Reviews 1982
Yves Montand Has Lot of Gaul
May 4
"If there’s a fire, it’s Montand who finds the water. If you’re losing blood, it’s Montand who knows how to make a tourniquet,” says Simone Signoret in her memoir. Yves Montand, her husband, is 60 now. In a suit he looks like an affluent businessman, but in his lapel is a Solidarity button that he intends to wear until Walesa’s out of jail. He’s just up from a catnap, blessed with the knack of some performers on grueling schedules for dozing off instantly and putting themselves quickly together afterwards. Two inches over six feet, he seems even bigger - not because of his bulk, but because of his substance. He’s exactly the person who you’d expect to meet from seeing Z, State of Siege, The Wages of Fear, The Sleeping Car Murders, Cesar et Rosalie, L’Aveu, La Guerre Est Fini. He is the same as all those men: a tough guy, a man of honor, a man trying to be true, hoping to make the best decisions, a man who laughs easily and speaks his mind. He seems unafraid. In short, he’d do fine as anybody’s lover, husband, daddy, pal.
In America we know him as an actor - we’ve seen maybe 20 of his 55 films. But he made his name as a singer, and it’s as a singer that he’ll open his one man show at the Metropolitan Opera House September 7 to 12. And nothing in the films, including the musicals Let’s Make Love and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, prepares you for the beauty of Montand’s voice when he’s singing in French, for its warmth, flexibility, and composure.
Montand’s grayer, his furrowed face a little softer, and relaxes into expressions of worry and sadness. But his vivacity sets his eyes twinkling with amusement, his hands flying, turns his face to rubber. For this reason, he’s leery of being photographed when he’s preoccupied - he doesn’t mind looking ugly, but he doesn’t want to look like a goof. Hates shots of himself with his mouth open. One familiar personal gesture seems almost a habit, that of partly shielding his mouth with his right hand. You see one version of it in the ads for the Met engagement. It’s a curiously shy mannerism, not particularly feminine, but somehow suggesting the way and older woman might try to hide the gap of a missing tooth. One of those gestures that’s meant to distract, and fascinates instead.
Montand’s family emigrated from Italy to Marseilles when he was two. He started working in a factory at 11, and at 18 studied hairdressing. A bio says that his customers were his first audience. In one of the giddy movie musicals of the late ‘30’s, he might well have sung as he snipped.
“I wanted to be a movie star,” he bops in a singsong voice. “That was my dream in 1938 when I started in a Marseilles suburb. In front of my house in the little cafe every Saturday night there were singers, attractions, illusionistes, - the tradition of the music hall, like vaudeville. I said to myself, ‘Okay, I start with singing.’ But I wanted to be a movie star.” He began with some songs of Chevalier and Charles Trenet, and a Donald Duck imitation. And after the first moments of stage fright, “I found singing so terrifying and so exciting that I didn’t think anymore about movies.”
“Also, it was the tradition in Europe that the singer must find not only his own material, routines and so on, plus his name, but how he dress, Now it’s not important, but then...
“Chevalier was the little hat, Trenet the trick with the eyes and his hat. Piaf was the black dress with the touch of white at the collar...So I tried to find something...To put on a jacket with a cravat is fine, but you’re a prisoner if you want to do some movement...” He settled for workmanlike brown pants and shirt.
Now he only switches to the brown in the second part of his show, for old times’ sake. He begins dressy, in black velvet. After all, he doesn’t pretend to be the man he was 20, or 40 years ago. But he shies well away, too, from being fashionable. “To be a la mode,” he says, and fizzes air through his pursed lips as he glides one hand down like a motorless plane.
“You had to find your own...trademark. It was indispensable. And your own repertory - like Brel, Brasses, Leo Ferre. In America, Ella Fitzgerald could sing the songs of Sinatra - both have their own styles and their talent and they can do this. In France, if you take, for instance, the beautiful song of Charles Trenet,” he sings softly, “ ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours...’” (Is it “I Wish You Love?”) “It was a success here five or 10 years ago. Well, in France, nobody can sing it because people will say, “Why are you singing a song of Trenet?”
“Many things you can’t explain” - like building a repertoire. It happens gradually; you choose your songs intuitively. “I started out with a cowboy song,” the first song he became identified with, “’Les Plaines du Far West”, all people of my generation were crazy about American movies. I mean the wonderful generation of the Roosevelt period, with Frank Capra, John Ford, George Cukor. And for us, we grew up with he image of the United States of America. And we never forget. Even when we don’t agree with the policies of the United States - McCarthyism, the war in Vietnam, we are never against the Constitution of the United States. You can criticize America, of course, but you must defend the last ramparts of freedom.
“I’m not crazy. I know that things are corrupt. But still, we must defend democracy, knowing what we know now that we didn’t know 30 years ago.”
Thirty years ago, Montand was sympathetic to the Soviets - but the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Soviet clampdown was an eye-opener. He tries to suggest the faith he had till then. “During the war, the French were almost together, those who fight, that is. People came together from many political families, from the communists to the Gaullists. When the war was over, it was hard to realize that the Gulag was there.
“What happened is that my certitude blew up. For years, we thought capitalism was the only power that could do awful things. But capitalism can be not only savage, but very well done, bien gere, bien conduit, like in Scandinavia. ‘It’s not so bad, monsieur.’ I want to tell someone.
“When my family came from Italy, immigrants, it wasn’t so easy just to eat. Even today, when you try to explain to someone the political evidence, if he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t care what I’m saying. ‘I want to eat!’ Montand growls ferociously. “If you don’t give me to eat, you’re the enemy.’ That’s it! Whap!
“We must help. But we must say the truth. I’m for the dream of people making better lives. But not for Utopia. It’s too insidious. It’s as dangerous as the Nazi ideal.
“You want to fight for the people who barely live. But we haven’t found a solution. Someone says to me, ‘I’m staying with socialism.’ What kind of socialism? Romanian socialism? Scandinavian, Cuban, Polish, Afghan socialism? Russian, Vietnamese, Cambodian socialism? Give me one!
“How can someone say to you that there’s just one philosophy, just one truth? How is it possible to say that? When I’m talking to a man who works hard, I want to be patient. When he’s young, not when he’s more than 40. If he doesn’t know by then, then I don’t care, worker or no worker.”
Montand’s songs, like most popular songs, seldom cross national or linguistic barriers. The sentiment’s not quite ours, the sounds not altogether comfortable in our ears. Some legendary artists, like Piaf, cross over with a few songs. You still hear Trenet’s 1946 hit “La Mer” on WNEW once in a while.
In most traditional French popular music, the lyric, the story, is crucial. Hardly any of our music is about the words anymore. And even when it is, we rarely savor them with the care the French insist on. And for us, the habit of storytelling in song is pretty much left to country music and 1950’s songs about teenage car wrecks.
“The words are very important,” says Montand. “And the business of translation is very tough. “Autumn Leaves” in English is awful. Why? They translated every word - but not the signification.
“When I’m singing “Autumn Leaves”, there’s nothing I have to do. Just give me, if you can, a beautiful voice. The words are so strong in their simplicity. You just say them. You don’t have to make a great uproar. If you have a gun in your hand, it’s not necessary to yell.
“But when I do a song like “Sir Godfrey” - he’s a kind of vaudeville gangster - it’s more cartoon than singing. The words are secondary, an excuse. It’s what I’m doing that’s important.”
Montand’s not really a song-and-dance man. “Sometimes I give the impression that I’m going to dance. I like the suggestion.” But he does a barre every day for just one step in ‘Luna Park’ (and flings his arm up to signal a grand battement). “The guy is very happy getting off work with a month’s paycheck in his pocket. He feels like a billionaire. To give the joy, the explosion, I’ve got to move. Just there. The leg comes up.
“Now, in the one-man show, I have my real freedom. It is freedom because you’re alone to fight alone. This is good. Of course, it’s really tough. It kills you.” But, on the other hand, he says, “I don’t have to work.” Well, anyone can see he’s not in it for the money, but for the challenge, the thrill.
“What’s exciting is the communication with the people and the guy on the stage. This is fantastic and assez troublant, disturbing, at the same time. You give and they give,” he repeats softly, like a mysterious mantra.
“Very, very peculiar. It’s mysterious, like a love affair. Who can explain? You are so happy. You are flying. And you say, ‘oh, ah, eh.’ You say, ‘I love you.’ Inside is coming a volcano. You’re in seventh sky. You say, ‘oooh, ah, eee.’ Any explanation is grossier.”
Montand’s audiences at the Olympia in Paris where he opened his show for three months last October, and on tour, have turned out to be about 80 per cent between 18 and 30 years old. People who never saw him sing. His last one-man show was in 1968, except for a one-night benefit in 1974 for Chilean refugees. He’s cautious with his younger audience. He approaches them “with humility,” remembering what 20 is like, remembering how far over the hill 30 can seem, how much people dislike being instructed. “I don’t go out to them,” he says, reaching his arms out. “I let them come to me - if they want to.
“For me,” he says, “young is inside.” And, roughly paraphrasing his old friend Picasso, adds “it takes a long time to grow young.
“I didn’t think when I started at the Olympia I’d be coming here, Japan, Brazil. I say just for three months. That’s it. After that, in January, I had to shoot a movie. The movie was postponed, so they said, make a little tour in France and then they ask me if I want to come to Germany, here, Japan, etcetera. I said, okay, let’s do it. Eight days here, 10 days there, and it’s the whole world.
“I open a golden jail, I put myself in. I close the door. Thank god, I’ve got the key, but...Voila!”
"If there’s a fire, it’s Montand who finds the water. If you’re losing blood, it’s Montand who knows how to make a tourniquet,” says Simone Signoret in her memoir. Yves Montand, her husband, is 60 now. In a suit he looks like an affluent businessman, but in his lapel is a Solidarity button that he intends to wear until Walesa’s out of jail. He’s just up from a catnap, blessed with the knack of some performers on grueling schedules for dozing off instantly and putting themselves quickly together afterwards. Two inches over six feet, he seems even bigger - not because of his bulk, but because of his substance. He’s exactly the person who you’d expect to meet from seeing Z, State of Siege, The Wages of Fear, The Sleeping Car Murders, Cesar et Rosalie, L’Aveu, La Guerre Est Fini. He is the same as all those men: a tough guy, a man of honor, a man trying to be true, hoping to make the best decisions, a man who laughs easily and speaks his mind. He seems unafraid. In short, he’d do fine as anybody’s lover, husband, daddy, pal.
In America we know him as an actor - we’ve seen maybe 20 of his 55 films. But he made his name as a singer, and it’s as a singer that he’ll open his one man show at the Metropolitan Opera House September 7 to 12. And nothing in the films, including the musicals Let’s Make Love and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, prepares you for the beauty of Montand’s voice when he’s singing in French, for its warmth, flexibility, and composure.
Montand’s grayer, his furrowed face a little softer, and relaxes into expressions of worry and sadness. But his vivacity sets his eyes twinkling with amusement, his hands flying, turns his face to rubber. For this reason, he’s leery of being photographed when he’s preoccupied - he doesn’t mind looking ugly, but he doesn’t want to look like a goof. Hates shots of himself with his mouth open. One familiar personal gesture seems almost a habit, that of partly shielding his mouth with his right hand. You see one version of it in the ads for the Met engagement. It’s a curiously shy mannerism, not particularly feminine, but somehow suggesting the way and older woman might try to hide the gap of a missing tooth. One of those gestures that’s meant to distract, and fascinates instead.
Montand’s family emigrated from Italy to Marseilles when he was two. He started working in a factory at 11, and at 18 studied hairdressing. A bio says that his customers were his first audience. In one of the giddy movie musicals of the late ‘30’s, he might well have sung as he snipped.
“I wanted to be a movie star,” he bops in a singsong voice. “That was my dream in 1938 when I started in a Marseilles suburb. In front of my house in the little cafe every Saturday night there were singers, attractions, illusionistes, - the tradition of the music hall, like vaudeville. I said to myself, ‘Okay, I start with singing.’ But I wanted to be a movie star.” He began with some songs of Chevalier and Charles Trenet, and a Donald Duck imitation. And after the first moments of stage fright, “I found singing so terrifying and so exciting that I didn’t think anymore about movies.”
“Also, it was the tradition in Europe that the singer must find not only his own material, routines and so on, plus his name, but how he dress, Now it’s not important, but then...
“Chevalier was the little hat, Trenet the trick with the eyes and his hat. Piaf was the black dress with the touch of white at the collar...So I tried to find something...To put on a jacket with a cravat is fine, but you’re a prisoner if you want to do some movement...” He settled for workmanlike brown pants and shirt.
Now he only switches to the brown in the second part of his show, for old times’ sake. He begins dressy, in black velvet. After all, he doesn’t pretend to be the man he was 20, or 40 years ago. But he shies well away, too, from being fashionable. “To be a la mode,” he says, and fizzes air through his pursed lips as he glides one hand down like a motorless plane.
“You had to find your own...trademark. It was indispensable. And your own repertory - like Brel, Brasses, Leo Ferre. In America, Ella Fitzgerald could sing the songs of Sinatra - both have their own styles and their talent and they can do this. In France, if you take, for instance, the beautiful song of Charles Trenet,” he sings softly, “ ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours...’” (Is it “I Wish You Love?”) “It was a success here five or 10 years ago. Well, in France, nobody can sing it because people will say, “Why are you singing a song of Trenet?”
“Many things you can’t explain” - like building a repertoire. It happens gradually; you choose your songs intuitively. “I started out with a cowboy song,” the first song he became identified with, “’Les Plaines du Far West”, all people of my generation were crazy about American movies. I mean the wonderful generation of the Roosevelt period, with Frank Capra, John Ford, George Cukor. And for us, we grew up with he image of the United States of America. And we never forget. Even when we don’t agree with the policies of the United States - McCarthyism, the war in Vietnam, we are never against the Constitution of the United States. You can criticize America, of course, but you must defend the last ramparts of freedom.
“I’m not crazy. I know that things are corrupt. But still, we must defend democracy, knowing what we know now that we didn’t know 30 years ago.”
Thirty years ago, Montand was sympathetic to the Soviets - but the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Soviet clampdown was an eye-opener. He tries to suggest the faith he had till then. “During the war, the French were almost together, those who fight, that is. People came together from many political families, from the communists to the Gaullists. When the war was over, it was hard to realize that the Gulag was there.
“What happened is that my certitude blew up. For years, we thought capitalism was the only power that could do awful things. But capitalism can be not only savage, but very well done, bien gere, bien conduit, like in Scandinavia. ‘It’s not so bad, monsieur.’ I want to tell someone.
“When my family came from Italy, immigrants, it wasn’t so easy just to eat. Even today, when you try to explain to someone the political evidence, if he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t care what I’m saying. ‘I want to eat!’ Montand growls ferociously. “If you don’t give me to eat, you’re the enemy.’ That’s it! Whap!
“We must help. But we must say the truth. I’m for the dream of people making better lives. But not for Utopia. It’s too insidious. It’s as dangerous as the Nazi ideal.
“You want to fight for the people who barely live. But we haven’t found a solution. Someone says to me, ‘I’m staying with socialism.’ What kind of socialism? Romanian socialism? Scandinavian, Cuban, Polish, Afghan socialism? Russian, Vietnamese, Cambodian socialism? Give me one!
“How can someone say to you that there’s just one philosophy, just one truth? How is it possible to say that? When I’m talking to a man who works hard, I want to be patient. When he’s young, not when he’s more than 40. If he doesn’t know by then, then I don’t care, worker or no worker.”
Montand’s songs, like most popular songs, seldom cross national or linguistic barriers. The sentiment’s not quite ours, the sounds not altogether comfortable in our ears. Some legendary artists, like Piaf, cross over with a few songs. You still hear Trenet’s 1946 hit “La Mer” on WNEW once in a while.
In most traditional French popular music, the lyric, the story, is crucial. Hardly any of our music is about the words anymore. And even when it is, we rarely savor them with the care the French insist on. And for us, the habit of storytelling in song is pretty much left to country music and 1950’s songs about teenage car wrecks.
“The words are very important,” says Montand. “And the business of translation is very tough. “Autumn Leaves” in English is awful. Why? They translated every word - but not the signification.
“When I’m singing “Autumn Leaves”, there’s nothing I have to do. Just give me, if you can, a beautiful voice. The words are so strong in their simplicity. You just say them. You don’t have to make a great uproar. If you have a gun in your hand, it’s not necessary to yell.
“But when I do a song like “Sir Godfrey” - he’s a kind of vaudeville gangster - it’s more cartoon than singing. The words are secondary, an excuse. It’s what I’m doing that’s important.”
Montand’s not really a song-and-dance man. “Sometimes I give the impression that I’m going to dance. I like the suggestion.” But he does a barre every day for just one step in ‘Luna Park’ (and flings his arm up to signal a grand battement). “The guy is very happy getting off work with a month’s paycheck in his pocket. He feels like a billionaire. To give the joy, the explosion, I’ve got to move. Just there. The leg comes up.
“Now, in the one-man show, I have my real freedom. It is freedom because you’re alone to fight alone. This is good. Of course, it’s really tough. It kills you.” But, on the other hand, he says, “I don’t have to work.” Well, anyone can see he’s not in it for the money, but for the challenge, the thrill.
“What’s exciting is the communication with the people and the guy on the stage. This is fantastic and assez troublant, disturbing, at the same time. You give and they give,” he repeats softly, like a mysterious mantra.
“Very, very peculiar. It’s mysterious, like a love affair. Who can explain? You are so happy. You are flying. And you say, ‘oh, ah, eh.’ You say, ‘I love you.’ Inside is coming a volcano. You’re in seventh sky. You say, ‘oooh, ah, eee.’ Any explanation is grossier.”
Montand’s audiences at the Olympia in Paris where he opened his show for three months last October, and on tour, have turned out to be about 80 per cent between 18 and 30 years old. People who never saw him sing. His last one-man show was in 1968, except for a one-night benefit in 1974 for Chilean refugees. He’s cautious with his younger audience. He approaches them “with humility,” remembering what 20 is like, remembering how far over the hill 30 can seem, how much people dislike being instructed. “I don’t go out to them,” he says, reaching his arms out. “I let them come to me - if they want to.
“For me,” he says, “young is inside.” And, roughly paraphrasing his old friend Picasso, adds “it takes a long time to grow young.
“I didn’t think when I started at the Olympia I’d be coming here, Japan, Brazil. I say just for three months. That’s it. After that, in January, I had to shoot a movie. The movie was postponed, so they said, make a little tour in France and then they ask me if I want to come to Germany, here, Japan, etcetera. I said, okay, let’s do it. Eight days here, 10 days there, and it’s the whole world.
“I open a golden jail, I put myself in. I close the door. Thank god, I’ve got the key, but...Voila!”
Under the Thumb
July 27
To the eye and ear, No More Giants, conceived by Birgitta Trommler and Angela Dauber, and choreographed by Trommler, is quite beautiful and absorbing. It’s inspired by the ideas and art of Kandinsky, but its didactic and somewhat static scenario make it overlong. The electronic and keyboard music, by Peter Michael Hamel and Ulrich Kraus, is full of rich, deep, extended sounds, sirens and bongings, that create a vibrant aural environment. The off-white set by Uwe Belzner, adorned with fabric reliefs in the same white by Thea Weltner, extends as walls in a deep U open toward the audience. You feel pleasantly encompassed by the walls of this huge room.
Three giants enter in the darkness. The first speaks harshly in German; the second furiously and bitingly in what I thought was German muddied with invented speech; the third sings long mournful notes. When the lights brighten, we an see them fully standing maybe eight feet tall on shoe-platforms hidden beneath their pants, clad in trench coats lengthened to the floor. The giants look official, like totalitarian plainclothes police whose attire is a giveaway. Then they speak simultaneously, and offstage voices join them shouting rhythmically, louder and louder, suddenly dropping to a whisper.
Five “people” come in suddenly in plain white jumpsuits. They cross to a fragile, illuminated sculpture that turns out to be a bowl of flowers. Each takes one, and the individual flowers light up when they’re plucked. The people walk, musing on the flowers, heads curved over them. They seem spellbound, gladly submissive to whatever power the flowers represent, as they are submissive to intimidation by the giants. The five begin to dance, first one, then the next, making simple stepping, circling movements in a small, space, uttering a light “hah” of breath with each step. Soon all five come into a rough circle, breathing simultaneously, and moving in unison, forming a kind of dipping wheel. There’s a lyrical spring, to it and a sweet communal feeling. As the hahs get louder, the space becomes very bright. In a while, their movements become more individual freer in the space, opening into quiet wheelings, stretches, easy jumps.
The first giant comes, speaking to them in a flat, assertive, supervisory tone, like someone not to be crossed. (The giants, says the program, are people too, who “demand greatness and power even though, in reality, they are insignificant.”) She swaggers around them as she speaks, and her presence stirs them to touch each other’s shoulders for protection. Linked together, they bend rhythmically - side, forward, back, side - as she circles. Later, they reaffirm themselves in their dipping circle, making their soft hah sounds together. Their movements spatter into little whirls and jumps, become inspirited with a kind of lightness.
The five run, and spin with the leg extended wide, and drop the torso sharply forward. There’s a gaiety to the dancing, with sharp gestures of the head, leaps, hips, slaps, but the way the dancers suddenly play to the audience almost breaks their white world apart. It’s been a closed room, a cage (some of the text translates “no escape, no exit, no goal”), and, momentarily, we appear to be a way out.
They’re threatened by the other giants. The second, who otherwise rants with terrifying anger and insistence, organizes and instructs them in a stiff, rhythmic pattern of gestures - throwing the head back, thrusting the arms down, stepping heavily on the foot. When he becomes somewhat less attentive, they drift into freer dancing, but the giant cows them again into the mechanical moves.
Later, they dance to exhaustion, mouths agape. At one point, they clasp or hang on to one another. They form a small procession, carrying one of their number to the feet of the third giant. And clustered there, each slips, unseen, a noosed rope onto one ankle. They run forward in a fan, and fall flat. Coming up, they reel stretches against the security of the ropes, fling in turns that topple them down. The ropes lash and snap against the floor. Eventually, they free themselves, get their flowers, dance in their breathing circle, as the giants shudder and collapse against each other.
There’s strength and beauty in the images of No More Giants, clear intentions in the giants’ behavior and the clipped repetitions of their speech, as well as in the shifts in the dancing from a kind of lyricism to stiffer patterns and gestures. But what you get in the beginning is what you get in the end. No more giants then, but the “people” otherwise unchanged. The limited world the “people” inhabit seems so without direction that it doesn’t too much matter who they submit themselves to. They seem like the lovely dimwit Eloi of The Time Machine. Though the rule of the giants seems more objectionable than the mesmerizing spell of the flowers, both serve to make the “people” unpersons.
There’s something curiously neutral in the piece. It’s like a reenactment of some experiments showing that if you lock people and giants together for X amount of time, the people become immune to the giants’ intimidation and the giants collapse. What of it? Something seems missing. The “people” and the giants are defined without possibilities. And the course of the piece is ineffably set in the narrow way they are characterized by delusions and weaknesses alone.
The sense of the work generates a kind of pointlessness that doesn’t match the formal beauty and sense of completion that No More Giants ends with. The “people” can’t put two and two together. They’re lovely and sweet and all they can do is go dope themselves on their flowers.
At La Mama Annex July 13 to 18).
To the eye and ear, No More Giants, conceived by Birgitta Trommler and Angela Dauber, and choreographed by Trommler, is quite beautiful and absorbing. It’s inspired by the ideas and art of Kandinsky, but its didactic and somewhat static scenario make it overlong. The electronic and keyboard music, by Peter Michael Hamel and Ulrich Kraus, is full of rich, deep, extended sounds, sirens and bongings, that create a vibrant aural environment. The off-white set by Uwe Belzner, adorned with fabric reliefs in the same white by Thea Weltner, extends as walls in a deep U open toward the audience. You feel pleasantly encompassed by the walls of this huge room.
Three giants enter in the darkness. The first speaks harshly in German; the second furiously and bitingly in what I thought was German muddied with invented speech; the third sings long mournful notes. When the lights brighten, we an see them fully standing maybe eight feet tall on shoe-platforms hidden beneath their pants, clad in trench coats lengthened to the floor. The giants look official, like totalitarian plainclothes police whose attire is a giveaway. Then they speak simultaneously, and offstage voices join them shouting rhythmically, louder and louder, suddenly dropping to a whisper.
Five “people” come in suddenly in plain white jumpsuits. They cross to a fragile, illuminated sculpture that turns out to be a bowl of flowers. Each takes one, and the individual flowers light up when they’re plucked. The people walk, musing on the flowers, heads curved over them. They seem spellbound, gladly submissive to whatever power the flowers represent, as they are submissive to intimidation by the giants. The five begin to dance, first one, then the next, making simple stepping, circling movements in a small, space, uttering a light “hah” of breath with each step. Soon all five come into a rough circle, breathing simultaneously, and moving in unison, forming a kind of dipping wheel. There’s a lyrical spring, to it and a sweet communal feeling. As the hahs get louder, the space becomes very bright. In a while, their movements become more individual freer in the space, opening into quiet wheelings, stretches, easy jumps.
The first giant comes, speaking to them in a flat, assertive, supervisory tone, like someone not to be crossed. (The giants, says the program, are people too, who “demand greatness and power even though, in reality, they are insignificant.”) She swaggers around them as she speaks, and her presence stirs them to touch each other’s shoulders for protection. Linked together, they bend rhythmically - side, forward, back, side - as she circles. Later, they reaffirm themselves in their dipping circle, making their soft hah sounds together. Their movements spatter into little whirls and jumps, become inspirited with a kind of lightness.
The five run, and spin with the leg extended wide, and drop the torso sharply forward. There’s a gaiety to the dancing, with sharp gestures of the head, leaps, hips, slaps, but the way the dancers suddenly play to the audience almost breaks their white world apart. It’s been a closed room, a cage (some of the text translates “no escape, no exit, no goal”), and, momentarily, we appear to be a way out.
They’re threatened by the other giants. The second, who otherwise rants with terrifying anger and insistence, organizes and instructs them in a stiff, rhythmic pattern of gestures - throwing the head back, thrusting the arms down, stepping heavily on the foot. When he becomes somewhat less attentive, they drift into freer dancing, but the giant cows them again into the mechanical moves.
Later, they dance to exhaustion, mouths agape. At one point, they clasp or hang on to one another. They form a small procession, carrying one of their number to the feet of the third giant. And clustered there, each slips, unseen, a noosed rope onto one ankle. They run forward in a fan, and fall flat. Coming up, they reel stretches against the security of the ropes, fling in turns that topple them down. The ropes lash and snap against the floor. Eventually, they free themselves, get their flowers, dance in their breathing circle, as the giants shudder and collapse against each other.
There’s strength and beauty in the images of No More Giants, clear intentions in the giants’ behavior and the clipped repetitions of their speech, as well as in the shifts in the dancing from a kind of lyricism to stiffer patterns and gestures. But what you get in the beginning is what you get in the end. No more giants then, but the “people” otherwise unchanged. The limited world the “people” inhabit seems so without direction that it doesn’t too much matter who they submit themselves to. They seem like the lovely dimwit Eloi of The Time Machine. Though the rule of the giants seems more objectionable than the mesmerizing spell of the flowers, both serve to make the “people” unpersons.
There’s something curiously neutral in the piece. It’s like a reenactment of some experiments showing that if you lock people and giants together for X amount of time, the people become immune to the giants’ intimidation and the giants collapse. What of it? Something seems missing. The “people” and the giants are defined without possibilities. And the course of the piece is ineffably set in the narrow way they are characterized by delusions and weaknesses alone.
The sense of the work generates a kind of pointlessness that doesn’t match the formal beauty and sense of completion that No More Giants ends with. The “people” can’t put two and two together. They’re lovely and sweet and all they can do is go dope themselves on their flowers.
At La Mama Annex July 13 to 18).
Tight Spot
October 12
Carolyn Lord’s solo I Walk the Line, to Johnny Cash songs interspersed with long silences, is an essay in stiffness and constraint. Her look is blank, severe, unchanging, even chilly. She gives nothing away. Emotional flavors, even humor, come through in tiny increments - the flick or rigidity of her hand, the angle of her head. As the piece develops, you see restriction and postulate disappointment, weakness, denial.
Hanging black and white tubes (the set’s by Michael Warren Powell) define an alley in a strong shrinking perspective that pulls the eye to the rear of the space. Impossibly far away, we see Lord, in striped shirt and white shorts. Then, shockingly, she steps in from the side - we’ve been looking in a mirror.
Lord seems implacable. Motionless in a lunge, her arms thrust forward, then jerks back in stages, again and again. Her movements grow, and she comes forward but erect, straight-armed, straight-legged, they all feel hard, spiky, resistant. Maybe she’ll swoop to the floor, or balance on an imaginary wire, where she’ll abruptly shift direction by 90 degrees, But most of the action is in her hands: flicking open, trembling, smacking into her palm, defining the edges of the space around her.
Coming closer, she allows her hips to swing, which turns into a jaunty exaggeration of Chaplin’s Little Tramp walkaway. Later in the piece, Lord appears a little more pliant, or maybe worn down - she’ll stop in positions, like cheek on hand, that suggest something like maidenly fatigue. With her arms in front of her like a spearhead, she ,arches straight ahead, but keeps veering off the line, as it out of weakness or indecision. Sometimes even her tangent is blocked, depending upon where the line of tubes curves into portals ad obstructions. Her hands seem to talk - one-syllable words. Yes, No, Maybe, Stop.
At the end, she retreats, scooping together smaller and smaller tidy heaps of nothing. The follow spot wanders, loses her for a while. In the very back, she makes big, slow, laboring gestures - smashing something with a maul, wielding a shovel. Then, legs apart, one hand slowly opening and dropping in inquiry or sudden surrender, she stands absolutely motionless and adamant.
The second piece, Caravan, for four women - Lord, Diana Confort, Beth Leonard, Linda Seifert - is calm and measured, but enveloped in an intoxicating atmosphere. A lovely sculptural balance pervades the piece, except during occasional frantic solos. Although it’s never symmetrical, the piece has the satisfying balance of symmetrical structures. Center, in the rear, composer Pierre Ruiz plays rich, opulent, rolling music on the piano. The women are elegant, curiously well mannered, their dancing seeping into sloe leans, tilts, plies, walks, floating pots de bras. But the movement also curves through their bodies, dives, bends, and circles, dips into deep, twisted balances. The lights turn poison Sno-Kone colors - magenta, blue, computer green, sometimes changing very actively.
Caravan seems to happen in a kind of clar-eyed daze. The women, variously dressed in white, seem entranced, obedient, remote, unshakably composed. Often, they’re quite still. They have an almost iconic authority. Sometimes there’s a faint aura of invitation. At other times the dancers appear like zoo creatures just aware of and slightly puzzled by onlookers. Mostly, they’re oblivious of each other, except as bodies to accompany, or, perhaps, to line up alongside. Though the movement is strong, clear and plastic, it has little direction or force. The interesting, detailed movement almost always occurs within the sphere of the dancer’s body, usually while she’s in place. This static spatial quality is reinforced, or even created, by the unusual narrowness of the space. Horizontal moves, which can take space most dramatically, are restricted. But big moves in any direction are not what Lord is about.
She creates a strict but faceted and perplexing world. Sufficiently specific to be intriguing, sufficiently blank so that you can hardly hep but jump at the smallest suggestions and invest their configurations with attitudes and emotions. But these notions are canceled almost immediately. I find myself identifying what I'm seeing, and changing my mind: like all three blind men inspecting the elephant.
Carolyn Lord’s solo I Walk the Line, to Johnny Cash songs interspersed with long silences, is an essay in stiffness and constraint. Her look is blank, severe, unchanging, even chilly. She gives nothing away. Emotional flavors, even humor, come through in tiny increments - the flick or rigidity of her hand, the angle of her head. As the piece develops, you see restriction and postulate disappointment, weakness, denial.
Hanging black and white tubes (the set’s by Michael Warren Powell) define an alley in a strong shrinking perspective that pulls the eye to the rear of the space. Impossibly far away, we see Lord, in striped shirt and white shorts. Then, shockingly, she steps in from the side - we’ve been looking in a mirror.
Lord seems implacable. Motionless in a lunge, her arms thrust forward, then jerks back in stages, again and again. Her movements grow, and she comes forward but erect, straight-armed, straight-legged, they all feel hard, spiky, resistant. Maybe she’ll swoop to the floor, or balance on an imaginary wire, where she’ll abruptly shift direction by 90 degrees, But most of the action is in her hands: flicking open, trembling, smacking into her palm, defining the edges of the space around her.
Coming closer, she allows her hips to swing, which turns into a jaunty exaggeration of Chaplin’s Little Tramp walkaway. Later in the piece, Lord appears a little more pliant, or maybe worn down - she’ll stop in positions, like cheek on hand, that suggest something like maidenly fatigue. With her arms in front of her like a spearhead, she ,arches straight ahead, but keeps veering off the line, as it out of weakness or indecision. Sometimes even her tangent is blocked, depending upon where the line of tubes curves into portals ad obstructions. Her hands seem to talk - one-syllable words. Yes, No, Maybe, Stop.
At the end, she retreats, scooping together smaller and smaller tidy heaps of nothing. The follow spot wanders, loses her for a while. In the very back, she makes big, slow, laboring gestures - smashing something with a maul, wielding a shovel. Then, legs apart, one hand slowly opening and dropping in inquiry or sudden surrender, she stands absolutely motionless and adamant.
The second piece, Caravan, for four women - Lord, Diana Confort, Beth Leonard, Linda Seifert - is calm and measured, but enveloped in an intoxicating atmosphere. A lovely sculptural balance pervades the piece, except during occasional frantic solos. Although it’s never symmetrical, the piece has the satisfying balance of symmetrical structures. Center, in the rear, composer Pierre Ruiz plays rich, opulent, rolling music on the piano. The women are elegant, curiously well mannered, their dancing seeping into sloe leans, tilts, plies, walks, floating pots de bras. But the movement also curves through their bodies, dives, bends, and circles, dips into deep, twisted balances. The lights turn poison Sno-Kone colors - magenta, blue, computer green, sometimes changing very actively.
Caravan seems to happen in a kind of clar-eyed daze. The women, variously dressed in white, seem entranced, obedient, remote, unshakably composed. Often, they’re quite still. They have an almost iconic authority. Sometimes there’s a faint aura of invitation. At other times the dancers appear like zoo creatures just aware of and slightly puzzled by onlookers. Mostly, they’re oblivious of each other, except as bodies to accompany, or, perhaps, to line up alongside. Though the movement is strong, clear and plastic, it has little direction or force. The interesting, detailed movement almost always occurs within the sphere of the dancer’s body, usually while she’s in place. This static spatial quality is reinforced, or even created, by the unusual narrowness of the space. Horizontal moves, which can take space most dramatically, are restricted. But big moves in any direction are not what Lord is about.
She creates a strict but faceted and perplexing world. Sufficiently specific to be intriguing, sufficiently blank so that you can hardly hep but jump at the smallest suggestions and invest their configurations with attitudes and emotions. But these notions are canceled almost immediately. I find myself identifying what I'm seeing, and changing my mind: like all three blind men inspecting the elephant.
The Machine Steams On
March 30
An inner pressure seems to stir the gleaming designs of Kathryn Posin’s new The Glass Engine into motion. Handsome, inventive, and well-mated to a rich, pulsing, chiming score by Philip Glass, The Glass Engine starts softly. A group of six dancers in shiny orange miliskin unitards is in a center-stage cluster. Each is tipped slightly back, forming a splayed M with arms, torso, thigh and lower leg. Isolated hand signs flicker through the group, and spread to involve everyone, becoming a soft beckoning that carries the body with it a bit, then recedes momentarily. This grows and rolls, repeating and slipping back before adding the next element. The bodies round up into arches, then legs and arms reach up from the arching bodies, then the bodies come standing, and fall backwards to stand again. The complex, multi-body form continues to develop, dividing into temporary pairs and trios, with one partner carried arches over another’s upthrust feet, catching someone as he slowly falls, or lifting him over. The broad effect is smooth and seamless, but, underneath, the dancers urgently arrange and prepare themselves to brace the next bridge or rolling construction.
At the end of the section, the group is back on the floor in a cluster. An arm gesture moves through the group again, but this one draws circularly back and down; it’s heavier, more ardent. Alistair Butler dancers center-stage with more heat and tense agony in his sweeping arms and arching thrusts. Posin joins him. Their duet, the first of three, is equally full of reaching gestures and resistance. Their quality of tension and holding back is typical. There’s a kind of isometric pressure of one part against another. There’s a constant, fierce, cooperative striving. In a way, it’s goalless. The sustained tension, drive and beautifully intricate configurations must be their own reward. Though it’s not at all personal, it is innately pitiless. These aren’t activities you can grow into. Interpretation doesn’t count. You do or you don’t.
In the duets, lots of the movement interest is concentrated in sharply punctuated, curving and thrusting gestures, curtailed swings, jerking hips, wheeling forearms, like an elaborate texture of scroll-like patterns perpetuated through swinging hands. A more sinuous, slightly archaic exoticism flavors this part of the dance. The erotic quality grows stronger, but there’s not much room to be human, no play, no release from hardness. The tight, carved shapes each person makes isolate him no matter how closely or interdependently he may hook up with anyone else. People would repel like identical magnetic poles if they were free.
Toward the end, the women are lifted high, like gliders, touch hands briefly in the center of a star. Then, a moment later, they’re down, disrupted, human, and lad each other back into the original formation. As an end, it seems tacked on, unconvincing and somehow depressing.
The Nickel and Dime Lounge, an atmospheric new piece, shows a different side of Posin. Set to 20’s jazz songs, the piece is awkward - almost everybody gets a solo to a whole song - but has beautiful moments. And the best of them are the softest, the most sentimental. What Posin glorifies here, in a way, are weaknesses, moments of frailty. The women are thin, foils for the men, whom Posin look sat tenderly. Alistair Butler (“the man with the candles”) seems to be part magician, the only one able to move in the beginning. He takes a broom from Anthony Stafford (“the man with the broom”), who dreamily floats out to him momentarily, with the pull. Butler sweeps around the floor, one couple whirls, caught in an eddy of air. Then Butler wakes everybody up - they’re perky and jaunty, bouncing with energy, bumping butts, the women flipping the men over their backs, kicking their legs in ye olde 20’s style. Stafford, some kind of janitor, has eyes for a girls and she’s got eyes for him.
With the piece set in the 20’s, the fact that Stafford is black, and playing a character of a lower class than the girl, accentuates the pain of this attraction. The girl (E. Laura Hausmann) taps in, followed by her adoring beau (Jean Marc Colet), who clings to her with his eyes. She sends him off on an errand, and Stafford, emboldened by love, exchanges his apron for a white evening jacket and sidles toward her, trying to speak. Light and silky, he moves to her a bit, and pulls away with terrible shyness. Back and forth. He’s an angel. At last he reaches her and they dance side by side. The beau returns, sees them, rushes away, and the girl rushes off after him.
Stafford becomes the emotional center of this piece, but the focus of the dance is too democratic for it to become his story. So we watch him brush off Posin (“the cigarette girl”), trying to be helpful, with a few shot, distressed pushes of his broom, his head averted. We watch him quietly burnishing a plate with his regret. The jazz-age dream goes on.
An inner pressure seems to stir the gleaming designs of Kathryn Posin’s new The Glass Engine into motion. Handsome, inventive, and well-mated to a rich, pulsing, chiming score by Philip Glass, The Glass Engine starts softly. A group of six dancers in shiny orange miliskin unitards is in a center-stage cluster. Each is tipped slightly back, forming a splayed M with arms, torso, thigh and lower leg. Isolated hand signs flicker through the group, and spread to involve everyone, becoming a soft beckoning that carries the body with it a bit, then recedes momentarily. This grows and rolls, repeating and slipping back before adding the next element. The bodies round up into arches, then legs and arms reach up from the arching bodies, then the bodies come standing, and fall backwards to stand again. The complex, multi-body form continues to develop, dividing into temporary pairs and trios, with one partner carried arches over another’s upthrust feet, catching someone as he slowly falls, or lifting him over. The broad effect is smooth and seamless, but, underneath, the dancers urgently arrange and prepare themselves to brace the next bridge or rolling construction.
At the end of the section, the group is back on the floor in a cluster. An arm gesture moves through the group again, but this one draws circularly back and down; it’s heavier, more ardent. Alistair Butler dancers center-stage with more heat and tense agony in his sweeping arms and arching thrusts. Posin joins him. Their duet, the first of three, is equally full of reaching gestures and resistance. Their quality of tension and holding back is typical. There’s a kind of isometric pressure of one part against another. There’s a constant, fierce, cooperative striving. In a way, it’s goalless. The sustained tension, drive and beautifully intricate configurations must be their own reward. Though it’s not at all personal, it is innately pitiless. These aren’t activities you can grow into. Interpretation doesn’t count. You do or you don’t.
In the duets, lots of the movement interest is concentrated in sharply punctuated, curving and thrusting gestures, curtailed swings, jerking hips, wheeling forearms, like an elaborate texture of scroll-like patterns perpetuated through swinging hands. A more sinuous, slightly archaic exoticism flavors this part of the dance. The erotic quality grows stronger, but there’s not much room to be human, no play, no release from hardness. The tight, carved shapes each person makes isolate him no matter how closely or interdependently he may hook up with anyone else. People would repel like identical magnetic poles if they were free.
Toward the end, the women are lifted high, like gliders, touch hands briefly in the center of a star. Then, a moment later, they’re down, disrupted, human, and lad each other back into the original formation. As an end, it seems tacked on, unconvincing and somehow depressing.
The Nickel and Dime Lounge, an atmospheric new piece, shows a different side of Posin. Set to 20’s jazz songs, the piece is awkward - almost everybody gets a solo to a whole song - but has beautiful moments. And the best of them are the softest, the most sentimental. What Posin glorifies here, in a way, are weaknesses, moments of frailty. The women are thin, foils for the men, whom Posin look sat tenderly. Alistair Butler (“the man with the candles”) seems to be part magician, the only one able to move in the beginning. He takes a broom from Anthony Stafford (“the man with the broom”), who dreamily floats out to him momentarily, with the pull. Butler sweeps around the floor, one couple whirls, caught in an eddy of air. Then Butler wakes everybody up - they’re perky and jaunty, bouncing with energy, bumping butts, the women flipping the men over their backs, kicking their legs in ye olde 20’s style. Stafford, some kind of janitor, has eyes for a girls and she’s got eyes for him.
With the piece set in the 20’s, the fact that Stafford is black, and playing a character of a lower class than the girl, accentuates the pain of this attraction. The girl (E. Laura Hausmann) taps in, followed by her adoring beau (Jean Marc Colet), who clings to her with his eyes. She sends him off on an errand, and Stafford, emboldened by love, exchanges his apron for a white evening jacket and sidles toward her, trying to speak. Light and silky, he moves to her a bit, and pulls away with terrible shyness. Back and forth. He’s an angel. At last he reaches her and they dance side by side. The beau returns, sees them, rushes away, and the girl rushes off after him.
Stafford becomes the emotional center of this piece, but the focus of the dance is too democratic for it to become his story. So we watch him brush off Posin (“the cigarette girl”), trying to be helpful, with a few shot, distressed pushes of his broom, his head averted. We watch him quietly burnishing a plate with his regret. The jazz-age dream goes on.
A Golden Age Just a Little
May 4
It seemed to be a holiday, or at least a sort of class reunion, at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery’s restored sanctuary the opening night of the Judson Dance Theater reconstructions. Amazing how strongly some of the work holds up.
Elaine Summer’s Dance for Lots of People was very much of its time, the ‘60’s, with its optimistic use of people in the mass working together with a naive and clumsy beauty. But the piece is still effective. An endless stream of chattering people enter from behind the audience - how many? 30? 40? - and make a really big clump in the space. They’re a tight bunch, pushing, shifting, with the people on the edge trying to stay part of the mass as the small movements of the others tend to push them out: it’s a constant effort of reintegration. (Their efforts are not far from the more labored and stressful struggles of the three people in Simone Forti’s 1961 Slant Board during intermission - to clamber around on a platform tilted 45 degrees from the floor. The crudenesses and adjustments are essential to the texture. And in Slant Board, the task is all there is.) Someone is lifted up, held aloft, then disappears, and two more people are lifted. They too sink bank, like folding up V’s, going down hips first. Lots of noise from the group. Two more people are lifted, then arch back into the mass headfirst. A few soloists emerge and what they do is more dancerly. A woman whirls around. But the group remains focal. When everyone reaches out, the group looks like a sea anemone waving its tentacles. Everyone bounces, then scatters with a thunder of feet and falls The first soloist remains. One man swings his arms, slides and rolls. Another does abrupt, zigzagging runs through the littered bodies. The group begins to rise, and almost congeals, but slowly returns to the floor instead. The people hardly ever shut up. They bounce and jiggle, hook themselves into a chain that pulls into huge serpentine loops, faster and rougher.
The general effect is grand. The stiffness and staginess of individuals becomes submerged in the main statement, just as the remarks everyone makes during the piece assert their individuality in some measure, but are neutralized in the total sound. The group is convincing and serious and the energy of the mass is compelling.
Judith Dunn and Bill Dixon’s Dewhorse was a kind of tough, meditative revelation. Dewhorse is a duet in long, alternating solo sections - for Dixon on trumpet, and Cheryl Lilienstein in Dunn’s part - which eventually draw together. It ends when she comes beside him. Lilienstein looks astonishingly like Dunn did, but she reveals a vibrant inner life in the dance that Dunn undercut. Dunn could be very ethereal or sensual through the upper body and arms, and much more matter-of-fact in the way she used her legs, but most of the dancing she did in her own works was overlaid by a sternness and tension that came across as her primary message. Lilienstein was luminous.
Dixon is first, with rhythmic cries on his horn, fading to wheezes and whispers. Lilienstein comes on holding a stuffed white pigeon in her mouth. She walks around, makes soft, sideways flip-flopping hand movements. Some of these movements become part of a recurring routine. There’s a deadpan quality that can be funny or puzzling or frightening: Lilienstein doesn’t force it. The body is often broad and foursquare, composed, while there’s great concentration in the hands curling or toes pulling tenaciously against the floor. Occasionally, there will be a blurt of strong, leggy jumps, or more sweeping stretches and bends. Or Lilienstein will lean back, as if to say, perhaps warily, “Look at me!” Something very intimate about the feeling of all this. Liliensten lies sideways and leaves the pigeon on the the floor nearby. She’s clear and very firm: even lying on the floor she surrenders nothing to it. In a bit, she sits up and stares away. Dixon comes out to play soft, short phrases. You’re free to feel the connections between the divided dance and music.
Lilienstein edges forward, shakes an upraised arm, flings it precisely. From her mouth, a small red bird dangles on a string. Standing, she makes soft, rocking motions. Now she moves with more force, decisiveness and resistance: like when she thrusts her hands downward thickly, then opens them. And bigger moves have a hard, sculpted quality, but not a forbidding one - it’s as if the dancer were simply taking great care of herself.
Dixon’s surprised trumpet makes more ecstatic babblings and whistles next time, and is frantic by the last, when Lilienstein’s sudden proximity drops them both into silence and stillness.
Forget Brian DePalma’s silly film Wotan’s Wake. Edward Bhartonn’s Pop 1 and Pop 2 just took a minute, and added the proper touch of frivolity to the evening. With stagey charm, Bhartonn in a red leotard blows up a yellow balloon, sets it on a blue mat, and does a flip to burst it. Nowadays, plenty of people have developed their acrobatic skills, but downtown, in the ‘60’s, Bhartonn, walking on his hands, was a rare bird.
In Flares, Philip Corner’s whining, intermittent (sometimes Cowell-esque) music played as, one at a time, slides floated around the walls, ceiling, and altar of the church: one dark, rather scratchy side was rather effective on corners. I enjoyed the patient predictability and the increasing density of Corner’s slightly tedious Keyboard Dances. After carefully taking off shoes and socks, Corner slowly lifts a foot to the piano keyboard and makes a glunk of sound. Then both feet. Then, very precisely, the nose. Shoes and socks go back on, and smoothing his wild hair, Corner plays mournful, climbing masses of notes. Presses his palms on the keyboard, his elbows, forearms, till he can mash sound from the entire keyboard at once.
Remy Charlip’s been doing Meditation on and off since he made it in 1966. And the dance has changed with him. At St. Mark’s, Charlip attacked the piece very broadly. Meditation hardly moves in space. It is the dance of a man barely holding himself together. Horrors and terrors and rages well out of him, and bend and constrict and topple and decompose the simple, secure gestures and patterns of the dance: his hands twitch, his body shrinks and trembles violently, his whole face seems to melt off the bones. It’s a very personal, emotional work, and shocking, too, by virtue of its strange, maybe unwelcome, intimacy. But it can be quite funny. Of course the cornball music from Thais sets you up for a joke. Doing the piece used to leave Charlip unstrung. The first time he did it in public, in 1967, at the Angry Arts concert against the Vietnam War, the audience laughed and he was devastated. The piece was relatively new then and it was doing him.
Part of what makes Meditation powerful is that the things that happen to Charlip, like the trembling, do really seem to possess him. They never seem to be under his control. For a moment he takes command, there’s a clarity and confidence; a moment later that’s stripped off. The dance has changed in many small ways, and it has acquired a short, conciliatory coda. A few of the gestures are altogether different, many are stronger and less ambivalent. In one of the first moments of the dance, Charlip used to set his arm at an angle in the air in a gesture that seemed partly to insist on restraint and partly to salute. Now a sharper gesture says, “Hold it!”
The evening ended with Yvonne Rainer doing her Trio A (1966), whose unstressed flow of movement non sequiturs forcibly caught people’s imaginations. You can’t tell the transitions from the climaxes. Everything’s pretty equal, the rhythms comfortably flexible; even ballet dancers and untrained people were invited to perform it. Now Rainer - having not done the piece at all for about eight months - almost qualifies as an untrained person. It was wonderful to see her in it. She has always been a riveting performer, with her long torso, her straight dark hair setting off her face with its characteristic wondering sweetness, and an odd, wry humor that isn’t exactly funny and probably isn’t humor: her presence just skews the world. Rainer looked good, but the dance was troublesome for her. It seemed slowed down and interrupted, and I enjoyed the qualities that the fragmentation reinforced.
Trio A is a dance of swings and wobbles, curious personal gestures, surprising isolations, and difficult coordinations. The gaze is averted. The piece bounces along cool and pedestrian on low-to-the-ground legwork that slips and bumps into squats, head rolls, somersaults, and almost acrobatic stuff that maybe she was going to do but changed her mind. Traditional dance movements are welded to the commonplace. Many of the moves are awkward, indulgent, or downright goofy, like wide steps taken with the legs lifting through second as the arms rotate and wobble the body. But the flow of it all satisfies by subverting expectations, deflecting movements from completion, not quite accomplishing anything. It’s filled with options with the “beautiful”, the gross, and the defective. It doesn’t celebrate awkwardness, doesn’t say “Clumsy is Beautiful.” But it includes them in the lexicon of things that are interesting to look at in themselves and pleasurable to do. The upshot is beautiful, even healing.
It seemed to be a holiday, or at least a sort of class reunion, at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery’s restored sanctuary the opening night of the Judson Dance Theater reconstructions. Amazing how strongly some of the work holds up.
Elaine Summer’s Dance for Lots of People was very much of its time, the ‘60’s, with its optimistic use of people in the mass working together with a naive and clumsy beauty. But the piece is still effective. An endless stream of chattering people enter from behind the audience - how many? 30? 40? - and make a really big clump in the space. They’re a tight bunch, pushing, shifting, with the people on the edge trying to stay part of the mass as the small movements of the others tend to push them out: it’s a constant effort of reintegration. (Their efforts are not far from the more labored and stressful struggles of the three people in Simone Forti’s 1961 Slant Board during intermission - to clamber around on a platform tilted 45 degrees from the floor. The crudenesses and adjustments are essential to the texture. And in Slant Board, the task is all there is.) Someone is lifted up, held aloft, then disappears, and two more people are lifted. They too sink bank, like folding up V’s, going down hips first. Lots of noise from the group. Two more people are lifted, then arch back into the mass headfirst. A few soloists emerge and what they do is more dancerly. A woman whirls around. But the group remains focal. When everyone reaches out, the group looks like a sea anemone waving its tentacles. Everyone bounces, then scatters with a thunder of feet and falls The first soloist remains. One man swings his arms, slides and rolls. Another does abrupt, zigzagging runs through the littered bodies. The group begins to rise, and almost congeals, but slowly returns to the floor instead. The people hardly ever shut up. They bounce and jiggle, hook themselves into a chain that pulls into huge serpentine loops, faster and rougher.
The general effect is grand. The stiffness and staginess of individuals becomes submerged in the main statement, just as the remarks everyone makes during the piece assert their individuality in some measure, but are neutralized in the total sound. The group is convincing and serious and the energy of the mass is compelling.
Judith Dunn and Bill Dixon’s Dewhorse was a kind of tough, meditative revelation. Dewhorse is a duet in long, alternating solo sections - for Dixon on trumpet, and Cheryl Lilienstein in Dunn’s part - which eventually draw together. It ends when she comes beside him. Lilienstein looks astonishingly like Dunn did, but she reveals a vibrant inner life in the dance that Dunn undercut. Dunn could be very ethereal or sensual through the upper body and arms, and much more matter-of-fact in the way she used her legs, but most of the dancing she did in her own works was overlaid by a sternness and tension that came across as her primary message. Lilienstein was luminous.
Dixon is first, with rhythmic cries on his horn, fading to wheezes and whispers. Lilienstein comes on holding a stuffed white pigeon in her mouth. She walks around, makes soft, sideways flip-flopping hand movements. Some of these movements become part of a recurring routine. There’s a deadpan quality that can be funny or puzzling or frightening: Lilienstein doesn’t force it. The body is often broad and foursquare, composed, while there’s great concentration in the hands curling or toes pulling tenaciously against the floor. Occasionally, there will be a blurt of strong, leggy jumps, or more sweeping stretches and bends. Or Lilienstein will lean back, as if to say, perhaps warily, “Look at me!” Something very intimate about the feeling of all this. Liliensten lies sideways and leaves the pigeon on the the floor nearby. She’s clear and very firm: even lying on the floor she surrenders nothing to it. In a bit, she sits up and stares away. Dixon comes out to play soft, short phrases. You’re free to feel the connections between the divided dance and music.
Lilienstein edges forward, shakes an upraised arm, flings it precisely. From her mouth, a small red bird dangles on a string. Standing, she makes soft, rocking motions. Now she moves with more force, decisiveness and resistance: like when she thrusts her hands downward thickly, then opens them. And bigger moves have a hard, sculpted quality, but not a forbidding one - it’s as if the dancer were simply taking great care of herself.
Dixon’s surprised trumpet makes more ecstatic babblings and whistles next time, and is frantic by the last, when Lilienstein’s sudden proximity drops them both into silence and stillness.
Forget Brian DePalma’s silly film Wotan’s Wake. Edward Bhartonn’s Pop 1 and Pop 2 just took a minute, and added the proper touch of frivolity to the evening. With stagey charm, Bhartonn in a red leotard blows up a yellow balloon, sets it on a blue mat, and does a flip to burst it. Nowadays, plenty of people have developed their acrobatic skills, but downtown, in the ‘60’s, Bhartonn, walking on his hands, was a rare bird.
In Flares, Philip Corner’s whining, intermittent (sometimes Cowell-esque) music played as, one at a time, slides floated around the walls, ceiling, and altar of the church: one dark, rather scratchy side was rather effective on corners. I enjoyed the patient predictability and the increasing density of Corner’s slightly tedious Keyboard Dances. After carefully taking off shoes and socks, Corner slowly lifts a foot to the piano keyboard and makes a glunk of sound. Then both feet. Then, very precisely, the nose. Shoes and socks go back on, and smoothing his wild hair, Corner plays mournful, climbing masses of notes. Presses his palms on the keyboard, his elbows, forearms, till he can mash sound from the entire keyboard at once.
Remy Charlip’s been doing Meditation on and off since he made it in 1966. And the dance has changed with him. At St. Mark’s, Charlip attacked the piece very broadly. Meditation hardly moves in space. It is the dance of a man barely holding himself together. Horrors and terrors and rages well out of him, and bend and constrict and topple and decompose the simple, secure gestures and patterns of the dance: his hands twitch, his body shrinks and trembles violently, his whole face seems to melt off the bones. It’s a very personal, emotional work, and shocking, too, by virtue of its strange, maybe unwelcome, intimacy. But it can be quite funny. Of course the cornball music from Thais sets you up for a joke. Doing the piece used to leave Charlip unstrung. The first time he did it in public, in 1967, at the Angry Arts concert against the Vietnam War, the audience laughed and he was devastated. The piece was relatively new then and it was doing him.
Part of what makes Meditation powerful is that the things that happen to Charlip, like the trembling, do really seem to possess him. They never seem to be under his control. For a moment he takes command, there’s a clarity and confidence; a moment later that’s stripped off. The dance has changed in many small ways, and it has acquired a short, conciliatory coda. A few of the gestures are altogether different, many are stronger and less ambivalent. In one of the first moments of the dance, Charlip used to set his arm at an angle in the air in a gesture that seemed partly to insist on restraint and partly to salute. Now a sharper gesture says, “Hold it!”
The evening ended with Yvonne Rainer doing her Trio A (1966), whose unstressed flow of movement non sequiturs forcibly caught people’s imaginations. You can’t tell the transitions from the climaxes. Everything’s pretty equal, the rhythms comfortably flexible; even ballet dancers and untrained people were invited to perform it. Now Rainer - having not done the piece at all for about eight months - almost qualifies as an untrained person. It was wonderful to see her in it. She has always been a riveting performer, with her long torso, her straight dark hair setting off her face with its characteristic wondering sweetness, and an odd, wry humor that isn’t exactly funny and probably isn’t humor: her presence just skews the world. Rainer looked good, but the dance was troublesome for her. It seemed slowed down and interrupted, and I enjoyed the qualities that the fragmentation reinforced.
Trio A is a dance of swings and wobbles, curious personal gestures, surprising isolations, and difficult coordinations. The gaze is averted. The piece bounces along cool and pedestrian on low-to-the-ground legwork that slips and bumps into squats, head rolls, somersaults, and almost acrobatic stuff that maybe she was going to do but changed her mind. Traditional dance movements are welded to the commonplace. Many of the moves are awkward, indulgent, or downright goofy, like wide steps taken with the legs lifting through second as the arms rotate and wobble the body. But the flow of it all satisfies by subverting expectations, deflecting movements from completion, not quite accomplishing anything. It’s filled with options with the “beautiful”, the gross, and the defective. It doesn’t celebrate awkwardness, doesn’t say “Clumsy is Beautiful.” But it includes them in the lexicon of things that are interesting to look at in themselves and pleasurable to do. The upshot is beautiful, even healing.