to control and expand it."
"Actually, I'm not sure why we're doing this. Nobody's making a big deal about it. It's sort of incidental. It's so odd. There must be a secret then. There must be a learning experience in it for us. Cunningham has thought about what he's doing for so many years, he must know something we don't know."
For the dancers, the most discomfiting element is the lack of music in rehearsal. "The absolutely most important aspect of our daily routine is missing," says Spizzo. "We don't have set music to respond to, to suggest emotion, to suggest an energy level, to be a foundation for us. We've had to work in silence with each other as couples and learn a rhythmical, physical, give-and-take relationship. Although the steps are not that complex - it's more like running, jumping, skipping - to put them together in a coordinated way with another person, with no musical framework, not even much reference as to where you should be on stage...it's so vague compared to how we're used to working. The music which will be used in performance, based on Irish jig rhythms, kind of cute, is on four tapes and they play them in random order. It's never the same. That randomness is something that never comes into our work. We know we can rely on the same things to happen all the time."
"The section that I do," remarks Kevin MacKenzie, really reflects what I remember of Merce's pieces, like when energy is interrupted. Like when you throw a ball and you expect it to go somewhere, and instead it goes...whsst...off! That's how his works strikes me visually, like there's no gravity involved or too much."
What's most interesting to MacKenzie is that Duets goes from "such quick to such slooow, such contrasting tempos. As I begin to see the ballet, each duet seems to be on a wider phrase of stop-go, stop-go, stop-go, slow slw, slow, fastfastfast, stop-go...and they're in different groupings of that. It looks hard to do, but it's not once you get the rhythms going." "MacKenzie's a very concentrated performer," remarks Komar. "I taught it to him in half an hour. Martine had already learned it. And he immediately picked it up, did it, and the two of them together were like one. Generally, there's a lack of attention between partners. They don't look at each other. Even when they're doing difficult things they're looking in the mirror. And that winds up taking the focus away from what the audience is eventually looking at."
"Doing it in silence," says MacKenzie, "your first reaction is to put the steps into a rhythm or a breath, so the two of you can work together and change he rhythm in the same mode. Then, all of a sudden, it's to a percussion score that has nothing to do with what you're doing, and that score changes every time. Perhaps, during the time you're doing something very still over a long breath, they may have picked the tape that has 55 guys out there banging on whatever they're banging on. It does affect how you approach the movement.
"In working on something new like this," Spizzo says, "you can't just give up a certain idea. At first we're like children, then we get defensive. It's hard to just trust the choreographer's intentions. You know I've done Jardin aux Lilas for years. Two different parts. Last year I learned a more significant girl and I never learned the part well. There wasn't time to learn all the steps, much less the character, motivation, who I was relating to, and why I was there. I went on stage and did it and did it and I was awful and I hated it every time A few weeks ago Tudor rehearsed it. He spent a good deal of time, not so much cleaning up steps and spacing, but to work on the psychology of the couples. He got us talking and it wasn't just me the character talking, but me, Chris Spizzo, talking to George Thompson, and we had this real, actual, physical, mental, everything relationship going on. And it was then, finally, that some life came into what I was doing. And I had to trust Tudor enough instead of thinking, 'oh, this is stupid.' I had to trust his reasons. And the steps seemed easier all of a sudden, and the ballet had meaning for me. He emphasized the coupling, which is why I mention it in relation to Duets. Because Merce had allowed us, as couples, to experience each other, each other's way of wanting to fall and travel and stop. And that's what it's about. The coupling. Not me getting out there with Robbie La Fosse and doing my interpretation of Cunningham. The coupling."
Uncommon Ground
May 11
One nice thing about Pennsylvania Ballet's "In Celebration of Women Choreographers" was that it made it pretty clear that women choreographers don't necessarily have anything in common. In fact, the program was rather eccentric: it opened with Doris Humphrey's modern dance classic Shakers, a constrained, energetic, purifying ritual with ecstatic outbreaks.
The dancers proved themselves later on, but in Shakers they were ill at ease. They were at high pitch, but this made them unsure and teetery, too sticklike, too forced. They couldn't convince as a community, which was crucial. There needed to be a better balance between frustration and exaltation. Too familiarly neurotic, what we saw would have shaken any community apart. More seriously, the dancers couldn't dig into the floor enough, or use their weight in a way that would have given the dance the grounding it desperately needed. Disconnected from the earth, the dance felt chopped off, as if half of it were missing.
Guest artist Anabelle Gamson, dancing three works of Isadora Duncan, uses her weight with the surest inflection, and her hands and her shining face speak with exact nuance. The Duncan dances are not complicated in terms of steps, and they use stage space in a plain and emphatic way, but Gamson makes you see their authority because she gives each moment its full worth with absolute clarity of intention. So nothing seems overstated - not the raging fists smashing down on the floor in Revolutionary Etude - or airy-fairy - like the rippling wavelike runs in The Blue Danube could be. Duncan may have performed these dances differently. It doesn't matter. Gamson makes them absolutely authentic.
Loyce Houlton's Galaxies, to Schoenberg, is a twirly, twisty stick-your-leg-up mess. A busy, unfocused, unwatchable modern ballet with truly horrible costumes, with "free-form" gaping holes in the chest dribbling strings of color. Fortunately, in Senta Driver's Resettings, you could see that the dancers could dance with intelligence and food will when given the chance. I enjoyed Resettings, but I had a difficult time with it, partly because the information that Driver used the plot elements of La Sylphide in the dance distracted me from the dance itself. I kept looking for bits of plot, and plot kept flying out the window.
The piece starts with a lineup of dancers, humming. A couple (Jeffrey Gribler and Linda Karash) separate from the line, leaning, turning together in a playful duet with an easy, teasing gaiety that stretches through the whole piece. As is common in Driver's dances, the work is democratic, so the girl hefts the guy, swings with him clamped around her body. She promenades him, cradles him, and they pursue each other in running, hopping phrases, lightly pushing each other, turning, enfolding. She somersaults over him where he's flat on the floor, then drags him backward to the group with a grin on his face. There are nice sounds coming from the group - rhythmic thumps, horsey clops and a soothing dental ts ts ts.
Resettings proceeds in episodes, with soloists emerging from the group in twos and threes, then disappearing back into it. The group itself rolls apart, breaking into three groups that fall or drop, repeatedly, in sequence. It reassembles as a line for a delightful, slightly snotty series of poker faced swings, as they enthusiastically recite: WONderful, MARvelous, EXcellent, EFfortless, which acquires a new rhythmic accent when it quickly becomes outRAGEous, misLEADing, preTENtions, disGRACEful. An amusing swipe at judgmental members of the audience. Later we see a kind of mild rivalry between two girls in a face-off, throwing themselves from side to side, or a boy-girl duet with a second girl comfortably left out, looking rather like a stranded mermaid but perfectly content. In the last section, Purcell's "Dido's Lament" plays in an orchestral version as the dancers, in turn, run out of a cluster along a parabola, and swing into a brief, twisted shape or jump or phrase, near the far end, before returning. As they go, one by one, the distance shortens until there's no more separation and the group itself opens into a big moving circle. At the very end, Gribler is rumbled over the heads of the group, which proceeds across the stage like some fat caterpillar. The group deposits him on the floor as they pass, drops out a woman further along. But however much people are separated from the group, they never seem alienated or excluded. Everything's temporary. So they're on the floor. Soon they won't be.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (April 6 to 11).
One nice thing about Pennsylvania Ballet's "In Celebration of Women Choreographers" was that it made it pretty clear that women choreographers don't necessarily have anything in common. In fact, the program was rather eccentric: it opened with Doris Humphrey's modern dance classic Shakers, a constrained, energetic, purifying ritual with ecstatic outbreaks.
The dancers proved themselves later on, but in Shakers they were ill at ease. They were at high pitch, but this made them unsure and teetery, too sticklike, too forced. They couldn't convince as a community, which was crucial. There needed to be a better balance between frustration and exaltation. Too familiarly neurotic, what we saw would have shaken any community apart. More seriously, the dancers couldn't dig into the floor enough, or use their weight in a way that would have given the dance the grounding it desperately needed. Disconnected from the earth, the dance felt chopped off, as if half of it were missing.
Guest artist Anabelle Gamson, dancing three works of Isadora Duncan, uses her weight with the surest inflection, and her hands and her shining face speak with exact nuance. The Duncan dances are not complicated in terms of steps, and they use stage space in a plain and emphatic way, but Gamson makes you see their authority because she gives each moment its full worth with absolute clarity of intention. So nothing seems overstated - not the raging fists smashing down on the floor in Revolutionary Etude - or airy-fairy - like the rippling wavelike runs in The Blue Danube could be. Duncan may have performed these dances differently. It doesn't matter. Gamson makes them absolutely authentic.
Loyce Houlton's Galaxies, to Schoenberg, is a twirly, twisty stick-your-leg-up mess. A busy, unfocused, unwatchable modern ballet with truly horrible costumes, with "free-form" gaping holes in the chest dribbling strings of color. Fortunately, in Senta Driver's Resettings, you could see that the dancers could dance with intelligence and food will when given the chance. I enjoyed Resettings, but I had a difficult time with it, partly because the information that Driver used the plot elements of La Sylphide in the dance distracted me from the dance itself. I kept looking for bits of plot, and plot kept flying out the window.
The piece starts with a lineup of dancers, humming. A couple (Jeffrey Gribler and Linda Karash) separate from the line, leaning, turning together in a playful duet with an easy, teasing gaiety that stretches through the whole piece. As is common in Driver's dances, the work is democratic, so the girl hefts the guy, swings with him clamped around her body. She promenades him, cradles him, and they pursue each other in running, hopping phrases, lightly pushing each other, turning, enfolding. She somersaults over him where he's flat on the floor, then drags him backward to the group with a grin on his face. There are nice sounds coming from the group - rhythmic thumps, horsey clops and a soothing dental ts ts ts.
Resettings proceeds in episodes, with soloists emerging from the group in twos and threes, then disappearing back into it. The group itself rolls apart, breaking into three groups that fall or drop, repeatedly, in sequence. It reassembles as a line for a delightful, slightly snotty series of poker faced swings, as they enthusiastically recite: WONderful, MARvelous, EXcellent, EFfortless, which acquires a new rhythmic accent when it quickly becomes outRAGEous, misLEADing, preTENtions, disGRACEful. An amusing swipe at judgmental members of the audience. Later we see a kind of mild rivalry between two girls in a face-off, throwing themselves from side to side, or a boy-girl duet with a second girl comfortably left out, looking rather like a stranded mermaid but perfectly content. In the last section, Purcell's "Dido's Lament" plays in an orchestral version as the dancers, in turn, run out of a cluster along a parabola, and swing into a brief, twisted shape or jump or phrase, near the far end, before returning. As they go, one by one, the distance shortens until there's no more separation and the group itself opens into a big moving circle. At the very end, Gribler is rumbled over the heads of the group, which proceeds across the stage like some fat caterpillar. The group deposits him on the floor as they pass, drops out a woman further along. But however much people are separated from the group, they never seem alienated or excluded. Everything's temporary. So they're on the floor. Soon they won't be.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (April 6 to 11).
Under the Stars of Exile
August 31
The Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park looks shabby, like everything else left to the mercy of the public. The audience that came to see the Kurdish dancers searches for benches that weren't broken. In front of me, a woman went looking for the nuts and bolts that had been removed from the loose front slat of her bench, and to her amazement, found them nearby on the ground.
Nonprofessionals, the group of about 10 young Kurdish dancers and musicians, doubling as singers, now hail from Washington, D.C., Nashville, and North Dakota. But they were among the 700 refugees who fled after the 1975-76 Iran-Iraq war. For this modest performance, in memory of a homeland they don't expect to see again, the male dancers wore baggy brown jumpsuits bound with wide sashes, and flattish red and white turbans. The women were in long, loose, filmy dresses, often with decorated waistcoats, and sometimes little caps. Kurdish music was played by two musicians on guitar, electric organ and rhythm machine; the result, I'm sure, must have been much more rhythmically inflexible than the real thing.
The dancing seemed kin to some of the line dances of the Balkan nations, Greece and Armenia, except that the sexes were mixed, alternating in the line, and the women didn't do the usual daintier, neater, more modest version of the men's steps. The lead dancer twirls a scarf. The line is tight, bouncing, with each dancer erect and compact in his or her own space. The patterns - like step, lift, step, hold - proceed consistently forward, though there are sharp changes in the directions the dancers face, and the pattern is sometimes dotted with small snapping jumps. One man let lots of little jiggles flutter the upper body in response to his steps. And during the love songs that followed the first dance, as a willing audience clapped along, he soloed briefly, free style, with light, nearly shuffling steps, his arms curled delicately in the air. The same ebullient fellow appeared during two other songs, doing a series of showy little kicking jumps from a squatting position, with his arms aloft, breaking with a staccato scamper of ratatat flat-footed steps, shimmying in the shoulders with a teasing sensuality to amplify the jiggle that accompanies hard, springy footwork. This is the guy who, it seems, has had his car broken into twice today, losing his costume and tapes the first time, and everything else in the trunk the second, ("If the thief who took the costume is here, give it back!")
Another dance sweeps much more through space; the linked hands of the dancers become the engine for that motion. And the dancers really warm to this, yipping, yelping, gleaming with smiles. The audience was invited to join the last dance - just hook onto the line - and maybe 60 or a hundred people did. Didn't now the dances, didn't need to, kept the rhythms, tried to follow the steps, fudged around. It was fine. The men mostly had to be dragged up by their women, but seemed to be as happy as anyone to be dancing. I guess if they don't act like they don't want to, they lose points on the big macho scoreboard in the sky. When I left, they were on the third "last" dance of the evening.
At Naumberg Bandshell, Central Park (August 19).
The Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park looks shabby, like everything else left to the mercy of the public. The audience that came to see the Kurdish dancers searches for benches that weren't broken. In front of me, a woman went looking for the nuts and bolts that had been removed from the loose front slat of her bench, and to her amazement, found them nearby on the ground.
Nonprofessionals, the group of about 10 young Kurdish dancers and musicians, doubling as singers, now hail from Washington, D.C., Nashville, and North Dakota. But they were among the 700 refugees who fled after the 1975-76 Iran-Iraq war. For this modest performance, in memory of a homeland they don't expect to see again, the male dancers wore baggy brown jumpsuits bound with wide sashes, and flattish red and white turbans. The women were in long, loose, filmy dresses, often with decorated waistcoats, and sometimes little caps. Kurdish music was played by two musicians on guitar, electric organ and rhythm machine; the result, I'm sure, must have been much more rhythmically inflexible than the real thing.
The dancing seemed kin to some of the line dances of the Balkan nations, Greece and Armenia, except that the sexes were mixed, alternating in the line, and the women didn't do the usual daintier, neater, more modest version of the men's steps. The lead dancer twirls a scarf. The line is tight, bouncing, with each dancer erect and compact in his or her own space. The patterns - like step, lift, step, hold - proceed consistently forward, though there are sharp changes in the directions the dancers face, and the pattern is sometimes dotted with small snapping jumps. One man let lots of little jiggles flutter the upper body in response to his steps. And during the love songs that followed the first dance, as a willing audience clapped along, he soloed briefly, free style, with light, nearly shuffling steps, his arms curled delicately in the air. The same ebullient fellow appeared during two other songs, doing a series of showy little kicking jumps from a squatting position, with his arms aloft, breaking with a staccato scamper of ratatat flat-footed steps, shimmying in the shoulders with a teasing sensuality to amplify the jiggle that accompanies hard, springy footwork. This is the guy who, it seems, has had his car broken into twice today, losing his costume and tapes the first time, and everything else in the trunk the second, ("If the thief who took the costume is here, give it back!")
Another dance sweeps much more through space; the linked hands of the dancers become the engine for that motion. And the dancers really warm to this, yipping, yelping, gleaming with smiles. The audience was invited to join the last dance - just hook onto the line - and maybe 60 or a hundred people did. Didn't now the dances, didn't need to, kept the rhythms, tried to follow the steps, fudged around. It was fine. The men mostly had to be dragged up by their women, but seemed to be as happy as anyone to be dancing. I guess if they don't act like they don't want to, they lose points on the big macho scoreboard in the sky. When I left, they were on the third "last" dance of the evening.
At Naumberg Bandshell, Central Park (August 19).
Word Games
October 26
The wonderful drumming of Auchee Lee underlies the dancing in Jane Comfort's Incorrect Translations. Often, the percussion meshes with texts of repetitive phrases (by Comfort, or, later, by Maneco Bueno, drifting into Portuguese). And it is the relation to the drum, the interweaving of dance steps and words with its reliable but fluctuating rhythms, that, in part, gives Comfort's work its refreshing drive.
Incorrect Translations combines two contrary dance ingredients which complement each other in the event. One is a curt, decisive gesture vocabulary that couples with verbal phrases delivered with consistent coolness or stylized - and perfectly regular - affect. The alternate is a lilting, springy field of dancing that's ignited, nourished and challenged by the drum rhythms. The upper body and arms sometimes dip, swing into, and amplify the motion generated by the feet, sometimes the top just rides the action quietly as can be. The dancers speak the text from the sidelines, or as they move. Comfort sets the ground in her opening solo, accompanied by Lee's low, rhythmic tapping, slowly teaching us her word/sign equivalents ("Right" swings the right arm out in a low, underhand curve; "that's right!" whips out a pistol-fingered left hand; "sure!" sets hands on hips). Later on, in various solos, duets, trios, we see this material handled as the phrases/gestures are repeated and juxtaposed, combined in sequences that challenge speed and precision (like the triple repeat: "IwantthatIwantthatIwantthat").
The juxtapositions of phrases that create nearly sensible verbal interactions, paired with the automatic, marionette-like moves of the dancers (sometimes two or three in unison) make for moments of rather abstract humor in temporarily coherent contexts. The repeating words and phrases, always with the same quality of expression and intensity, unaffected by what has been done and said, a moment before, can also be, quite suddenly, funny, simultaneously familiar and remote.
Comfort's first solo also carries the seeds of the later, spacious, rhythmic movement sections in small, odd, side-to-side shifting, angling moves at the hips, knees, ankles. The solo expands when Chris Burnside joins her in a gimpy,, up-and-down duet that swings around the space. The way they're together, but not always precisely, makes me wonder if they're sometimes second-guessing each other. The duet becomes a trio with Karen Callaghan. Then there's a one-shot acrobatic duet for Terry Creach and Mary Forlenza with cartwheels, handstands, low lifts, strong, wheeling carries. Ann Papoulis starts a solo running circles at a fierce speed, sometimes thwacking her feet incredibly loudly on the floor as she goes, occasionally seeming to try to go two ways at once. She's got impressive force. Creach joins her in a giddy-making duet. All the moving sections display a sporty sense of challenge: a bit like a kicky endurance contest, but never a grind. There's a sense of give-and-take. Two couples in a quick, racing section pit different rhythms against one another in the same gleeful spirit. And the last part, for alternating trios, and eventually all six dancers together, rushes like a swinging, surging Samba in a modern American idiom.
Comfort has a certain kinship with David Gordon in her use of words. Gordon's work is more faceted and teasing. He toys more with meaning, expression and intention in a delicate way, while creating ephemeral narrative contexts. Comfort holds the expressive quality constant, links the words or phrases with the same routine gestures, and bleeds the words of meaning. She shares with people like Charles Moulton an interest in precise rhythmic games, which you see in the brisk, tight patterns of the gestural parts as well as in the intricate rhythmic exchanges of the other sections. But there's also a friendly, gracious quality. The flow of movement is fast, unstoppable; it must be wearing, but it breathes too, surges and relaxes with the tempered wildness of some Bulgarian or Romanian dances. The tricky steps fit neatly into the rhythmic structure and though the shape of the dancing may be a kind of maze, if anyone loses the thread, as happens undisastrously from time to time, they can slip back into it a phrase of two later. The flow of movement accommodates this quite naturally and without penalty.
In speaking, the dancers were perfect. They weren't "phony expressive", didn't flatten the words out either. The words came across sharp and vivid, as if original, no matter how often repeated, and psychology didn't intrude where it wasn't wanted. It's hard to say why the parts of the piece fit so comfortably. Of course, the percussion bound everything. But doing this kind of thing - exact, controlled, and in place, for example - usually awakens the need or desire for something opposite - like movement that generates a looser, more rippling energy. And Comfort's Incorrect Translations seems partly built on this response.
At Dance Theater Workshop (Tuesdays from October 12 to November 2).
The wonderful drumming of Auchee Lee underlies the dancing in Jane Comfort's Incorrect Translations. Often, the percussion meshes with texts of repetitive phrases (by Comfort, or, later, by Maneco Bueno, drifting into Portuguese). And it is the relation to the drum, the interweaving of dance steps and words with its reliable but fluctuating rhythms, that, in part, gives Comfort's work its refreshing drive.
Incorrect Translations combines two contrary dance ingredients which complement each other in the event. One is a curt, decisive gesture vocabulary that couples with verbal phrases delivered with consistent coolness or stylized - and perfectly regular - affect. The alternate is a lilting, springy field of dancing that's ignited, nourished and challenged by the drum rhythms. The upper body and arms sometimes dip, swing into, and amplify the motion generated by the feet, sometimes the top just rides the action quietly as can be. The dancers speak the text from the sidelines, or as they move. Comfort sets the ground in her opening solo, accompanied by Lee's low, rhythmic tapping, slowly teaching us her word/sign equivalents ("Right" swings the right arm out in a low, underhand curve; "that's right!" whips out a pistol-fingered left hand; "sure!" sets hands on hips). Later on, in various solos, duets, trios, we see this material handled as the phrases/gestures are repeated and juxtaposed, combined in sequences that challenge speed and precision (like the triple repeat: "IwantthatIwantthatIwantthat").
The juxtapositions of phrases that create nearly sensible verbal interactions, paired with the automatic, marionette-like moves of the dancers (sometimes two or three in unison) make for moments of rather abstract humor in temporarily coherent contexts. The repeating words and phrases, always with the same quality of expression and intensity, unaffected by what has been done and said, a moment before, can also be, quite suddenly, funny, simultaneously familiar and remote.
Comfort's first solo also carries the seeds of the later, spacious, rhythmic movement sections in small, odd, side-to-side shifting, angling moves at the hips, knees, ankles. The solo expands when Chris Burnside joins her in a gimpy,, up-and-down duet that swings around the space. The way they're together, but not always precisely, makes me wonder if they're sometimes second-guessing each other. The duet becomes a trio with Karen Callaghan. Then there's a one-shot acrobatic duet for Terry Creach and Mary Forlenza with cartwheels, handstands, low lifts, strong, wheeling carries. Ann Papoulis starts a solo running circles at a fierce speed, sometimes thwacking her feet incredibly loudly on the floor as she goes, occasionally seeming to try to go two ways at once. She's got impressive force. Creach joins her in a giddy-making duet. All the moving sections display a sporty sense of challenge: a bit like a kicky endurance contest, but never a grind. There's a sense of give-and-take. Two couples in a quick, racing section pit different rhythms against one another in the same gleeful spirit. And the last part, for alternating trios, and eventually all six dancers together, rushes like a swinging, surging Samba in a modern American idiom.
Comfort has a certain kinship with David Gordon in her use of words. Gordon's work is more faceted and teasing. He toys more with meaning, expression and intention in a delicate way, while creating ephemeral narrative contexts. Comfort holds the expressive quality constant, links the words or phrases with the same routine gestures, and bleeds the words of meaning. She shares with people like Charles Moulton an interest in precise rhythmic games, which you see in the brisk, tight patterns of the gestural parts as well as in the intricate rhythmic exchanges of the other sections. But there's also a friendly, gracious quality. The flow of movement is fast, unstoppable; it must be wearing, but it breathes too, surges and relaxes with the tempered wildness of some Bulgarian or Romanian dances. The tricky steps fit neatly into the rhythmic structure and though the shape of the dancing may be a kind of maze, if anyone loses the thread, as happens undisastrously from time to time, they can slip back into it a phrase of two later. The flow of movement accommodates this quite naturally and without penalty.
In speaking, the dancers were perfect. They weren't "phony expressive", didn't flatten the words out either. The words came across sharp and vivid, as if original, no matter how often repeated, and psychology didn't intrude where it wasn't wanted. It's hard to say why the parts of the piece fit so comfortably. Of course, the percussion bound everything. But doing this kind of thing - exact, controlled, and in place, for example - usually awakens the need or desire for something opposite - like movement that generates a looser, more rippling energy. And Comfort's Incorrect Translations seems partly built on this response.
At Dance Theater Workshop (Tuesdays from October 12 to November 2).