1983 CONTINUED
A Word in Your Ear
September 6
With hair slightly mussed, leaning over her crossed legs, looking like she's going to give us the lowdown - which she is - Liz Lerman seems a sensible gal, wry and durable, a natural and practiced comedienne. Based with her company, the Dance Exchange Performance Company, In one of the citadels of doublethink, Washingon, D.C., she uses the hard information churned out by the political and military bureaucracies (Docudance III has a bibliography of eight books and nine periodicals), to whip appalling facts, gross inconsistencies, and moronic statements into brief, sassy, ironic dance pieces.
Lerman introduces each section of the first Docudances increasingly briefly, stating the subject and her role, "which is to say, the choreographer." The 1980 Docudance, Current Events, features a "family" in a three-part cartoon about politics and social issues. Each family member has a few characteristic actions. The husband reads the mail, has a hulking, worried walk. Grandmother, who's trotted out for show on the holidays, cuts out paper dolls. The consumer-conscious sister models her Calvins. The third part is about "solutions". Lerman admits we'd think she was a dope if she offered us "hope", "respect", "commitment". Instead the characters offer their solutions. Mom ditches her baby in the pot, grandmother sucks her thumb, consumer-conscious sister marries a doctor, concerned-citizen sister hands herself by a yellow ribbon.
Docudance II, from 1982, is Reaganomics. In it Lerman plays "myself, a choreographer concerned with the cost of production." She uses the dancers graphically - they line up according to income level, from Jess, who's on social security, to Helen ---- Docudance III, Nine Short Dances about the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters, from this year, is rich with feeling and shifting perspectives. In part it's like a revue and it's amazing to realize that it's almost entirely --- with expert use of slides (designed by Steve Spector) and props (including a life-size puppet by Ingrid Crepeau).
Nine Short Dances starts with a super --- "How Many Bucks in a Billion?" by Ed Rejouney), cheerfully delivered by Don Zuckerman, for those of us who can't accurately imagine what a billion is. ---- at 10,000 apiece, 10,000 -- a hundred Gs/ 1,000 games of PacMan a day at least for 11,000 years...A week of sloppy joes for each child in the US/A trip around the world for all of Kalamazoo,yes/A half of a B-1 bomber, a third of a Trident sub, --- while the moon creeps up into a --- becomes the economic pie and breaks up into cars, houses, burgers yachts, which tumble into a hole which is the center of the Pentagon. Lerman begins a mesmerizing, lyrical solo full of political reminders, wisps of sentiment, evocative gestures, using he stage floor as a great map and speaking only place names. She swirls two fingers tightly over Alaska, moves wavy arms over the Yukon, extends her arms over Canadian outlands, lies on the floor, feeling the peaks of the Rockies, smooths her hand along the floor for the Midwest, bumps her tush gently along down the northeast corridor, teeters dangerously on Central America, wheels over South America, draws a sinuous line for the Amazon. She makes a cone for Mount McKinley, poses a dainty foot for Japan, chose an Apsara pose for Cambodia, a heavy squat jump for the Philippines, rolls over on her back for Afghanistan. She picks Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel like specks out of the palm of her hand. In silence, she draws a line down the center of her body for what we know to be South Africa. Repeats big, grasping gestures again and again for Russia, Russia, Russia, alternating with her little Alaska fingers. Stops and quietly scans it all, remarks, "There are missiles pointed at every square inch."
Let's skip over the 27-foot blind spot in the front of the M-1 Abrams tank and Lerman, like some windup cockroach blindly banging her head against the stage legs. Ignore the ridiculous increase in price of some Pratt and Whitney aircraft part from $16 to $34 in a single year. Jump to Lerman's beautifully articulated dance with a life size puppet with her at first as the Congress and the front and back of the puppet as Mr. Pentagon and Mr. Defense Contractor. Mr Pentagon whispers in her ear, tries to screw her, slips money from pocket to pocket. In another part, Lerman stands stage center, with a ball of wool, pulling it through her fingers, sometimes reading it like ticker tape, as a moody, changing gallery of characters.
"It won't happen," she says, "because people are too smart. It won't happen because the guys pushing the buttons don't want to die either. It won't happen because I'm doing this dance..." The argument that history's not supposed to end this way finds Lerman letting the wool twist itself into a noose. Her finesse with the material is masterful and utterly simple. "It won't happen because it would hurt..." she trails off almost in surprise as the wool slips through her fingers. Last, after a comic calamity of accumulating belligerence, with Lerman alternating as the punch-em-out superpowers, she poignantly echoes a fragment of the geography lesson - "the Rockies, the Midwest, New York, Philadelphia - reminding us of the preciousness of these places, and simultaneously suggesting we might erase them from the map in our memories.
In Lerman's fourth piece, Video Arcane (1983), it's wonderful to see her company dance full out. Arcane spins off from the behavior of people addicted to computer games and from motorized sorts of movement derived from the game figures - from stiffly squirming alligators to grasping pincers to whizzing space blips Lerman keeps things rhythmically alive amid the boinging obsessional music of Kraftwerk and Space Invaders. The excellent performers include Mary Buckley, Diane Floyd, Bob Fogelgren, Helen Rea, and Don Zuckerman, plus Judith Jourdin and Jess Rea from Dance Exchange's group of older dancers, Dancers of the Third Age.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 15 to 23).
With hair slightly mussed, leaning over her crossed legs, looking like she's going to give us the lowdown - which she is - Liz Lerman seems a sensible gal, wry and durable, a natural and practiced comedienne. Based with her company, the Dance Exchange Performance Company, In one of the citadels of doublethink, Washingon, D.C., she uses the hard information churned out by the political and military bureaucracies (Docudance III has a bibliography of eight books and nine periodicals), to whip appalling facts, gross inconsistencies, and moronic statements into brief, sassy, ironic dance pieces.
Lerman introduces each section of the first Docudances increasingly briefly, stating the subject and her role, "which is to say, the choreographer." The 1980 Docudance, Current Events, features a "family" in a three-part cartoon about politics and social issues. Each family member has a few characteristic actions. The husband reads the mail, has a hulking, worried walk. Grandmother, who's trotted out for show on the holidays, cuts out paper dolls. The consumer-conscious sister models her Calvins. The third part is about "solutions". Lerman admits we'd think she was a dope if she offered us "hope", "respect", "commitment". Instead the characters offer their solutions. Mom ditches her baby in the pot, grandmother sucks her thumb, consumer-conscious sister marries a doctor, concerned-citizen sister hands herself by a yellow ribbon.
Docudance II, from 1982, is Reaganomics. In it Lerman plays "myself, a choreographer concerned with the cost of production." She uses the dancers graphically - they line up according to income level, from Jess, who's on social security, to Helen ---- Docudance III, Nine Short Dances about the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters, from this year, is rich with feeling and shifting perspectives. In part it's like a revue and it's amazing to realize that it's almost entirely --- with expert use of slides (designed by Steve Spector) and props (including a life-size puppet by Ingrid Crepeau).
Nine Short Dances starts with a super --- "How Many Bucks in a Billion?" by Ed Rejouney), cheerfully delivered by Don Zuckerman, for those of us who can't accurately imagine what a billion is. ---- at 10,000 apiece, 10,000 -- a hundred Gs/ 1,000 games of PacMan a day at least for 11,000 years...A week of sloppy joes for each child in the US/A trip around the world for all of Kalamazoo,yes/A half of a B-1 bomber, a third of a Trident sub, --- while the moon creeps up into a --- becomes the economic pie and breaks up into cars, houses, burgers yachts, which tumble into a hole which is the center of the Pentagon. Lerman begins a mesmerizing, lyrical solo full of political reminders, wisps of sentiment, evocative gestures, using he stage floor as a great map and speaking only place names. She swirls two fingers tightly over Alaska, moves wavy arms over the Yukon, extends her arms over Canadian outlands, lies on the floor, feeling the peaks of the Rockies, smooths her hand along the floor for the Midwest, bumps her tush gently along down the northeast corridor, teeters dangerously on Central America, wheels over South America, draws a sinuous line for the Amazon. She makes a cone for Mount McKinley, poses a dainty foot for Japan, chose an Apsara pose for Cambodia, a heavy squat jump for the Philippines, rolls over on her back for Afghanistan. She picks Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel like specks out of the palm of her hand. In silence, she draws a line down the center of her body for what we know to be South Africa. Repeats big, grasping gestures again and again for Russia, Russia, Russia, alternating with her little Alaska fingers. Stops and quietly scans it all, remarks, "There are missiles pointed at every square inch."
Let's skip over the 27-foot blind spot in the front of the M-1 Abrams tank and Lerman, like some windup cockroach blindly banging her head against the stage legs. Ignore the ridiculous increase in price of some Pratt and Whitney aircraft part from $16 to $34 in a single year. Jump to Lerman's beautifully articulated dance with a life size puppet with her at first as the Congress and the front and back of the puppet as Mr. Pentagon and Mr. Defense Contractor. Mr Pentagon whispers in her ear, tries to screw her, slips money from pocket to pocket. In another part, Lerman stands stage center, with a ball of wool, pulling it through her fingers, sometimes reading it like ticker tape, as a moody, changing gallery of characters.
"It won't happen," she says, "because people are too smart. It won't happen because the guys pushing the buttons don't want to die either. It won't happen because I'm doing this dance..." The argument that history's not supposed to end this way finds Lerman letting the wool twist itself into a noose. Her finesse with the material is masterful and utterly simple. "It won't happen because it would hurt..." she trails off almost in surprise as the wool slips through her fingers. Last, after a comic calamity of accumulating belligerence, with Lerman alternating as the punch-em-out superpowers, she poignantly echoes a fragment of the geography lesson - "the Rockies, the Midwest, New York, Philadelphia - reminding us of the preciousness of these places, and simultaneously suggesting we might erase them from the map in our memories.
In Lerman's fourth piece, Video Arcane (1983), it's wonderful to see her company dance full out. Arcane spins off from the behavior of people addicted to computer games and from motorized sorts of movement derived from the game figures - from stiffly squirming alligators to grasping pincers to whizzing space blips Lerman keeps things rhythmically alive amid the boinging obsessional music of Kraftwerk and Space Invaders. The excellent performers include Mary Buckley, Diane Floyd, Bob Fogelgren, Helen Rea, and Don Zuckerman, plus Judith Jourdin and Jess Rea from Dance Exchange's group of older dancers, Dancers of the Third Age.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 15 to 23).
Big Feet, Lily Feet
March 30
Maria Cheng welcomes the audience to her DTW concert in a friendly way, making an informal ambiance for her solo dancing and storytelling - a journey through Cheng's Chinese, American and professional heritages. Speaking mildly, sweetly and modestly, like a nice, well-brought-up Chinese girl ought, she masks her tenacity and strength. But she exposes, for example, a sturdy, rebellious consciousness of the place of women in Chinese society, and counters with the heroic story of the sick general's daughter who disguises herself as a man and leads his troops for a dozen years unsuspected.
The program seems easy, agreeable, loose. Cheng's forays into the matters that concern her seem almost offhand. Unlike her dancing which is lucid and intentional every moment, where her stories and casual chatting will lead isn't clear. It all seems suspiciously innocent, but she knits it together into a substantial fabric. Like the way she talks about feet - linking the old Chinese custom of binding the feet of women, her own disappointingly "normal, flat Oriental feet," the fact that she's got herself into a profession with a foot fetish, and questioning the distorted, desirable stretched foot of ballet, encased like the crumpled bound foot, in a curious shoe.
Cheng's dancing underlying and accompanying her stories, gives her words perspective and authority by its committed action. Her voice in English is sweet and cool. But when she bursts into Chinese, displaying, perhaps, her father's anger, or her own acquiescence, she spits poison, burns with fury, dissolves into whining helplessness. She brings to the surface a web of prejudices and offenses: of the brutality of white toward Oriental, of the contempt of Chinese for "foreign devils", of the scorn of the Chinese-born for, in her mother's words, ABC's, American-born Chinese, or "bananas - yellow on the outside, white inside."
More and more bitter feeling is revealed in the course of the hour, but Cheng, we see, is not a biter woman. She has humor, a sense of proportion, sincerity. Her first dance starts tentatively, but when she goes, she's brilliantly clear. Her moves can shift, suddenly, from sharp to gentle, suffused with lively feeling. Her upper body's particularly fluid and flexible, her gaze keen, her curling, slicing arms superb. Her energy flows through easy hands. She whips the moves together over a bubbling ground of tiny bounces. When it's over, she pulls off her wine-colored leg warmers, sips from a styrofoam cup, wipes her face. Begins to tell about her grandfather, about starting to dance. Then, in red leotard and skirt, to a diddly, throbbing guitar piece of Tarrega does a rose of a dance of rich, curving and swinging, sinking down and twisting, and running turns, scooping turns, turning turns... She changes, again, and to a series of innocent questions, rhetorical questions, and questions the audience might have for her ("why is there so much talking in dancing these days?"), she moves through an eclectic shorthand movement grammar (like an animal, parodying ballet, in exaggerated triplets, delivering kung fu death blows). Her movements run together as she enumerates "fantasies of a professional nature", glamorous and sometimes noble dreams, like "to have the strength to say 'no' to the NEA and never write a grant proposal again."
Putting on a kimono, she introduces another dance, Seasonal Images of a Courtesan, with its not unusual history. She wanted to do a piece about the seasons, cycles in nature, rebirth blah blah, chose "obvious music", Vivaldi; it was academic, didn't work. She dumped it, but returned to it later. The result is a lovely, tight, all-in-one-spot dance to the most familiar of Japanese melodies, "Sakura Sakura". It's a dance almost all of hands, though the body comes to work to row and push, to age and grow limp and weary and passive. But the hands are exquisite, rising along he center line of her body, fingers spreading into wings, opening forward like a shadow bird, stiffening, fluttering, pressing together into symmetrical diagrams - into skulls of eyes and mouth, into images of insects and flowers.
For the last part, Cheng changes into white and burgundy looking like the heroine of Red Detachment of Women, and with wry humor details her dance history. "In the beginning I was taught curves...I was told not to forget ellipses." All the excellences we note in her dancing are catalogued with the ambivalence we all feel about rules: clarity, articulation, intent, appreciation of space, all about diagonals, concern for transitions, the importance of the swing. Into this intrudes the specter of money and the devotion of the lords on high to the authority of ballet with the visit of some snot from the NEA to Minneapolis, whereupon Cheng decides to give up dance, then not to. She characterizes postmodern and other dance experiences there, and the reactions of her family when, exploding into a fury of Chinese, she drives herself, another character, into a crumpled knot on the floor. In the end, life's unresolved but accepted, without fuss, in the words and gestures of her nine-year-old son. "My mommy's Chinese, my dad's American, and I'm mixed," she imitates, slanting one eye with her finger.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 24 to 27).
Maria Cheng welcomes the audience to her DTW concert in a friendly way, making an informal ambiance for her solo dancing and storytelling - a journey through Cheng's Chinese, American and professional heritages. Speaking mildly, sweetly and modestly, like a nice, well-brought-up Chinese girl ought, she masks her tenacity and strength. But she exposes, for example, a sturdy, rebellious consciousness of the place of women in Chinese society, and counters with the heroic story of the sick general's daughter who disguises herself as a man and leads his troops for a dozen years unsuspected.
The program seems easy, agreeable, loose. Cheng's forays into the matters that concern her seem almost offhand. Unlike her dancing which is lucid and intentional every moment, where her stories and casual chatting will lead isn't clear. It all seems suspiciously innocent, but she knits it together into a substantial fabric. Like the way she talks about feet - linking the old Chinese custom of binding the feet of women, her own disappointingly "normal, flat Oriental feet," the fact that she's got herself into a profession with a foot fetish, and questioning the distorted, desirable stretched foot of ballet, encased like the crumpled bound foot, in a curious shoe.
Cheng's dancing underlying and accompanying her stories, gives her words perspective and authority by its committed action. Her voice in English is sweet and cool. But when she bursts into Chinese, displaying, perhaps, her father's anger, or her own acquiescence, she spits poison, burns with fury, dissolves into whining helplessness. She brings to the surface a web of prejudices and offenses: of the brutality of white toward Oriental, of the contempt of Chinese for "foreign devils", of the scorn of the Chinese-born for, in her mother's words, ABC's, American-born Chinese, or "bananas - yellow on the outside, white inside."
More and more bitter feeling is revealed in the course of the hour, but Cheng, we see, is not a biter woman. She has humor, a sense of proportion, sincerity. Her first dance starts tentatively, but when she goes, she's brilliantly clear. Her moves can shift, suddenly, from sharp to gentle, suffused with lively feeling. Her upper body's particularly fluid and flexible, her gaze keen, her curling, slicing arms superb. Her energy flows through easy hands. She whips the moves together over a bubbling ground of tiny bounces. When it's over, she pulls off her wine-colored leg warmers, sips from a styrofoam cup, wipes her face. Begins to tell about her grandfather, about starting to dance. Then, in red leotard and skirt, to a diddly, throbbing guitar piece of Tarrega does a rose of a dance of rich, curving and swinging, sinking down and twisting, and running turns, scooping turns, turning turns... She changes, again, and to a series of innocent questions, rhetorical questions, and questions the audience might have for her ("why is there so much talking in dancing these days?"), she moves through an eclectic shorthand movement grammar (like an animal, parodying ballet, in exaggerated triplets, delivering kung fu death blows). Her movements run together as she enumerates "fantasies of a professional nature", glamorous and sometimes noble dreams, like "to have the strength to say 'no' to the NEA and never write a grant proposal again."
Putting on a kimono, she introduces another dance, Seasonal Images of a Courtesan, with its not unusual history. She wanted to do a piece about the seasons, cycles in nature, rebirth blah blah, chose "obvious music", Vivaldi; it was academic, didn't work. She dumped it, but returned to it later. The result is a lovely, tight, all-in-one-spot dance to the most familiar of Japanese melodies, "Sakura Sakura". It's a dance almost all of hands, though the body comes to work to row and push, to age and grow limp and weary and passive. But the hands are exquisite, rising along he center line of her body, fingers spreading into wings, opening forward like a shadow bird, stiffening, fluttering, pressing together into symmetrical diagrams - into skulls of eyes and mouth, into images of insects and flowers.
For the last part, Cheng changes into white and burgundy looking like the heroine of Red Detachment of Women, and with wry humor details her dance history. "In the beginning I was taught curves...I was told not to forget ellipses." All the excellences we note in her dancing are catalogued with the ambivalence we all feel about rules: clarity, articulation, intent, appreciation of space, all about diagonals, concern for transitions, the importance of the swing. Into this intrudes the specter of money and the devotion of the lords on high to the authority of ballet with the visit of some snot from the NEA to Minneapolis, whereupon Cheng decides to give up dance, then not to. She characterizes postmodern and other dance experiences there, and the reactions of her family when, exploding into a fury of Chinese, she drives herself, another character, into a crumpled knot on the floor. In the end, life's unresolved but accepted, without fuss, in the words and gestures of her nine-year-old son. "My mommy's Chinese, my dad's American, and I'm mixed," she imitates, slanting one eye with her finger.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 24 to 27).
Chorizo Con Cream Cheese
January 11
William Carter, formerly a principal with American Ballet Theater, has woven a number of diverse threads into his career, dancing with the Graham company, with Maria Alba's Spanish dance company, with Pearl Lang, with the New York City Ballet. In the early 60's, with other NYCB dancers, he started the first Chamber Dance Quartet, which toured extensively here and abroad. At Riverside Church, Carter brought together a group of superb dancers for his concert - a piquant Spanish sandwich between two longish pieces of balletic white bread.
I'd hoped to see in the dances - Seven Songs of Lorca to songs by Mikis Theodorakis and Songs of Praise (music by Dominic Argento) - more of the qualities Carter brings to his own dancing: variety of attack and modulation, precise nuance, richness of detail, a liveliness of feeling that informs movement, without necessarily labeling or defining it or hemming it in. But both pieces were long-winded, full of exclamations. Static, his brief expressive gestures and poses were scattered like emotional signposts through dances that were not, in fact, dramatic, though built on dramatic themes.
Carter is a charismatic, inspiring dancer, whose wide background has enriched his own style and appetite. When he draws himself up from kneeling in the first moment of his solo in Lorca, you see that he understands weight as well as lightness and how to fill that elastic transition. And partly, the ballets he's made require someone onstage to take charge as fully as he does: they seem too sketchy otherwise. They demand that the dancers assert themselves - not through pushiness but through the interpretation. Stephanie Saland of the New York City Ballet, replacing the injured Nanette Glushak about a week before the program, could do that, as Carter always does. He may be dancing something abstract, but he never dances just steps. His dancing always makes meaning for himself, so it holds together for an audience, it makes sense. Whether or not you could or would want to penetrate that meaning is irrelevant. And he conveys his passionate love for dancing to strengthen that sense.
Saland was exquisite and voluptuous, calm and sure and elegant as one of those great wading birds. A goddamn queen on stage, al arms and legs and a kind of secret knowledge smiling behind her face. In a duet in Lorca ("The Wind and the Gypsy Girl"), she and Carter swept through arching, sinuous waves showing each other off as agreeably as Fed and Ginger. Victor Castelli, also of the NYCB, was forceful in a solo of extremes ("Lost Through Love"), up and down, turning, thrusting away, imploring. When the footwork was rapid and delicate, Castelli was particularly beautiful. The other dancers - all very fine - were Christopher Fleming, Bonita Bourne, Mario Trujillo, Maria Gisladottir and Kathleen Smith. In the Spanish part of the concert, there's a good tavern setup: table in back with candles, wine bottles, two guitarists (Pedro Cortes and Paco Juanas), a flamenco singer (Paco Ortiz), Carter and Maria Alba - all seated in a fog of cigarette smoke though the cigarettes are missing They tap on the guitars, on the tabletop. Alba stands, a polka dot flood of white ruffles; she's slow, her feet are quiet, silky. Carter drags his chair over, his hair looks wet. There's a long slow tease, lots of foreplay, wrapping and unwrapping with Alba's shawl. (This is Curro Saraya's Estampa Arrabalera.) When Carter comes close behind her, you feel his breath on her. She can be as tough and smiling as she likes; he keeps her in an embrace of warm attention.
Spanish dancing is so fierce in its concentration and intensity, such a terribly private testing on display in public. But this is different; emotionally, it seems unusually safe. Even though he leaves without her - to her chagrin - Carter makes you feel that as far as he's concerned, Alba can do no wrong, so the heat of their challenge is subtly altered. No dummy, after slugging down a drink, she takes the bottle and marches after him. In his solo, Alegrias, Carter amplifies the Spanish vocabulary with baller lightness and flash - like a triple pirouette that drops to the floor - and uses the space in an expansive way. It seems perfectly appropriate, not at all gimmicky or awkward, because it's all second nature to him. He molds the elements seamlessly so there's no flaw in the logic.
The other duet, Concerto de Aranjuez, to the inevitable Rodrigo music, is one of those scenarios of the Poet and his Muse, or the Lover and his dead Beloved. Alba, in black and covered with a big black veil, comes behind Carter. He's reaching for her, sensing her, but doesn't see her. He's discouraged...Gradually they grow closer; she lifts him without touching, he tries to hold her and can't. As they grow surer, he tries to penetrate the veil, and finally it does come off and clings to him. He's able to discard it, and they get together with nothing in the way, but when he picks her up, she wilts. And at the end, when she separates herself from him, he dies. The whole Romantic conceit progresses pretty sensibly, considering, and all the crucial veil business is beautifully worked out. Against men and women who seem substantial, whom you think of as persons (Carter, Saland, Alba, the singer) the other dancers can seem dangerously thin, even - this is too harsh - trivial. I can just endure this in ballets where everyone is clearly ranked - stars, secondary soloists, corps. But when the choreography puts the dancers on a more equal footing, it's unpleasant, painful, to perceive one as a woman, another as a girl, one as a man, another as a boy.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (December 16 to 19).
William Carter, formerly a principal with American Ballet Theater, has woven a number of diverse threads into his career, dancing with the Graham company, with Maria Alba's Spanish dance company, with Pearl Lang, with the New York City Ballet. In the early 60's, with other NYCB dancers, he started the first Chamber Dance Quartet, which toured extensively here and abroad. At Riverside Church, Carter brought together a group of superb dancers for his concert - a piquant Spanish sandwich between two longish pieces of balletic white bread.
I'd hoped to see in the dances - Seven Songs of Lorca to songs by Mikis Theodorakis and Songs of Praise (music by Dominic Argento) - more of the qualities Carter brings to his own dancing: variety of attack and modulation, precise nuance, richness of detail, a liveliness of feeling that informs movement, without necessarily labeling or defining it or hemming it in. But both pieces were long-winded, full of exclamations. Static, his brief expressive gestures and poses were scattered like emotional signposts through dances that were not, in fact, dramatic, though built on dramatic themes.
Carter is a charismatic, inspiring dancer, whose wide background has enriched his own style and appetite. When he draws himself up from kneeling in the first moment of his solo in Lorca, you see that he understands weight as well as lightness and how to fill that elastic transition. And partly, the ballets he's made require someone onstage to take charge as fully as he does: they seem too sketchy otherwise. They demand that the dancers assert themselves - not through pushiness but through the interpretation. Stephanie Saland of the New York City Ballet, replacing the injured Nanette Glushak about a week before the program, could do that, as Carter always does. He may be dancing something abstract, but he never dances just steps. His dancing always makes meaning for himself, so it holds together for an audience, it makes sense. Whether or not you could or would want to penetrate that meaning is irrelevant. And he conveys his passionate love for dancing to strengthen that sense.
Saland was exquisite and voluptuous, calm and sure and elegant as one of those great wading birds. A goddamn queen on stage, al arms and legs and a kind of secret knowledge smiling behind her face. In a duet in Lorca ("The Wind and the Gypsy Girl"), she and Carter swept through arching, sinuous waves showing each other off as agreeably as Fed and Ginger. Victor Castelli, also of the NYCB, was forceful in a solo of extremes ("Lost Through Love"), up and down, turning, thrusting away, imploring. When the footwork was rapid and delicate, Castelli was particularly beautiful. The other dancers - all very fine - were Christopher Fleming, Bonita Bourne, Mario Trujillo, Maria Gisladottir and Kathleen Smith. In the Spanish part of the concert, there's a good tavern setup: table in back with candles, wine bottles, two guitarists (Pedro Cortes and Paco Juanas), a flamenco singer (Paco Ortiz), Carter and Maria Alba - all seated in a fog of cigarette smoke though the cigarettes are missing They tap on the guitars, on the tabletop. Alba stands, a polka dot flood of white ruffles; she's slow, her feet are quiet, silky. Carter drags his chair over, his hair looks wet. There's a long slow tease, lots of foreplay, wrapping and unwrapping with Alba's shawl. (This is Curro Saraya's Estampa Arrabalera.) When Carter comes close behind her, you feel his breath on her. She can be as tough and smiling as she likes; he keeps her in an embrace of warm attention.
Spanish dancing is so fierce in its concentration and intensity, such a terribly private testing on display in public. But this is different; emotionally, it seems unusually safe. Even though he leaves without her - to her chagrin - Carter makes you feel that as far as he's concerned, Alba can do no wrong, so the heat of their challenge is subtly altered. No dummy, after slugging down a drink, she takes the bottle and marches after him. In his solo, Alegrias, Carter amplifies the Spanish vocabulary with baller lightness and flash - like a triple pirouette that drops to the floor - and uses the space in an expansive way. It seems perfectly appropriate, not at all gimmicky or awkward, because it's all second nature to him. He molds the elements seamlessly so there's no flaw in the logic.
The other duet, Concerto de Aranjuez, to the inevitable Rodrigo music, is one of those scenarios of the Poet and his Muse, or the Lover and his dead Beloved. Alba, in black and covered with a big black veil, comes behind Carter. He's reaching for her, sensing her, but doesn't see her. He's discouraged...Gradually they grow closer; she lifts him without touching, he tries to hold her and can't. As they grow surer, he tries to penetrate the veil, and finally it does come off and clings to him. He's able to discard it, and they get together with nothing in the way, but when he picks her up, she wilts. And at the end, when she separates herself from him, he dies. The whole Romantic conceit progresses pretty sensibly, considering, and all the crucial veil business is beautifully worked out. Against men and women who seem substantial, whom you think of as persons (Carter, Saland, Alba, the singer) the other dancers can seem dangerously thin, even - this is too harsh - trivial. I can just endure this in ballets where everyone is clearly ranked - stars, secondary soloists, corps. But when the choreography puts the dancers on a more equal footing, it's unpleasant, painful, to perceive one as a woman, another as a girl, one as a man, another as a boy.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (December 16 to 19).
Confining Visions
July 5
Laura Glenn and Gary Lund, who used to be Two's Company, presented mostly premieres in their recent DTW concert. Physically, they're beautifully clear and strong. Glenn can be lyric and eloquent. Lund has an impressive mimetic flair and he can commit his whole body to a single idea. But the schemes of their serious dance seem, to some degree, out of scale - too confining for their considerable abilities.
The novelty of the evening was a 3-D dance film (cinematography by Tom Mangravite, editor Harvey Kopel) in black and white called After the Appointment near Kerb, choreographed by Glenn in 1981, with a set by David Itchkawich based on a small etching of his own. The etching shows a middle European couple in a well-to-do but empty and stolidly gloomy scene of blocky houses, auto, iron gate. The dimensionality of the film (Tri-Delta system devised by Marcus and Pompey Mainardi) is vivid but rarely gives the illusion of volume you hope for Rather there's a strong sense of successive flat planes in dramatic perspective.
From time to time cutout figures in the foreground exaggerate the sense of near and far. The glasses are the usual nuisance. The film-dance alternates sequences of the elderly couple (Glenn and Lund), dressed in between-the-wars mufti, with, I assume their younger selves. The older people run forward with tight steps, jump back, clutch each other, huddle together - fearful or weak or totally interdependent. They walk, run in steady rhythm rock, kick to the floor. Sometimes you see them or their flashback versions through bars. Lund runs in a limping circle, holding on to his calf. Glenn hobbles backward, gripping her ankle. She turns onto her side on the floor, then pushes herself away from the camera foot by foot. Lund, crouched, turns slowly. We see the pair, too, in straitjackets with very long, linked sleeves; they can wind and pretzel themselves together. There's a quality in so many of the images of vigor imprisoned, of crippling, of futility and sadness. The faltering old people are the remnants of those strugglers.
Nuclear Family Suite's first part, "The Family", to "Frere Jacques," "Daisy, Daisy" and part of a Bach partita, shows an ideal family unit around the dinner table (with cutout roasts and cutout kids pasted onto little chairs). With sharp-edged gestures like mechanical dolls, Lund and Glenn, Mr. & Mrs., do kissy-face, pat hands on asses, smile, yawn, say grace, cut their food Run through their repertoire a couple of times, roll crookedly around the floor, engage in a bit of crablike sex, prance together and recapitulate with all the stuffing and spunk gone out of them - old, tentative, disappointed, pooped. It's beautifully clear, but eventually disappointing - too much effort and superb execution goes into getting somewhere obvious.
The second part, Glenn's "Chicago Tribune", starts with a bunch of women wearing cartons painted to represent city buildings. Glenn carries a shrouded object on her back, another carton-building, ad, alone, unwinds a track of thread to form a square on the floor. Her movement afterwards is broken by wrong turns, little hard jumps, little backwards steps with flopping hands, constricted turns - all of which generates a distraught intensity. This accompanies the tale of an elderly Chinese woman lost and so fearful, unable to find her way home or make herself understood, that she wanders alone for two days straight. Glenn's thread never guides her home. Somehow the directness of the dance illustration depletes the poignancy of the story, and the textual particulars of the woman's plight reduce her experience to something more ordinary than a sketchier version of the facts suggests.
The third section, "Flight 242", by and with Lund, starts with people crossing back and forth with suitcases. A tape spews mixed news about tail winds and predicts a rough flight. Lund's solo is earnest and determined. He attacks it sharply, muscularly. His fists pulse, he rolls upside down. The movement's usually urgent, punching into big leaps, stiff, straight bounces. In a way, he's astonishingly forceful and single-minded. So much of what he does seems drastic, traumatic, hysterical - the way he flings into pugnacious attitudes, suddenly laughs, shudders up and down in a fit, gets his powerfully windmilling arms to almost lift him off the ground. He twists one hand down the inside of his other arm abruptly, as if her were screwing open the lid of an old sardine tin - it struck me as a ghastly image of mutilation. Lund is an intense presence - distressed, hard and relentless - but I can't grasp the shape of this dreadful occasion. And he hits with numbing force all at once, so the emotional impact of "Flight 242" is strangely blunt.
War of the Worlds, Part I, by Glenn for 16 or 17 women in sort of formal pants and vests, is set to the beginning of Orson Welles's infamous broadcast of martian invasion. It's light and very funny, with a clever use of choral effects as snazzy as the fancy shuffles of the amateur card sharp. We see those teasing, clickety, sequential shifts, like rows of heads or hands turning one after another, symmetrical formations like a crew of plastic girls flowing around a smiling central cluster. Glenn divides her women into three flexible groups: sometimes people dancing at the hotels where Welles's newscast ostensibly interrupts is originating, or stupefied observers, or ominous martians. Sometimes the dancers seem infected by a kind of pseudo innocence of te super children of John Wyndham's Midwitch Cuckoos. But the way Glenn mixes a droll and literal Mickey-Mousing of the text with very plain but abstract gestures and patterns keeps the piece surprisingly silly. Being able to play off a ready-made plot episode that doesn't have to be taken seriously or illuminated in any way may have been a very good idea.
At Dance Theater Workshop (June 16 to 19).
Laura Glenn and Gary Lund, who used to be Two's Company, presented mostly premieres in their recent DTW concert. Physically, they're beautifully clear and strong. Glenn can be lyric and eloquent. Lund has an impressive mimetic flair and he can commit his whole body to a single idea. But the schemes of their serious dance seem, to some degree, out of scale - too confining for their considerable abilities.
The novelty of the evening was a 3-D dance film (cinematography by Tom Mangravite, editor Harvey Kopel) in black and white called After the Appointment near Kerb, choreographed by Glenn in 1981, with a set by David Itchkawich based on a small etching of his own. The etching shows a middle European couple in a well-to-do but empty and stolidly gloomy scene of blocky houses, auto, iron gate. The dimensionality of the film (Tri-Delta system devised by Marcus and Pompey Mainardi) is vivid but rarely gives the illusion of volume you hope for Rather there's a strong sense of successive flat planes in dramatic perspective.
From time to time cutout figures in the foreground exaggerate the sense of near and far. The glasses are the usual nuisance. The film-dance alternates sequences of the elderly couple (Glenn and Lund), dressed in between-the-wars mufti, with, I assume their younger selves. The older people run forward with tight steps, jump back, clutch each other, huddle together - fearful or weak or totally interdependent. They walk, run in steady rhythm rock, kick to the floor. Sometimes you see them or their flashback versions through bars. Lund runs in a limping circle, holding on to his calf. Glenn hobbles backward, gripping her ankle. She turns onto her side on the floor, then pushes herself away from the camera foot by foot. Lund, crouched, turns slowly. We see the pair, too, in straitjackets with very long, linked sleeves; they can wind and pretzel themselves together. There's a quality in so many of the images of vigor imprisoned, of crippling, of futility and sadness. The faltering old people are the remnants of those strugglers.
Nuclear Family Suite's first part, "The Family", to "Frere Jacques," "Daisy, Daisy" and part of a Bach partita, shows an ideal family unit around the dinner table (with cutout roasts and cutout kids pasted onto little chairs). With sharp-edged gestures like mechanical dolls, Lund and Glenn, Mr. & Mrs., do kissy-face, pat hands on asses, smile, yawn, say grace, cut their food Run through their repertoire a couple of times, roll crookedly around the floor, engage in a bit of crablike sex, prance together and recapitulate with all the stuffing and spunk gone out of them - old, tentative, disappointed, pooped. It's beautifully clear, but eventually disappointing - too much effort and superb execution goes into getting somewhere obvious.
The second part, Glenn's "Chicago Tribune", starts with a bunch of women wearing cartons painted to represent city buildings. Glenn carries a shrouded object on her back, another carton-building, ad, alone, unwinds a track of thread to form a square on the floor. Her movement afterwards is broken by wrong turns, little hard jumps, little backwards steps with flopping hands, constricted turns - all of which generates a distraught intensity. This accompanies the tale of an elderly Chinese woman lost and so fearful, unable to find her way home or make herself understood, that she wanders alone for two days straight. Glenn's thread never guides her home. Somehow the directness of the dance illustration depletes the poignancy of the story, and the textual particulars of the woman's plight reduce her experience to something more ordinary than a sketchier version of the facts suggests.
The third section, "Flight 242", by and with Lund, starts with people crossing back and forth with suitcases. A tape spews mixed news about tail winds and predicts a rough flight. Lund's solo is earnest and determined. He attacks it sharply, muscularly. His fists pulse, he rolls upside down. The movement's usually urgent, punching into big leaps, stiff, straight bounces. In a way, he's astonishingly forceful and single-minded. So much of what he does seems drastic, traumatic, hysterical - the way he flings into pugnacious attitudes, suddenly laughs, shudders up and down in a fit, gets his powerfully windmilling arms to almost lift him off the ground. He twists one hand down the inside of his other arm abruptly, as if her were screwing open the lid of an old sardine tin - it struck me as a ghastly image of mutilation. Lund is an intense presence - distressed, hard and relentless - but I can't grasp the shape of this dreadful occasion. And he hits with numbing force all at once, so the emotional impact of "Flight 242" is strangely blunt.
War of the Worlds, Part I, by Glenn for 16 or 17 women in sort of formal pants and vests, is set to the beginning of Orson Welles's infamous broadcast of martian invasion. It's light and very funny, with a clever use of choral effects as snazzy as the fancy shuffles of the amateur card sharp. We see those teasing, clickety, sequential shifts, like rows of heads or hands turning one after another, symmetrical formations like a crew of plastic girls flowing around a smiling central cluster. Glenn divides her women into three flexible groups: sometimes people dancing at the hotels where Welles's newscast ostensibly interrupts is originating, or stupefied observers, or ominous martians. Sometimes the dancers seem infected by a kind of pseudo innocence of te super children of John Wyndham's Midwitch Cuckoos. But the way Glenn mixes a droll and literal Mickey-Mousing of the text with very plain but abstract gestures and patterns keeps the piece surprisingly silly. Being able to play off a ready-made plot episode that doesn't have to be taken seriously or illuminated in any way may have been a very good idea.
At Dance Theater Workshop (June 16 to 19).
Drops from a Deep River
December 20
Deborah Hay and composer Pauline Oliveros's dance/music collaboration, Midnight Well Water, with its four sections called after hexagrams of the I Ching, suggests in its title, depths that the piece itself skims over.
In the first section, "The Receptive", Oliveros sits on stage in a red pants suit, playing just the wind of the accordion. Hay moves first in arcs, without momentum. Her steps are small, padding sideways, her arms spread. But there's flat, airless, oddly absent quality. It's the slight stiffness of Hay's back and shoulders that's responsible, I think, that makes her arms resistant rather than receptive. And a very low-key but superior manner that implies, "This is good for you." She lets her belly relax into a comfortable curve and begins to shiver at the waist. Her mouth forms an O. She moves into a crouch. Knees atremble, eyes blinking, she staggers convulsively but quietly. Her head shakes, hands shake and then soften as she takes control and comes erect. She makes small tight expressions with her mouth like she's got some loathsome wad in there that she can't spit out. She kicks her legs back, almost running in place, does high kicks with bent legs, looking dismayingly old-ladyish, like Martha Graham not long before she finally quit dancing.
In the second section, "The Well, inexhaustible nourishment", one, two, finally three women - Helene Gold, Emily Burken, Diana Prechter - bend over, with plaid cloths over their heads, palms on the floor. Malcolm Goldstein plays faint, slightly scratchy sounds on the violin. Stuart Dempster comes in with a long low hum on the trombone. After a long time, growing roots and juicing up, the women pull the cloths down to they waists, and begin to move in a bent, waddling walk. The music stays kind of foggy. The band looks asleep. Percussionist Don Knaack gently taps a cowbell. The women, standing, shift directions slightly, as gradually as a shadow moves across a sundial. They walk softly, with a slight bend, wrap and tie their plaids into skirts. Hay comes on slowly. Oliveros opens her eyes, from time t time, piercingly alert, watching the dancers whose hands begin to claw and faces to twist with a wild and unpredictable range of emotions - fear, disgust, horror,etc. - that possess the whole body. This live-action gallery of emotional extremity becomes as comic as it is fierce, since the expressions seem to arise willy-nilly from the dancers and relate to nothing situational. Routinely, these manic episodes subside into gentler ones, where, for example, the women lift their feet softly, let their arms drift. Then they stamp, jump, wriggle, vibrate, twitch twist, scamper, hop with eager maenad faces, gleaming. he trombone growls, drumsticks hammer, the violin bites into short attacks on the strings.
When, out of nowhere, Yvonne Rainer, shrieked and crashed around in Three Seascapes 20 years ago, she had a zany, uncompromising vitality that made rationalization unnecessary. But Hay's work is more embedded in a philosophical schema that arouses the expectation that we will feel, in some way, the sense underlying the changing configuration of physical/emotional events. The movement is often basic, but not crude. We have to trust, absolutely, the bodies we're seeing, trust what they do and how they do it. It's not the sort of dancing where we accept a style and nod to its conventions. If we wonder about Hay's choices, her construction crumbles. What's required of us, in a way, is faith. But there's a lack of generosity, a narrowness, a guru-ish pushiness that makes it hard to go along with the piece or have confidence in the dancing. Something seems closed that should be open.
Of the dancers, who are very good, only Diana Prechter moves with the sort of full-bodied glee that makes everything possible. The "band" is my favorite thing in all this. They're the ones your eyes seek out. And in the third section, "Preponderance of the Great," they go ape. The dancers do, too, bursting with sudden yelps as they run, leap, stamp, kick. The musicians utter short yells, chopped off guttural screams - more in delight than to terrify. The dancers swank into storky, flat-footed, straight-legged runs with arms lifted. A little later, they're creeping around the floor on all fours, frontside up, with funny, shamed, proud, quizzical looks like tots who've shit in their pans and won't know how it happened or what to do. They mass into a snarl of bodies, turn into stamping furies. And the band's in no less of a tumult. Knack's rat-a-tating some stick on the floor, blowing a conch shell; Dempster's honking on some blatting tube I can't see what it is. The last section smooths all this away, with the dancers in skirts of ribbons, walking smoothly like fantasy maidservants, and loosely weaving together a little more quickly. The music spells out a steady dadadaDUM dadum. But sudden spurts of flinging limbs and wild spiraling, erupting, until the end confirm the instability of our accommodations.
Deborah Hay and composer Pauline Oliveros's dance/music collaboration, Midnight Well Water, with its four sections called after hexagrams of the I Ching, suggests in its title, depths that the piece itself skims over.
In the first section, "The Receptive", Oliveros sits on stage in a red pants suit, playing just the wind of the accordion. Hay moves first in arcs, without momentum. Her steps are small, padding sideways, her arms spread. But there's flat, airless, oddly absent quality. It's the slight stiffness of Hay's back and shoulders that's responsible, I think, that makes her arms resistant rather than receptive. And a very low-key but superior manner that implies, "This is good for you." She lets her belly relax into a comfortable curve and begins to shiver at the waist. Her mouth forms an O. She moves into a crouch. Knees atremble, eyes blinking, she staggers convulsively but quietly. Her head shakes, hands shake and then soften as she takes control and comes erect. She makes small tight expressions with her mouth like she's got some loathsome wad in there that she can't spit out. She kicks her legs back, almost running in place, does high kicks with bent legs, looking dismayingly old-ladyish, like Martha Graham not long before she finally quit dancing.
In the second section, "The Well, inexhaustible nourishment", one, two, finally three women - Helene Gold, Emily Burken, Diana Prechter - bend over, with plaid cloths over their heads, palms on the floor. Malcolm Goldstein plays faint, slightly scratchy sounds on the violin. Stuart Dempster comes in with a long low hum on the trombone. After a long time, growing roots and juicing up, the women pull the cloths down to they waists, and begin to move in a bent, waddling walk. The music stays kind of foggy. The band looks asleep. Percussionist Don Knaack gently taps a cowbell. The women, standing, shift directions slightly, as gradually as a shadow moves across a sundial. They walk softly, with a slight bend, wrap and tie their plaids into skirts. Hay comes on slowly. Oliveros opens her eyes, from time t time, piercingly alert, watching the dancers whose hands begin to claw and faces to twist with a wild and unpredictable range of emotions - fear, disgust, horror,etc. - that possess the whole body. This live-action gallery of emotional extremity becomes as comic as it is fierce, since the expressions seem to arise willy-nilly from the dancers and relate to nothing situational. Routinely, these manic episodes subside into gentler ones, where, for example, the women lift their feet softly, let their arms drift. Then they stamp, jump, wriggle, vibrate, twitch twist, scamper, hop with eager maenad faces, gleaming. he trombone growls, drumsticks hammer, the violin bites into short attacks on the strings.
When, out of nowhere, Yvonne Rainer, shrieked and crashed around in Three Seascapes 20 years ago, she had a zany, uncompromising vitality that made rationalization unnecessary. But Hay's work is more embedded in a philosophical schema that arouses the expectation that we will feel, in some way, the sense underlying the changing configuration of physical/emotional events. The movement is often basic, but not crude. We have to trust, absolutely, the bodies we're seeing, trust what they do and how they do it. It's not the sort of dancing where we accept a style and nod to its conventions. If we wonder about Hay's choices, her construction crumbles. What's required of us, in a way, is faith. But there's a lack of generosity, a narrowness, a guru-ish pushiness that makes it hard to go along with the piece or have confidence in the dancing. Something seems closed that should be open.
Of the dancers, who are very good, only Diana Prechter moves with the sort of full-bodied glee that makes everything possible. The "band" is my favorite thing in all this. They're the ones your eyes seek out. And in the third section, "Preponderance of the Great," they go ape. The dancers do, too, bursting with sudden yelps as they run, leap, stamp, kick. The musicians utter short yells, chopped off guttural screams - more in delight than to terrify. The dancers swank into storky, flat-footed, straight-legged runs with arms lifted. A little later, they're creeping around the floor on all fours, frontside up, with funny, shamed, proud, quizzical looks like tots who've shit in their pans and won't know how it happened or what to do. They mass into a snarl of bodies, turn into stamping furies. And the band's in no less of a tumult. Knack's rat-a-tating some stick on the floor, blowing a conch shell; Dempster's honking on some blatting tube I can't see what it is. The last section smooths all this away, with the dancers in skirts of ribbons, walking smoothly like fantasy maidservants, and loosely weaving together a little more quickly. The music spells out a steady dadadaDUM dadum. But sudden spurts of flinging limbs and wild spiraling, erupting, until the end confirm the instability of our accommodations.
Fire on Ice
January 26
The threat of the current Ice Capades's hordes of skating smurfs makes the Pro-Skate Championships at Madison Square Garden in December seem even more glorious. Two days were filled with marvelous figure skating in a situation fostering competition on a professional level, giving skaters options besides doing virtuosos turns in the ice shows. Women, in particular, tend to drop out of the sport young, though the matchless Protopopovs - not part of Pro Skate - who raised the artistic level of pair skating immeasurably, are into their fifties and still skate ravishingly.
If some of the youthful fizz dissipates, other kinds of artistry develop. There's a weird awkwardness in events that mix art and sport. You can watch a fine diver or gymnast on the rings, or the horse, or the uneven parallel bars, etc. with total satisfaction in the art of it. It's clean, formal, minimal in the relation of muscular effort to result. That's part of the beauty. The art is the sport - in the skill required and in formal qualities of execution. There are no interpretive aspects. But in certain women's events especially, like balance-beam work or free-style gymnastics on the floor, we're onto mucky artistic ground with decorative and presentational elements of performance, with musical choices and interpretation. And these elements often set skilled gymnastic abilities in a tacky context. It's sport, so you excuse it.
Figure skating also uncomfortably balances artistic choices and technical skills. And in competition, taste is a quality that the judges don't quite measure, and that audience members would thoroughly disagree on. But the question of taste comes up in several ways. First, in the music. Skaters are judged for their use of music, but not for their selection. In the Pro-Skate events, "What I did for Love" was a popular choice. Debussy was not, the "love theme" from Spartacus was a big item. Often the music was just horrid (this is certainly no better in the big ice shows). And the way many skaters patch together musical selections so they can show off different talents with appropriate backup makes for clumsy, amateurish combinations.
Another problem of taste has to do with figure skating as something commercial and circusy, as something that's popular in a low sense. In loftier realms, and technical excellence aside, "artistic" skaters like Peggy Fleming or Toller Cranston sometimes seem merely arty, into spinoffs of ballerina stuff or the phony intensity of modern interpretive dancing like Gene Kelly's lumpily serious movie numbers. Grafts of delicate ballet mannerisms, as if they have some value out of context, are an embarrassment. More generally, anything that depends on the audience's perception of the skater's projection of a wrought-up emotional state comes off fake. Even with pair skating it's not the romance of couples that make it so appealing, though there may be those overtones, but its crucial harmony. That smooth, consonant glide gets busted up by throws and flings, by daredevil catches and whizzing death spirals. But every trick emphasized how well the partners are matched and synchronized.
The smooth lines of balletic style translate very accommodatingly to the ice; "jazzy", nightclubby, floozy stuff looks dumb. A jerky rock style studded with staccato jabs at the ice seems disagreeable in the wrong element. But, Allen Schram, for example, in a jagged, pop horror routine, made a raw, angular style work because the theatrical notion and a sharply humorous edge sustained it. Fumio Igarashi, a sliver of a skater, was dazzling in a fast, skittering routine glittering with light split-second, punctuating footwork that kept him as low to the ice as any speed skater. Janet Lynn, recently returned to skating, was exquisite in her winning solo. Young Katherine Healy did a surprisingly effective and uneffusive version of The Dying Swan, sensibly taking only the last few seconds to die. Robin Cousins's thrilling, turning jumps, his deep, resilient landings, his smashing back flip, and clean, decisive arms brought him first place among the men. He does just sit there in midair. But charismatic Terry Kubicka, who didn't even place for reasons I can't understand, roused the audience to its feet with a spectacular tourine and the enormous generosity of his performance.
John Curry presented an exhibition trio - which next year will be a competition category - with Patricia Dodd and Mark Hominuke. The element of simultaneity is trickier with three, and it will be worth seeing if three skaters can devise things significantly different from what pairs can work out together. I mean, why have two guys lift a girl when one can do it? Among the other fine skaters were Lynn Nightingale, Angela Greenhow, Kath Malmberg, Bob Rubens and Simon Grigorescu, and among the pairs: Candy Jones and Don Fraser, Keith Davis and Shelley Winters, Mark and Janet Lee, Hominuke, Bruce Hurd and Elizabeth Chabot, Kim Krohn and Barry Haran, Lillian Heming and Murray Carey.
At Madison Square Garden (December 18 and 19).
The threat of the current Ice Capades's hordes of skating smurfs makes the Pro-Skate Championships at Madison Square Garden in December seem even more glorious. Two days were filled with marvelous figure skating in a situation fostering competition on a professional level, giving skaters options besides doing virtuosos turns in the ice shows. Women, in particular, tend to drop out of the sport young, though the matchless Protopopovs - not part of Pro Skate - who raised the artistic level of pair skating immeasurably, are into their fifties and still skate ravishingly.
If some of the youthful fizz dissipates, other kinds of artistry develop. There's a weird awkwardness in events that mix art and sport. You can watch a fine diver or gymnast on the rings, or the horse, or the uneven parallel bars, etc. with total satisfaction in the art of it. It's clean, formal, minimal in the relation of muscular effort to result. That's part of the beauty. The art is the sport - in the skill required and in formal qualities of execution. There are no interpretive aspects. But in certain women's events especially, like balance-beam work or free-style gymnastics on the floor, we're onto mucky artistic ground with decorative and presentational elements of performance, with musical choices and interpretation. And these elements often set skilled gymnastic abilities in a tacky context. It's sport, so you excuse it.
Figure skating also uncomfortably balances artistic choices and technical skills. And in competition, taste is a quality that the judges don't quite measure, and that audience members would thoroughly disagree on. But the question of taste comes up in several ways. First, in the music. Skaters are judged for their use of music, but not for their selection. In the Pro-Skate events, "What I did for Love" was a popular choice. Debussy was not, the "love theme" from Spartacus was a big item. Often the music was just horrid (this is certainly no better in the big ice shows). And the way many skaters patch together musical selections so they can show off different talents with appropriate backup makes for clumsy, amateurish combinations.
Another problem of taste has to do with figure skating as something commercial and circusy, as something that's popular in a low sense. In loftier realms, and technical excellence aside, "artistic" skaters like Peggy Fleming or Toller Cranston sometimes seem merely arty, into spinoffs of ballerina stuff or the phony intensity of modern interpretive dancing like Gene Kelly's lumpily serious movie numbers. Grafts of delicate ballet mannerisms, as if they have some value out of context, are an embarrassment. More generally, anything that depends on the audience's perception of the skater's projection of a wrought-up emotional state comes off fake. Even with pair skating it's not the romance of couples that make it so appealing, though there may be those overtones, but its crucial harmony. That smooth, consonant glide gets busted up by throws and flings, by daredevil catches and whizzing death spirals. But every trick emphasized how well the partners are matched and synchronized.
The smooth lines of balletic style translate very accommodatingly to the ice; "jazzy", nightclubby, floozy stuff looks dumb. A jerky rock style studded with staccato jabs at the ice seems disagreeable in the wrong element. But, Allen Schram, for example, in a jagged, pop horror routine, made a raw, angular style work because the theatrical notion and a sharply humorous edge sustained it. Fumio Igarashi, a sliver of a skater, was dazzling in a fast, skittering routine glittering with light split-second, punctuating footwork that kept him as low to the ice as any speed skater. Janet Lynn, recently returned to skating, was exquisite in her winning solo. Young Katherine Healy did a surprisingly effective and uneffusive version of The Dying Swan, sensibly taking only the last few seconds to die. Robin Cousins's thrilling, turning jumps, his deep, resilient landings, his smashing back flip, and clean, decisive arms brought him first place among the men. He does just sit there in midair. But charismatic Terry Kubicka, who didn't even place for reasons I can't understand, roused the audience to its feet with a spectacular tourine and the enormous generosity of his performance.
John Curry presented an exhibition trio - which next year will be a competition category - with Patricia Dodd and Mark Hominuke. The element of simultaneity is trickier with three, and it will be worth seeing if three skaters can devise things significantly different from what pairs can work out together. I mean, why have two guys lift a girl when one can do it? Among the other fine skaters were Lynn Nightingale, Angela Greenhow, Kath Malmberg, Bob Rubens and Simon Grigorescu, and among the pairs: Candy Jones and Don Fraser, Keith Davis and Shelley Winters, Mark and Janet Lee, Hominuke, Bruce Hurd and Elizabeth Chabot, Kim Krohn and Barry Haran, Lillian Heming and Murray Carey.
At Madison Square Garden (December 18 and 19).
Flights and Fights
March 9
The two theatrical works Tom Keegan, Davidson Lloyd and Dan Froot have joined in Fragile Bodies at P.S. 122 are cousins, lacing good talk and songs with stylized and careless, highly energized movement. Both pieces rely on a kind of boyish, playground zest and wild, flaky humor. But these guys can loop and flex an emotional line that's elastic, fantastic. They're protean in the easy way they'll slip from one emotional gear to another. The timing's right, nothing drags, but when something should take a while - like a stymied fight at the end of the first piece - they're not afraid to stay with it.
But what makes Fragile Bodies rich is the way images of different activities and relationships overlap and mesh, become simultaneous, so you cross through the image or ride on the mood of pitch of the movement from one event or "story" into another, swimming back and forth. In the first piece, Keegan - tall, rubber-faced, red-haired - stands still, rubs his nose, screws up his face. Froot- compact, in black - smashes a metal folding chair upside down, then perches comfortably on the rung. Both tell kid stories of fantasy and disaster, like Keegan flying downhill on a bike without having learned to brake. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," he babbles. Under a pair of tied-together sheets, they sleep apart, wriggling and shifting positions alternately. Head out, sleepless, Froot plays with his fingers like puppets; Keegan bounces his knees under the covers.
You don't exactly peg these guys, don't expect consistency, but Keegan is candid, impulsive, with a marvelous daffiness; Froot's slier, more calculating, determined and intense. Both are fierce, and the poignant humor that explodes from their exchanges comes from the way their similarities - like their heat and eagerness flow together and their differences jar. Like when their enthusiasms run with them but their ideas clash. They sing, separately, "I like being home alone." Keegan's reasons are all "no"s - "I don't want to see your face, I don't want to be a scout, I don't want to get a job..." Froot's have to do with taking advantage of somebody's absence, like "eat from someone else's plate, sleep with someone else's date..." Back with the sheets they crawl hand over hand from opposite ends, their impassioned raps melding thoughts about the piece they're making - this one, maybe - how it should go, and culminate, blending and overlaid with the warmth of their personal relationship, real or fictional. Revisions, new ideas, send them back to the ends of the sheets to crawl to the middle again, where, each time, they end with foreheads pressed together, physically close but disappointingly more and more isolated in their plans. Eventually, disagreement and the agitation of mounting physical energy sets them battling One knocks the other. Both have their shirts half off, can't see.
The unremitting pushing, twisting force of their forms locked together is beautifully unself-conscious and exciting. They won't let go. And they don't. But the pressing of one against the other subtly and very slowly changes into the relief of a tight embrace. Well - you've been waiting for it.
The second piece is a looser amalgam of images and fragments and stories of danger and menace and fragility, enacted by Keegan and Lloyd, with Froot high up, away from the action, reading a smarty-pants version of The Three Little Pigs. First thing that happens is that Lloyd, in a patchwork athletic outfit, jumps, falls, crashes and reappears n crutches. There are couple of malicious tests. Keegan's supposed to fold a towel a particular way. Lloyd nastily gives him lots of chances, needling him each time without quite letting him see how it's done. And there's an egg balancing contest: Keegan cheats; his egg's glued on. Keegan warns Lloyd early on that the pain - of whatever - gets worse. Later, he whacks him, reminding him that "the middle is always painful." The Three Little Pigs becomes more synchronous with the action. Keegan, in a black coat, approaches Lloyd. "Let me in," he demands. "Let me in," he insists, threatens, whines, wheedles, pleads. While Lloyd sings a song about fragility, Keegan flits around dispensing eggs all over the floor. Then Lloyd does too. They dance among the thickly scattered eggs. One or two are purposely smashed, spilling a gluey mess on the floor. A minute later, Keegan crushes one or two others in his hands. But these drizzle confetti snow or flakes of mica. We remember Froot then, still on his perch, but now he's wearing a gas mask, and almost incoherent. What's he mumbling? "Mayday, mayday..." Sorry. Everybody's busy laughing.
At P.S. 122 (February 25 to 27).
The two theatrical works Tom Keegan, Davidson Lloyd and Dan Froot have joined in Fragile Bodies at P.S. 122 are cousins, lacing good talk and songs with stylized and careless, highly energized movement. Both pieces rely on a kind of boyish, playground zest and wild, flaky humor. But these guys can loop and flex an emotional line that's elastic, fantastic. They're protean in the easy way they'll slip from one emotional gear to another. The timing's right, nothing drags, but when something should take a while - like a stymied fight at the end of the first piece - they're not afraid to stay with it.
But what makes Fragile Bodies rich is the way images of different activities and relationships overlap and mesh, become simultaneous, so you cross through the image or ride on the mood of pitch of the movement from one event or "story" into another, swimming back and forth. In the first piece, Keegan - tall, rubber-faced, red-haired - stands still, rubs his nose, screws up his face. Froot- compact, in black - smashes a metal folding chair upside down, then perches comfortably on the rung. Both tell kid stories of fantasy and disaster, like Keegan flying downhill on a bike without having learned to brake. "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," he babbles. Under a pair of tied-together sheets, they sleep apart, wriggling and shifting positions alternately. Head out, sleepless, Froot plays with his fingers like puppets; Keegan bounces his knees under the covers.
You don't exactly peg these guys, don't expect consistency, but Keegan is candid, impulsive, with a marvelous daffiness; Froot's slier, more calculating, determined and intense. Both are fierce, and the poignant humor that explodes from their exchanges comes from the way their similarities - like their heat and eagerness flow together and their differences jar. Like when their enthusiasms run with them but their ideas clash. They sing, separately, "I like being home alone." Keegan's reasons are all "no"s - "I don't want to see your face, I don't want to be a scout, I don't want to get a job..." Froot's have to do with taking advantage of somebody's absence, like "eat from someone else's plate, sleep with someone else's date..." Back with the sheets they crawl hand over hand from opposite ends, their impassioned raps melding thoughts about the piece they're making - this one, maybe - how it should go, and culminate, blending and overlaid with the warmth of their personal relationship, real or fictional. Revisions, new ideas, send them back to the ends of the sheets to crawl to the middle again, where, each time, they end with foreheads pressed together, physically close but disappointingly more and more isolated in their plans. Eventually, disagreement and the agitation of mounting physical energy sets them battling One knocks the other. Both have their shirts half off, can't see.
The unremitting pushing, twisting force of their forms locked together is beautifully unself-conscious and exciting. They won't let go. And they don't. But the pressing of one against the other subtly and very slowly changes into the relief of a tight embrace. Well - you've been waiting for it.
The second piece is a looser amalgam of images and fragments and stories of danger and menace and fragility, enacted by Keegan and Lloyd, with Froot high up, away from the action, reading a smarty-pants version of The Three Little Pigs. First thing that happens is that Lloyd, in a patchwork athletic outfit, jumps, falls, crashes and reappears n crutches. There are couple of malicious tests. Keegan's supposed to fold a towel a particular way. Lloyd nastily gives him lots of chances, needling him each time without quite letting him see how it's done. And there's an egg balancing contest: Keegan cheats; his egg's glued on. Keegan warns Lloyd early on that the pain - of whatever - gets worse. Later, he whacks him, reminding him that "the middle is always painful." The Three Little Pigs becomes more synchronous with the action. Keegan, in a black coat, approaches Lloyd. "Let me in," he demands. "Let me in," he insists, threatens, whines, wheedles, pleads. While Lloyd sings a song about fragility, Keegan flits around dispensing eggs all over the floor. Then Lloyd does too. They dance among the thickly scattered eggs. One or two are purposely smashed, spilling a gluey mess on the floor. A minute later, Keegan crushes one or two others in his hands. But these drizzle confetti snow or flakes of mica. We remember Froot then, still on his perch, but now he's wearing a gas mask, and almost incoherent. What's he mumbling? "Mayday, mayday..." Sorry. Everybody's busy laughing.
At P.S. 122 (February 25 to 27).
I Hear You Rockin
September 13
An audience of deaf and hearing people was loudly enthusiastic about the Berkeley-based
Musign Theater's program on Dance Theater Workshop's Out-of-Towners series. The company of three - Rita Corey, Ed Chevy and Bob Hiltermann - is hearing-impaired, that is, with the help of hearing aids they can hear. Even if they couldn't, they would be able to dance to the felt vibrations of the rhythms.
The program was in two parts - "New World", with seven new wave songs, and "Burning Rubber", another seven early rock and roll numbers. What Musign does is sign songs - it's a little like the lipsynch mime of cabaret -but they establish an elaborate context for each song, like rock video does, or set it as a little vignette. American Sign Language is amplified with variations on the usual signs, visual jokes, mimetic comments on the song texts and situations. To Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene," the three enter like robots, in jumpsuits and sunglasses, move with lurching, doll-like walks. Their gestures are ore iconographic and sharper for Devos "Praying Hands." They rip gleefully out of their suits for Michael Des Barres "I'm Only Human," flapping and freezing, with stop and go body isolations and some heavy exercise. Another song gets an old-time burlesque treatment, with the little guy getting whacked by the various limbs of the stiff he's trying to cart off. You know, push a leg down and an arm smacks you on the head.
The new wave songs, in their futuristic, unevocative, relatively undetailed setting, were much paler, more routine than the subsequent rock and roll numbers. Because the movement models were often mechanical, or the "characters" terribly sketchy (except for Corey as a funny, slovenly dipso maid), the performers are forced into a very broad, very cute delivery. Almost all the expressiveness is in the face, and this localization makes it too insistent to be convincing. In the rock songs, expressiveness radiates through the whole body and keeps the whole space shaking happily.
An additional problem is that the words of the new wave songs are often difficult to distinguish. Similarly, a deaf member of the audience observed, in a brief discussion period after the concert, that the signing was also less clear. Corey said that the company often tries to visualize the text in movement and images, "like painting words in air," instead of signing. But the problem, I think, is not that their signs or "visualizations" are unclear, but that these songs don't contain much narrative thread and you can't ell if you're following them or not. The mythical 50's, on the other hand, provide a familiar context of dress, behavior and social values that are vivid and funny and still seem wonderfully outre. Though the rock and roll material is at least as broad as the new wave stuff, the temperamental, stereotypical characters can use the extravagance. It fills them out.
It's in this section that Musign comes into its own. There's a brick wall painted with the usual graffiti (like Buddy Holly Lives), a garbage car, an old tire. The guys are always punching each other out, Hiltermann combs his slick hair a lot, admires himself in a shined-up hubcap. They hardly ever stop bouncing. They use their outrageous but predictable characters to drag in the audience. Hiltermann tries to get a girl to dance with him. When he sees he's picked a guy by mistake, he's mad, insulted, pulls out his switchblade. Master of the suave, our tough guy pretends to comb his hair with the undoubtedly razor-sharp edge. The hot, eager, extreme passions of the songs, the pleading, glowering vocal styles, are perfectly suited to clowning. Visual and physical expressiveness, along with economy, are strengths of sign language, and it's expressiveness that makes the meaning unmistakeable. The songs seem to beg for all the exaggeration Musign provides, like slavering, macho grossness for the girlie dreams ("a giggle in her walk, giggle in her talk...") of "Chantilly Lace". The men jealously plead with Corey to be faithful in "Tell Him No". Chevy punches Hiltermann who's twice his size, and blows him clear across the stage. Hiltermann flops and blubbers as the dying teenager in "Tell Laura I Love Her." The energy is maniacal, gorgeous.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 26 to 28). - - - - - - - -
Marjorie Gamso's Fugitive Furniture is unbearably tedious and rather beautiful. In lng solos, intercut with brief sculptural gatherings and blackouts, then a long final group dance, Gamso involves with dances with old, wooden, lived-with office chairs, side chairs, folding chairs that accumulate over the course of the piece from one to 16.
Bryan Hayes is the soloist in the first long section with three men, and then Gamso and three women roughly repeat the material. The music by Giancinto Scelsi evokes the exploration of some cavernous underwater hulk. In the last section, three men and three women work with and dance among the chairs shifting them, dragging them, toppllng them, sometimes in partnership. This section is a little brighter and busier, fuller too of accidental bang-ups. A little rawer. The stage is a littered chairscape, almost a sort of battleground, through which the dancers, often simultaneously, move, nap, tap on chairs or knock them to the floor, balance in titled attitudes, swing chairs away then bring them back under to sit. All this interplay with objects requires a narrow kind of concentration that treats the object with reverence as well as boldness, yet doesn't turn it into an extension of self.
At the beginning, after a short film of some chairs, we see Hayes seated, then smoothly getting out of the chair as Gamso describes his actions slightly in advance of their occurrence. Hayes does many different movements with and around the chair - sitting, covering his eyes, scraping the chair along the floor, lying stiffly near it, escaping into more conventional balletomodern dance steps, rocking on his back holding the chair up in his arms. Resting his head on the chair seat or rubbing his cheek against it seems to signal he other men to enter with their chairs. They link up with him in a sensitive, changing sculpture. The first time, each an carefully fits is chair somehow to the person in front of him, making a sort of chain, and then they draw themselves off as a unit. Additional chairs are left onstage, perhaps one each time, and they gradually add up. These brief sections are mysterious and rather tender. Once, Hayes pulls off a chair with a man seated on it while, next to him, another man, holding the legs of another chair, pulls Scott Caywood, who's upside down hanging onto the chair back. When all else has stopped moving the seated man places his hand over Caywood's eyes.
The pacing is perfect in its slow measured way, for these meditative group sections, which have a certain luminosity. But overall, the tolling regularity of the piece is dulling. The stubborn plodding tempo almost creates a kind of despair in the watcher as the interactions with the chairs become pointless through repetition. The dancers neither seem to tire or lose interest. But their implacability adds to the pointlessness. Inextricably combined with the problem of inflexible pacing is the serious attitude that governs the work. The particulars of the movement are submerged by it. No matter what happens, glumness is the quality conveyed. What's the matter with seriousness? Well, it's not a serious approach that I mind, but the overwhelming pall of it, which, I imagine,is meant to convince us of something that the onstage activity cannot.
The text of Fugitive Furniture, largely at the beginning and the end, is also meant to suggest a wider, deeper context for what we see. But Gamso's first remarks, about the concrete images that embody the wisdoms of various cultures and the mutilation of these images in the course of time, seem to be an obscurantist gesture. And the remarks at the end, which nag us to see ourselves in the place of the performers, seem weak and desperate. If the piece hasn't put us in their place long since, it's too late now.
At Newfoundland (August 2 to 30).
An audience of deaf and hearing people was loudly enthusiastic about the Berkeley-based
Musign Theater's program on Dance Theater Workshop's Out-of-Towners series. The company of three - Rita Corey, Ed Chevy and Bob Hiltermann - is hearing-impaired, that is, with the help of hearing aids they can hear. Even if they couldn't, they would be able to dance to the felt vibrations of the rhythms.
The program was in two parts - "New World", with seven new wave songs, and "Burning Rubber", another seven early rock and roll numbers. What Musign does is sign songs - it's a little like the lipsynch mime of cabaret -but they establish an elaborate context for each song, like rock video does, or set it as a little vignette. American Sign Language is amplified with variations on the usual signs, visual jokes, mimetic comments on the song texts and situations. To Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene," the three enter like robots, in jumpsuits and sunglasses, move with lurching, doll-like walks. Their gestures are ore iconographic and sharper for Devos "Praying Hands." They rip gleefully out of their suits for Michael Des Barres "I'm Only Human," flapping and freezing, with stop and go body isolations and some heavy exercise. Another song gets an old-time burlesque treatment, with the little guy getting whacked by the various limbs of the stiff he's trying to cart off. You know, push a leg down and an arm smacks you on the head.
The new wave songs, in their futuristic, unevocative, relatively undetailed setting, were much paler, more routine than the subsequent rock and roll numbers. Because the movement models were often mechanical, or the "characters" terribly sketchy (except for Corey as a funny, slovenly dipso maid), the performers are forced into a very broad, very cute delivery. Almost all the expressiveness is in the face, and this localization makes it too insistent to be convincing. In the rock songs, expressiveness radiates through the whole body and keeps the whole space shaking happily.
An additional problem is that the words of the new wave songs are often difficult to distinguish. Similarly, a deaf member of the audience observed, in a brief discussion period after the concert, that the signing was also less clear. Corey said that the company often tries to visualize the text in movement and images, "like painting words in air," instead of signing. But the problem, I think, is not that their signs or "visualizations" are unclear, but that these songs don't contain much narrative thread and you can't ell if you're following them or not. The mythical 50's, on the other hand, provide a familiar context of dress, behavior and social values that are vivid and funny and still seem wonderfully outre. Though the rock and roll material is at least as broad as the new wave stuff, the temperamental, stereotypical characters can use the extravagance. It fills them out.
It's in this section that Musign comes into its own. There's a brick wall painted with the usual graffiti (like Buddy Holly Lives), a garbage car, an old tire. The guys are always punching each other out, Hiltermann combs his slick hair a lot, admires himself in a shined-up hubcap. They hardly ever stop bouncing. They use their outrageous but predictable characters to drag in the audience. Hiltermann tries to get a girl to dance with him. When he sees he's picked a guy by mistake, he's mad, insulted, pulls out his switchblade. Master of the suave, our tough guy pretends to comb his hair with the undoubtedly razor-sharp edge. The hot, eager, extreme passions of the songs, the pleading, glowering vocal styles, are perfectly suited to clowning. Visual and physical expressiveness, along with economy, are strengths of sign language, and it's expressiveness that makes the meaning unmistakeable. The songs seem to beg for all the exaggeration Musign provides, like slavering, macho grossness for the girlie dreams ("a giggle in her walk, giggle in her talk...") of "Chantilly Lace". The men jealously plead with Corey to be faithful in "Tell Him No". Chevy punches Hiltermann who's twice his size, and blows him clear across the stage. Hiltermann flops and blubbers as the dying teenager in "Tell Laura I Love Her." The energy is maniacal, gorgeous.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 26 to 28). - - - - - - - -
Marjorie Gamso's Fugitive Furniture is unbearably tedious and rather beautiful. In lng solos, intercut with brief sculptural gatherings and blackouts, then a long final group dance, Gamso involves with dances with old, wooden, lived-with office chairs, side chairs, folding chairs that accumulate over the course of the piece from one to 16.
Bryan Hayes is the soloist in the first long section with three men, and then Gamso and three women roughly repeat the material. The music by Giancinto Scelsi evokes the exploration of some cavernous underwater hulk. In the last section, three men and three women work with and dance among the chairs shifting them, dragging them, toppllng them, sometimes in partnership. This section is a little brighter and busier, fuller too of accidental bang-ups. A little rawer. The stage is a littered chairscape, almost a sort of battleground, through which the dancers, often simultaneously, move, nap, tap on chairs or knock them to the floor, balance in titled attitudes, swing chairs away then bring them back under to sit. All this interplay with objects requires a narrow kind of concentration that treats the object with reverence as well as boldness, yet doesn't turn it into an extension of self.
At the beginning, after a short film of some chairs, we see Hayes seated, then smoothly getting out of the chair as Gamso describes his actions slightly in advance of their occurrence. Hayes does many different movements with and around the chair - sitting, covering his eyes, scraping the chair along the floor, lying stiffly near it, escaping into more conventional balletomodern dance steps, rocking on his back holding the chair up in his arms. Resting his head on the chair seat or rubbing his cheek against it seems to signal he other men to enter with their chairs. They link up with him in a sensitive, changing sculpture. The first time, each an carefully fits is chair somehow to the person in front of him, making a sort of chain, and then they draw themselves off as a unit. Additional chairs are left onstage, perhaps one each time, and they gradually add up. These brief sections are mysterious and rather tender. Once, Hayes pulls off a chair with a man seated on it while, next to him, another man, holding the legs of another chair, pulls Scott Caywood, who's upside down hanging onto the chair back. When all else has stopped moving the seated man places his hand over Caywood's eyes.
The pacing is perfect in its slow measured way, for these meditative group sections, which have a certain luminosity. But overall, the tolling regularity of the piece is dulling. The stubborn plodding tempo almost creates a kind of despair in the watcher as the interactions with the chairs become pointless through repetition. The dancers neither seem to tire or lose interest. But their implacability adds to the pointlessness. Inextricably combined with the problem of inflexible pacing is the serious attitude that governs the work. The particulars of the movement are submerged by it. No matter what happens, glumness is the quality conveyed. What's the matter with seriousness? Well, it's not a serious approach that I mind, but the overwhelming pall of it, which, I imagine,is meant to convince us of something that the onstage activity cannot.
The text of Fugitive Furniture, largely at the beginning and the end, is also meant to suggest a wider, deeper context for what we see. But Gamso's first remarks, about the concrete images that embody the wisdoms of various cultures and the mutilation of these images in the course of time, seem to be an obscurantist gesture. And the remarks at the end, which nag us to see ourselves in the place of the performers, seem weak and desperate. If the piece hasn't put us in their place long since, it's too late now.
At Newfoundland (August 2 to 30).
If It Only Had a Heart
December 13
Choreographers Cyndy Lee and Mary Ellen Strom, working with composer Pierce Turner, set a determined and popular sort of style in State of the Heart recently at Dance Theater Workshop. An ambitious, three-part piece, with a large video segment, it's clear, strong, emphatic, yet seems to lack purpose. Turner supplies solid rhythms that course steadily under the dancing, but sometimes the music seems melodically shallow, like the variations on a five-note melody that become something of a nag. I was sorry, because I loved the substantial musical offering that preceded the actual dancing, a sort of overture, with Turner on electronic keyboards and Mick McQuaidon the Uillean pipes, making a rich windy fabric of droning nasal harmonies.
The first part, "Verbum Sap", features a "shouting harmonic choir" of 14 voices on the sidelines, plus half a dozen dancers - all women - wearing somewhat fantastic but peasanty skirts-over-pants outfits (by Marc Happel). The movement is loosely choral to start, with a firm elasticity and a blunt, insistent gestural element that's sometimes workmanlike, sometimes like language, sometimes expressive - like smacking the breast - in shape and accent, but without any special feeling. The footwork is percussive and clever, but the conclusive, striking designs of the arms and hands carry the force of the piece. Often, the movement is quite mechanical, like clock work, like clock works. I cant help thinking of Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and crew as the clock figures chiming the hour and bashing each other in their old Your Show of Shows skit. Behind the dancing, slides show fists. a hammer, a heart within a phrenological diagram, fingers counting, the flopped eight that stands for infinity...Curious choice, because the movement component of the work seems so hardened, aggressive, finite. The choir sometimes chants words we recognize, sometimes gabble, like "tikka tikka phut phut."
And another element, the weakest, is added: words. The sort of conversational repetitions and aborted phrase game that seemed interesting for a few minutes 20 years ago. State of the Heart's emphatic, demanding quality reinforces, by contrast, its dead-endedness. Its vehemence is connected to nothing in particular. The solid rhythmic bass provides security, but it also becomes a choreographic trap. It's as if the choreographers were browbeaten by the beat, hemmed in. The force of the dancers seems confined instead of spring. All their sharp edges seem to have been trimmed and sanded round.
After the video which opens part three, "Talking Hands" (Neighborhood people "speaking" routines of big, repeating gestures, transferred to seven dancers and to a whole gang of people in Washington Square Park), three dancers, start clapping the rhythm over a smoothly blaring horn and throbbing beat, and then kick, stamp, swagger, through a brief section that has the punch that's been missing too much of the evening. Part of the overall problem is that the rigorous attitude of the dancers somehow caps the energy. They're cut off from the effect of the power and new information they generate, and it's pissed away. They're never depleted, but they don't thrive either. What I feel like I'm watching is an efficient and beautifully produced school piece. Intellectually, I suppose, the movements, visuals, words, etc. should mesh. But they don't. Won't. It's a willful piece of work, and will can't hold it together.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 25 to 28).
Choreographers Cyndy Lee and Mary Ellen Strom, working with composer Pierce Turner, set a determined and popular sort of style in State of the Heart recently at Dance Theater Workshop. An ambitious, three-part piece, with a large video segment, it's clear, strong, emphatic, yet seems to lack purpose. Turner supplies solid rhythms that course steadily under the dancing, but sometimes the music seems melodically shallow, like the variations on a five-note melody that become something of a nag. I was sorry, because I loved the substantial musical offering that preceded the actual dancing, a sort of overture, with Turner on electronic keyboards and Mick McQuaidon the Uillean pipes, making a rich windy fabric of droning nasal harmonies.
The first part, "Verbum Sap", features a "shouting harmonic choir" of 14 voices on the sidelines, plus half a dozen dancers - all women - wearing somewhat fantastic but peasanty skirts-over-pants outfits (by Marc Happel). The movement is loosely choral to start, with a firm elasticity and a blunt, insistent gestural element that's sometimes workmanlike, sometimes like language, sometimes expressive - like smacking the breast - in shape and accent, but without any special feeling. The footwork is percussive and clever, but the conclusive, striking designs of the arms and hands carry the force of the piece. Often, the movement is quite mechanical, like clock work, like clock works. I cant help thinking of Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and crew as the clock figures chiming the hour and bashing each other in their old Your Show of Shows skit. Behind the dancing, slides show fists. a hammer, a heart within a phrenological diagram, fingers counting, the flopped eight that stands for infinity...Curious choice, because the movement component of the work seems so hardened, aggressive, finite. The choir sometimes chants words we recognize, sometimes gabble, like "tikka tikka phut phut."
And another element, the weakest, is added: words. The sort of conversational repetitions and aborted phrase game that seemed interesting for a few minutes 20 years ago. State of the Heart's emphatic, demanding quality reinforces, by contrast, its dead-endedness. Its vehemence is connected to nothing in particular. The solid rhythmic bass provides security, but it also becomes a choreographic trap. It's as if the choreographers were browbeaten by the beat, hemmed in. The force of the dancers seems confined instead of spring. All their sharp edges seem to have been trimmed and sanded round.
After the video which opens part three, "Talking Hands" (Neighborhood people "speaking" routines of big, repeating gestures, transferred to seven dancers and to a whole gang of people in Washington Square Park), three dancers, start clapping the rhythm over a smoothly blaring horn and throbbing beat, and then kick, stamp, swagger, through a brief section that has the punch that's been missing too much of the evening. Part of the overall problem is that the rigorous attitude of the dancers somehow caps the energy. They're cut off from the effect of the power and new information they generate, and it's pissed away. They're never depleted, but they don't thrive either. What I feel like I'm watching is an efficient and beautifully produced school piece. Intellectually, I suppose, the movements, visuals, words, etc. should mesh. But they don't. Won't. It's a willful piece of work, and will can't hold it together.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 25 to 28).
In Which the Critic Turns in His Humanity Button
August 16
Blue Panic is the sort of endeavor that gives dance and theatrical enterprises based on personal experience a bad rep. The sort of thing that makes "sincere", like "interesting", a good cause for suspicion. The stories and incidents of this episodic "personal odyssey", whether invented or remembered, are either didactic or about some private emotion we're given no reason to care about. They may be rooted in honest feelings. They may be terribly important to the performers of Tapestry Dance Theater: Baxter Vogel, Kaye Kasemi, Robert Quintana, who all wrote and choreographed the materials, directed by Nikki Cole - but theatrically we're dumped in a world of generic daytime drama - without its commercial and cynical distance.
From the first, I'm embarrassed by the oversimplification, the lack of consciousness in he material, the puppyish delivery. "Grow up," I want to say. I hate the sentimentality, the cuteness, the intense looks, the indulgence, the stridency, the unjustified optimism, the courage-in-the-face-of-failure faces. All that, and an infuriating, unintentional shallowness, makes me feel mean-spirited. And that's hard to forgive. I don't want to participate in Tapestry's soft-core notion of humanity. Something about Blue Panic is certainly meaningful to its performer-creators, but they haven't transformed their ideas into sometimes palatable. Even the names hey use for themselves in it - Elf, Pain, Rider - don't stand for consistent characters and are, up front, thoroughly off-putting. What's their purpose?
Tapestry presents feelings and situations that are cliches - the agonies of family life, masturbation, entering the world, loneliness, disappointment. But one of the constant surprises in theater is how novel, how faceted, how wacky, how surreal, how pure, how endlessly fascinating these trite old feelings and situations can be. Yet instead of creating characters or situations I want to know more about, Tapestry makes me wish I knew less. Kasemi's a lonely, nonconforming child, says things that are virtually impossible to say and unbearable to hear, like, "but I'm alive inside with feelings of love and wonderment."
Even a powerful story Vogel tells about the death in an automobile accident of "Rider's" parents and four-year-old sister on her birthday doesn't send out a ripple beyond its own moment of horror. Tapestry's overeager performing style is mistrustful. Because the appropriate emotion is smeared over each section, we couldn't be taken by surprise under any circumstances. And we can find the emotion distasteful before we know how or where it arises. Things that are important in every person's life can become trivial without suitable context, become empty, lies. Presented with your innermost feelings, your naked heart, without sufficient art or sufficient artlessness, I'm forced to say "I don't want to know, I don't care." Rejecting is a cruel thing to make members of the audience do.
At P.S. 122 (July 22 to August 14).
Blue Panic is the sort of endeavor that gives dance and theatrical enterprises based on personal experience a bad rep. The sort of thing that makes "sincere", like "interesting", a good cause for suspicion. The stories and incidents of this episodic "personal odyssey", whether invented or remembered, are either didactic or about some private emotion we're given no reason to care about. They may be rooted in honest feelings. They may be terribly important to the performers of Tapestry Dance Theater: Baxter Vogel, Kaye Kasemi, Robert Quintana, who all wrote and choreographed the materials, directed by Nikki Cole - but theatrically we're dumped in a world of generic daytime drama - without its commercial and cynical distance.
From the first, I'm embarrassed by the oversimplification, the lack of consciousness in he material, the puppyish delivery. "Grow up," I want to say. I hate the sentimentality, the cuteness, the intense looks, the indulgence, the stridency, the unjustified optimism, the courage-in-the-face-of-failure faces. All that, and an infuriating, unintentional shallowness, makes me feel mean-spirited. And that's hard to forgive. I don't want to participate in Tapestry's soft-core notion of humanity. Something about Blue Panic is certainly meaningful to its performer-creators, but they haven't transformed their ideas into sometimes palatable. Even the names hey use for themselves in it - Elf, Pain, Rider - don't stand for consistent characters and are, up front, thoroughly off-putting. What's their purpose?
Tapestry presents feelings and situations that are cliches - the agonies of family life, masturbation, entering the world, loneliness, disappointment. But one of the constant surprises in theater is how novel, how faceted, how wacky, how surreal, how pure, how endlessly fascinating these trite old feelings and situations can be. Yet instead of creating characters or situations I want to know more about, Tapestry makes me wish I knew less. Kasemi's a lonely, nonconforming child, says things that are virtually impossible to say and unbearable to hear, like, "but I'm alive inside with feelings of love and wonderment."
Even a powerful story Vogel tells about the death in an automobile accident of "Rider's" parents and four-year-old sister on her birthday doesn't send out a ripple beyond its own moment of horror. Tapestry's overeager performing style is mistrustful. Because the appropriate emotion is smeared over each section, we couldn't be taken by surprise under any circumstances. And we can find the emotion distasteful before we know how or where it arises. Things that are important in every person's life can become trivial without suitable context, become empty, lies. Presented with your innermost feelings, your naked heart, without sufficient art or sufficient artlessness, I'm forced to say "I don't want to know, I don't care." Rejecting is a cruel thing to make members of the audience do.
At P.S. 122 (July 22 to August 14).
Life and Death by Misadventure
February 2
Back temporarily from a year-and-a-half sojourn in Arkansas, Rachel Lampert and Dancers recently presented three new and newish works along with her 1981 Cui Bono? at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (from which she's on leave of absence).
The deft opening piece, Five, was a clean, excitable dance with a clear geometry of intercutting groups of two and three to a throbbing score by Sergio Cervetti. But it doesn't make much use of Lampert's marvelous gift for incident. It builds from brief, controlled phrases that keep ending quietly to a really nervous burst of energy. In The Distance Between, Lampert and Michael Day-Pitts stand back-to-back atop a scaffolding that's high enough to be a little scary, roped together at the waist. They start off affectionate - touching hands, nuzzling a little - but they need a little space too and they can't get away from each other. When Lampert wriggles loose out of a loop of rope, they begin to partially unreel. He climbs down and she follows, and stretching out the rope they begin to play with it, winding and unwinding, stepping on it, twisting it, holding it. With the two of them moving fast, Lampert gets yanked out of the air when the rope plays out. Happens to Pitt too. So they explore their freedom and its limits.
But the emotional tone of the piece is sentimental. You're always aware of the rope being used to illustrate facets of their relationship or an emotional counterpart being shown to parallel something you can do with a rope. It often seems arbitrary, feels self-conscious and gooey, because the ideas keep coming from switching sources. There's something consistently awkward in Lampert's portrayal of erotic, affectionate relationships, something coy and slightly icky that discolors a situation we shouldn't think twice about. This is true also in Cui Bono?, which is full of brilliant stuff. But the ambivalent, love-hate relationship of husband and wife is naggingly whimsical and erratic. As if some ground in Lampert's character, some motive I can believe in and forget, is missing. The novelist-wife (Lampert), typing and scribbling, creates Gothic murder mysteries, which we see comically exaggerated upstage, alternating with homey segments of the novelist and her sculptor husband (Pitts) working and squabbling. The plot characters - elegant Edwardian men, a clergyman, a maid, a Belle Epoque dame, etc. - deliciously murder each other again and again as the novelist revises her ideas. Harry Streep III sails onto Grayson James's chest, strangling him as he knocks him backwards, landing on his feet and stalking over the body. It's almost all one motion, the work of a second. But the husband and wife are out of phase - he's feeling sexy when she wants to work. They infuriate each other and egg each on; their battles develop a --age roughness that contrasts sharply with the plot characters' swift, neat comedy. Until the phantasms of her plots become part of a nightmare - curled in her desk chair, helpless as a timid child, she's pushed and rolled amid the circling characters. Later with "reality" and fantasy blending, she knifes her husband along with everyone else. Technically, all this meshes well: Lampert is able to create a mod of obsession and fear, partly out of the memory of the zany violence we've seen erupt between husband and wife. But it remains hard to swallow that thee comic figures could become so threatening since they have no convincing psychic weight.
Strategy, premiered in St. Louis in November 1981, but never seen here, had much of the inventiveness of Cui Bono? and I liked it even better. It starts out dry and witty, and gets pretty unfunny and acid. Pitts, nasty in a pearl-gray suit, falls forward like a board from the wings. He's dragged out by the feet. Gina Russell, dressed identically, falls from further back, and she's dragged out. Then Pitts falls on top of Russell; he's dragged off, she gets up herself then falls out backwards. Eventually, there are four of these guys (two of them girls), immaculate in their gray suits, vests, neat hair, and cheerful ties. Mostly executed at a brisk, walking pace, their economical activities are usually marked by mild decisive bossiness. Pitts does a tight churning wheel of turning leaps. Russell gives him a slight push forward, then falls over herself. Another time, she jumps straight up to be caught in his arms, then wilts. When a new guy comes in, Stephen Nunley, Pitts leads him humbly back and forth by the head like some automaton. Susanna Weiss glides through as if seated, carried by Nunley, pointing here, there, giving orders from her mobile throne. Pitts is the strongest early on; he pushes the other three en masses, and when they rebound, he does it again, more forcefully. But gradually he ceases to dominate. Neutral, as always, and without any sense of attachment except for the practical purposes of the moment, the others join forces to face him, and even leapfrog him. He throws off his jacket, his vest. He runs forward, leaps up, and they hold him there. Later, he runs forward again, in place, an accusing figure. The others run alongside, but avoid him, and drop away. He continues to run alone, fast and steady. But even with no one in the race, he's dropping behind. Sergio Cervetti's music in three of the dances, and Tom Hamilton's for Strategy. were a big help. And the dancing all around was clean, vigorous, first-rate.
At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (January 25 to 30).
Back temporarily from a year-and-a-half sojourn in Arkansas, Rachel Lampert and Dancers recently presented three new and newish works along with her 1981 Cui Bono? at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (from which she's on leave of absence).
The deft opening piece, Five, was a clean, excitable dance with a clear geometry of intercutting groups of two and three to a throbbing score by Sergio Cervetti. But it doesn't make much use of Lampert's marvelous gift for incident. It builds from brief, controlled phrases that keep ending quietly to a really nervous burst of energy. In The Distance Between, Lampert and Michael Day-Pitts stand back-to-back atop a scaffolding that's high enough to be a little scary, roped together at the waist. They start off affectionate - touching hands, nuzzling a little - but they need a little space too and they can't get away from each other. When Lampert wriggles loose out of a loop of rope, they begin to partially unreel. He climbs down and she follows, and stretching out the rope they begin to play with it, winding and unwinding, stepping on it, twisting it, holding it. With the two of them moving fast, Lampert gets yanked out of the air when the rope plays out. Happens to Pitt too. So they explore their freedom and its limits.
But the emotional tone of the piece is sentimental. You're always aware of the rope being used to illustrate facets of their relationship or an emotional counterpart being shown to parallel something you can do with a rope. It often seems arbitrary, feels self-conscious and gooey, because the ideas keep coming from switching sources. There's something consistently awkward in Lampert's portrayal of erotic, affectionate relationships, something coy and slightly icky that discolors a situation we shouldn't think twice about. This is true also in Cui Bono?, which is full of brilliant stuff. But the ambivalent, love-hate relationship of husband and wife is naggingly whimsical and erratic. As if some ground in Lampert's character, some motive I can believe in and forget, is missing. The novelist-wife (Lampert), typing and scribbling, creates Gothic murder mysteries, which we see comically exaggerated upstage, alternating with homey segments of the novelist and her sculptor husband (Pitts) working and squabbling. The plot characters - elegant Edwardian men, a clergyman, a maid, a Belle Epoque dame, etc. - deliciously murder each other again and again as the novelist revises her ideas. Harry Streep III sails onto Grayson James's chest, strangling him as he knocks him backwards, landing on his feet and stalking over the body. It's almost all one motion, the work of a second. But the husband and wife are out of phase - he's feeling sexy when she wants to work. They infuriate each other and egg each on; their battles develop a --age roughness that contrasts sharply with the plot characters' swift, neat comedy. Until the phantasms of her plots become part of a nightmare - curled in her desk chair, helpless as a timid child, she's pushed and rolled amid the circling characters. Later with "reality" and fantasy blending, she knifes her husband along with everyone else. Technically, all this meshes well: Lampert is able to create a mod of obsession and fear, partly out of the memory of the zany violence we've seen erupt between husband and wife. But it remains hard to swallow that thee comic figures could become so threatening since they have no convincing psychic weight.
Strategy, premiered in St. Louis in November 1981, but never seen here, had much of the inventiveness of Cui Bono? and I liked it even better. It starts out dry and witty, and gets pretty unfunny and acid. Pitts, nasty in a pearl-gray suit, falls forward like a board from the wings. He's dragged out by the feet. Gina Russell, dressed identically, falls from further back, and she's dragged out. Then Pitts falls on top of Russell; he's dragged off, she gets up herself then falls out backwards. Eventually, there are four of these guys (two of them girls), immaculate in their gray suits, vests, neat hair, and cheerful ties. Mostly executed at a brisk, walking pace, their economical activities are usually marked by mild decisive bossiness. Pitts does a tight churning wheel of turning leaps. Russell gives him a slight push forward, then falls over herself. Another time, she jumps straight up to be caught in his arms, then wilts. When a new guy comes in, Stephen Nunley, Pitts leads him humbly back and forth by the head like some automaton. Susanna Weiss glides through as if seated, carried by Nunley, pointing here, there, giving orders from her mobile throne. Pitts is the strongest early on; he pushes the other three en masses, and when they rebound, he does it again, more forcefully. But gradually he ceases to dominate. Neutral, as always, and without any sense of attachment except for the practical purposes of the moment, the others join forces to face him, and even leapfrog him. He throws off his jacket, his vest. He runs forward, leaps up, and they hold him there. Later, he runs forward again, in place, an accusing figure. The others run alongside, but avoid him, and drop away. He continues to run alone, fast and steady. But even with no one in the race, he's dropping behind. Sergio Cervetti's music in three of the dances, and Tom Hamilton's for Strategy. were a big help. And the dancing all around was clean, vigorous, first-rate.
At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (January 25 to 30).
London Calling
May 17
Impressed by Martha Graham's work, Robin Howard fostered her company's 1963 London performance, established a trust to send British dancers to study at the Graham school in New York, and brought members of her company to London to teach. Under Howard's guidance, the London School of Contemporary Dance opened in 1966, and in 1967, Robert Cohan, one of Graham's most valued dancers, became artistic director of the trust and its newly formed company. Sixteen years later, that company of 21 strong and supple dancers made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (though in 1977 they approached as close at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College). London Contemporary Dance Trust has been provoking and nurturing British interest and involvement in modern dance, breeding performers and choreographers, though three of the four choreographers shown - Cohan, Tom Jobe and Robert North - are American born. According to a program note by Howard, of the seven contemporary dance companies in England receiving any sort of government subsidy, six are led or were founded by former students or company members. North, for example, dancing here with LCDT and an original member of the group, is artistic director of Ballet Rambert. So the influence of London Contemporary's technical training and aesthetic is great. But it's not single-track: many different points of view have come to be represented in the school's curriculum.
Four dances by Cohan were presented at BAM. All of them were too long. One, Class (1975), a cousin to Graham's Adorations, is a dance built on classroom exercises. It's dynamic, exciting, sexually segregated, rhythmically strong, and rhythmically naive- the sort of emphatic crowd-pleaser in which you applaud the clean, sharp perfections of technique. Harder, faster, bigger are the goals, and humanity the only flaw.
Cell (1969), one of Cohan's earliest works for the company, and Nympheas, (1976) are thoroughly different in atmosphere: Nympheas is curvy and watery, to Debussy preludes and such; Cell is hard, forced, desperate. But both have superb sets: white enclosures by Norberto Chiesa. In Cell, the curtain opens on a sculpturally exciting white walled yard (or perhaps it's a room), tipped slightly toward the audience, enough so that you can imagine movement from the invisible rear entrances as spilling front, and movement back as climbing. But just seeing the set is almost all you need to know about this dance, which takes half an hour to play out its bitter vision of a hostile, trapped humanity, without displaying any humanity of its own. Undeniably, it has powerful dancing, and images that are cruelly and beautifully composed. The last part - with strobe flashing and white bricks tumbling out of the black sky - is indelible. But the whole piece, much admired in England, demonstrates a cold, self-lacerating willfulness.
In Nympheas, the white set has a monumental, austere, temple like quality. On each side of the stage are three irregular wing panels, at the back is a triple-stepped wall that fans up, with a set in ledge for walking and climbing on. The set is used actively. It's rather wonderful, even when the dancers appear on two levels, walk out in a line and clamber down, or hang, or scramble up. At the end, people are twining, bending, crawling all over it. Nympheas seems aimless and sometimes cluttered, though usually Cohan creates a strong stage picture. Perhaps because the set is such a dominating presence, most of the vivid moments are nearly static - people cling to the walls, men are stuck in eccentric poses against the backdrop, women stand against it like figures in a frieze. That moment when several men are flat against the set, bent and angled into pinwheel designs, suggests that we can look into the stage as if we're looking down. The men are below, not in front of us, the women are on the walls, not the floor. Later, when Siobhan Davies is supported by three men and walked along the side of the set, the illusion is confirmed. Throughout the piece, its colors change, and so do the costumes, initially blotched blue, green, yellow; maybe were moving from one Monet painting to another. But there's a mushiness in the way particular movements keep unresolving, winding and unwinding, stretch forward and pull back, rarely with much intensity or any sense of direction.
Women drift through the beginning of Cohan's Forest in slow spins, listening, calling, with hands to their ears, their mouths. It's a lovely, delicately elegant work. Couples leap through, settle a moment, as they pass through this glade. Linda Gibbons stops dead in the air, held magically still at the top of her leap by Michael Small. The inhabitants of Cohan's forest are fascinating and refined, maybe animals or birds or people or some wizard mix, like the shaman/creatures of primitive rock paintings. The wind sighs low and steady in Brian Hodgson's score; eventually we hear quiet twitterings, and finally rain. A team of men in attitude leaps hold their arms wide and lifted in bows like the horns of African cattle. The men may be hunters, sometimes, but if so they're wed to the animals they hunt. Mysterious ladies dip, bend, tip forward, ear to the ground. When others pass by, they must be invisible. Patrick Harding-Irmer is excellent in a gorgeous solo - arching sideways, soaring into a fall, up and alert. He slides backward along the floor, chest up, one leg pounding rhythmically, a magic being. And his duet with Kate Harrison becomes an exotic ritual of wooing and silent communication. There's a marvelous atmosphere, a sensuous and pristine quality with the spare suggestiveness of Brancusi's sculpture. Tom Jobe's an amazing, outrageous squiggle. His sassy, loose-limbed Liquid Assets (1982) is a dizzy flipflop of an untogether slugabed slung into the world of neckties and secretaries. Big swings, extravagant legs, staggers and slumps, high flying kicks.
To parts of Bach's The Musical Offering, Siobhan Davies has made a muted and musical piece, The Dancing Department, as courteous and conversational as the music it partners so gracefully in its silver-gray environment by David Buckland. The dancing Davies seems to like is kin to Cunningham cool and open, with bodies erect, arms long and rather straight. The dancers are usually in small groups; some move while some wait and maybe observe. Sometimes the movement will flood from one group to incorporate a second, and a third. There'll be a return to quietness, to sculptural presence, while the dancing continues in a portion of the space. Patrick Harding-Irmer (I think), in blue, has a short, oddly touching moment p arching, scooping, drawing both hands up close to himself. Out of a diagonal line of dancers - just before it quite forms - one dancers gently drops out in a kind of lunge, and returns to place. Then the line begins to erode, dancers nicely pulling out in seesawing duets and trios, and re-forming the line, angling it back, at the other end. More and more you note the gestures of support, the easy stances, the comfortable elasticity of the movement. You feel the links of respect and community between these people. It's a given. No big deal.
North's ballet, Death and the Maiden, starts with a formal and solemn group, then moves, with flung arms, grinding, twisting feet, with the urgent grasping sharpness of the violin attack in the Schubert quartet. The context is Romantic: the men, in loose blouses, like Poets, kneel and pledge; the women's gestures reach and yearn. But there's nothing mopey going on - a vibrant springiness hums in the footwork and in the speedy looping and weaving of the dancers around the stage. From overhead lifts, the women suddenly drop, limp as sacks. That's just foreshadowing. There's a sense of consternation. The real thing's when Linda Gibbs, Death's chosen partner, is lifted in North's arms and plunges to the floor. Moments later, when everyone heads offstage, North, the only man in black, blocks her. His gestures throughout are interestingly blunt and beautiful - like this block he leans into with both arms. Or later when she pleads against his chest and he throws his hands up as if to say "It's impossible." He knocks his arms gently sideways into her back; smooths his hands over her body without touching; chops softly into her shoulder, hewing her down. She runs, fast, every which way, finds herself sailing helplessly into his arms. It's as if he's playing a fish, but without cruelty. Alone, Gibbs is helped by Charlotte Kirkpatrick, and consoled, as if it had all been a dream. But North reenters; they don't see him, but Gibbs matches her pace to his, till he swats her down, intoxicates her, and prevents her frenzied escape. Gibbs and North were superb. I've sometimes thought her excellent but cold, but the two of them were as warm and beautifully paired as can be. Among the other dancers who must be mentioned are Darshan Bhuller, Sallie Estep, Anca Frankenhauser and Christopher Hannerman, who danced brilliantly the first night, and injured his calf muscle at the very end of the performance.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (May 3 to 8).
Impressed by Martha Graham's work, Robin Howard fostered her company's 1963 London performance, established a trust to send British dancers to study at the Graham school in New York, and brought members of her company to London to teach. Under Howard's guidance, the London School of Contemporary Dance opened in 1966, and in 1967, Robert Cohan, one of Graham's most valued dancers, became artistic director of the trust and its newly formed company. Sixteen years later, that company of 21 strong and supple dancers made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (though in 1977 they approached as close at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College). London Contemporary Dance Trust has been provoking and nurturing British interest and involvement in modern dance, breeding performers and choreographers, though three of the four choreographers shown - Cohan, Tom Jobe and Robert North - are American born. According to a program note by Howard, of the seven contemporary dance companies in England receiving any sort of government subsidy, six are led or were founded by former students or company members. North, for example, dancing here with LCDT and an original member of the group, is artistic director of Ballet Rambert. So the influence of London Contemporary's technical training and aesthetic is great. But it's not single-track: many different points of view have come to be represented in the school's curriculum.
Four dances by Cohan were presented at BAM. All of them were too long. One, Class (1975), a cousin to Graham's Adorations, is a dance built on classroom exercises. It's dynamic, exciting, sexually segregated, rhythmically strong, and rhythmically naive- the sort of emphatic crowd-pleaser in which you applaud the clean, sharp perfections of technique. Harder, faster, bigger are the goals, and humanity the only flaw.
Cell (1969), one of Cohan's earliest works for the company, and Nympheas, (1976) are thoroughly different in atmosphere: Nympheas is curvy and watery, to Debussy preludes and such; Cell is hard, forced, desperate. But both have superb sets: white enclosures by Norberto Chiesa. In Cell, the curtain opens on a sculpturally exciting white walled yard (or perhaps it's a room), tipped slightly toward the audience, enough so that you can imagine movement from the invisible rear entrances as spilling front, and movement back as climbing. But just seeing the set is almost all you need to know about this dance, which takes half an hour to play out its bitter vision of a hostile, trapped humanity, without displaying any humanity of its own. Undeniably, it has powerful dancing, and images that are cruelly and beautifully composed. The last part - with strobe flashing and white bricks tumbling out of the black sky - is indelible. But the whole piece, much admired in England, demonstrates a cold, self-lacerating willfulness.
In Nympheas, the white set has a monumental, austere, temple like quality. On each side of the stage are three irregular wing panels, at the back is a triple-stepped wall that fans up, with a set in ledge for walking and climbing on. The set is used actively. It's rather wonderful, even when the dancers appear on two levels, walk out in a line and clamber down, or hang, or scramble up. At the end, people are twining, bending, crawling all over it. Nympheas seems aimless and sometimes cluttered, though usually Cohan creates a strong stage picture. Perhaps because the set is such a dominating presence, most of the vivid moments are nearly static - people cling to the walls, men are stuck in eccentric poses against the backdrop, women stand against it like figures in a frieze. That moment when several men are flat against the set, bent and angled into pinwheel designs, suggests that we can look into the stage as if we're looking down. The men are below, not in front of us, the women are on the walls, not the floor. Later, when Siobhan Davies is supported by three men and walked along the side of the set, the illusion is confirmed. Throughout the piece, its colors change, and so do the costumes, initially blotched blue, green, yellow; maybe were moving from one Monet painting to another. But there's a mushiness in the way particular movements keep unresolving, winding and unwinding, stretch forward and pull back, rarely with much intensity or any sense of direction.
Women drift through the beginning of Cohan's Forest in slow spins, listening, calling, with hands to their ears, their mouths. It's a lovely, delicately elegant work. Couples leap through, settle a moment, as they pass through this glade. Linda Gibbons stops dead in the air, held magically still at the top of her leap by Michael Small. The inhabitants of Cohan's forest are fascinating and refined, maybe animals or birds or people or some wizard mix, like the shaman/creatures of primitive rock paintings. The wind sighs low and steady in Brian Hodgson's score; eventually we hear quiet twitterings, and finally rain. A team of men in attitude leaps hold their arms wide and lifted in bows like the horns of African cattle. The men may be hunters, sometimes, but if so they're wed to the animals they hunt. Mysterious ladies dip, bend, tip forward, ear to the ground. When others pass by, they must be invisible. Patrick Harding-Irmer is excellent in a gorgeous solo - arching sideways, soaring into a fall, up and alert. He slides backward along the floor, chest up, one leg pounding rhythmically, a magic being. And his duet with Kate Harrison becomes an exotic ritual of wooing and silent communication. There's a marvelous atmosphere, a sensuous and pristine quality with the spare suggestiveness of Brancusi's sculpture. Tom Jobe's an amazing, outrageous squiggle. His sassy, loose-limbed Liquid Assets (1982) is a dizzy flipflop of an untogether slugabed slung into the world of neckties and secretaries. Big swings, extravagant legs, staggers and slumps, high flying kicks.
To parts of Bach's The Musical Offering, Siobhan Davies has made a muted and musical piece, The Dancing Department, as courteous and conversational as the music it partners so gracefully in its silver-gray environment by David Buckland. The dancing Davies seems to like is kin to Cunningham cool and open, with bodies erect, arms long and rather straight. The dancers are usually in small groups; some move while some wait and maybe observe. Sometimes the movement will flood from one group to incorporate a second, and a third. There'll be a return to quietness, to sculptural presence, while the dancing continues in a portion of the space. Patrick Harding-Irmer (I think), in blue, has a short, oddly touching moment p arching, scooping, drawing both hands up close to himself. Out of a diagonal line of dancers - just before it quite forms - one dancers gently drops out in a kind of lunge, and returns to place. Then the line begins to erode, dancers nicely pulling out in seesawing duets and trios, and re-forming the line, angling it back, at the other end. More and more you note the gestures of support, the easy stances, the comfortable elasticity of the movement. You feel the links of respect and community between these people. It's a given. No big deal.
North's ballet, Death and the Maiden, starts with a formal and solemn group, then moves, with flung arms, grinding, twisting feet, with the urgent grasping sharpness of the violin attack in the Schubert quartet. The context is Romantic: the men, in loose blouses, like Poets, kneel and pledge; the women's gestures reach and yearn. But there's nothing mopey going on - a vibrant springiness hums in the footwork and in the speedy looping and weaving of the dancers around the stage. From overhead lifts, the women suddenly drop, limp as sacks. That's just foreshadowing. There's a sense of consternation. The real thing's when Linda Gibbs, Death's chosen partner, is lifted in North's arms and plunges to the floor. Moments later, when everyone heads offstage, North, the only man in black, blocks her. His gestures throughout are interestingly blunt and beautiful - like this block he leans into with both arms. Or later when she pleads against his chest and he throws his hands up as if to say "It's impossible." He knocks his arms gently sideways into her back; smooths his hands over her body without touching; chops softly into her shoulder, hewing her down. She runs, fast, every which way, finds herself sailing helplessly into his arms. It's as if he's playing a fish, but without cruelty. Alone, Gibbs is helped by Charlotte Kirkpatrick, and consoled, as if it had all been a dream. But North reenters; they don't see him, but Gibbs matches her pace to his, till he swats her down, intoxicates her, and prevents her frenzied escape. Gibbs and North were superb. I've sometimes thought her excellent but cold, but the two of them were as warm and beautifully paired as can be. Among the other dancers who must be mentioned are Darshan Bhuller, Sallie Estep, Anca Frankenhauser and Christopher Hannerman, who danced brilliantly the first night, and injured his calf muscle at the very end of the performance.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (May 3 to 8).
Marketing the Trocks: Butch Ballerinas
June 21
When my June 2 New York Times fell open to a full-page ad for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, I was astonished. “smashing, isn’t it?” says Sheldon Soffer, who manages the troupe. “Big! Big.” But three weeks at City Center? Cunningham does two. Nikolais has gradually worked up from one to two to three. Martha Graham couldn't hack a season this year at all. And this flock of male ballerinas making fun of die heilige Kunst of dance dares book itself into this huge house for three weeks? What is this world coming to?
"It's an outrageous ad," says Soffer happily. "Outrageous. But that's what I wanted. I didn't want a regular little thing - Ballets Trockadero at City Center with three reviews. The ad agent who did it did that Paul Taylor ad a year or two ago. Remember? It talked about sex, love, passion, anything but dance. I was outraged. Everyone in the industry talked about it for weeks. How disgraceful! But it produced."
Soffer fills me in on his involvement with the Trocks, whom he has managed since 1975. "Before I saw them, I saw the Gloxinia (Larry Ree's Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet), the original. It was at the Cubiculo after midnight sometime, and they were extravagant. Their outfits were phenomenal, but it was a drag act. It looked beautiful, but after three minutes, it was just one laugh, because they went around in circles, like something you'd see in Reno or Las Vegas. A year later, someone from Yale who was working in my office became enamored of the Trocks when they split off. He worked as an usher for them and for months he tried to get me to go down and see them. I said, "I saw them already." This confusion still persists, and there's Antony Bassae's Ballets Trockadero de la Karpova ("the black rhinestone of the Russian ballet") as well.
"This is the same thing that happens in Europe," says Soffer, because the Gloxinia was there first. "Or I speak to someone at the Philharmonic and they say, 'I saw them.' 'No, you haven't seen them' I tell them. 'They haven't performed here in four years. "Anyway, he phoned a friend of mine who lived downtown to ask me to supper, and then, lo and behold, there were seats for the Trocks. It was a hot night, June, and I went in and I saw the cash register clicking. 'If they can get their act together and work this up,' I thought, 'it could be what we don't have in dance: a spoof."
The company's artistic director, Natch Taylor (aka Suzina LaFuzzivitch) worked with the Gloxinia, as had the company's other founders, Peter Anastos and Antony Bassae. But they wanted a more rigorous focus on dancing and choreography, less mushing around onstage. "Anyway, we started our own company with not really anything great in mind, I don't think. In the summer, we went around looking for places to perform and the West Side Discussion Group, a gay discussion center, said, sure, you can use our space. Anyway, we started doing shows at midnight, and we'd do a couple of nights a week, and after the first or second season there we decided maybe we should try for the eight o'clock show and see if we can be more normal and compete with other companies in town. And we did, we got the people."
After a while, competition for space and scheduling conflicts spurred the to the Church of the Beloved Disciple on 14th Street, where similar kinds of problems started them looking for yet another theater. They ended up at the Van Dam, where they had their longest run. "That must have been the spring and summer of 1975. And that's where we met Sheldon. And he signed us."
"I guess," Taylor continues, "in 1975 we had one or two performances out of town, which isn't exactly touring. We went to Rhode Island and Toronto. And, then, in 1976, when Sheldon had time to get us engagements, we hired Betteanne Terrell, who's now my associate artistic director, to come in and teach class, and to rehearse ballets and stage some for us, and we've literally been touring ever since. So, what started as a joke has turned into an international business."
"A number of bookers were interested at the beginning," says Taylor. "Sheldon was the only one who had the guts to say, 'O.K., I'm going to put my name on the line with your name and go out in front of the University Dance Association and all those associations that he's part of or was president of, and say, 'Listen, I have this company - it's kind of strange, kind of funny, but..."
Soffer represents mostly musicians, composers, conductors. "He's never been a major dance promoter or management agent," says Taylor. "He's always had six, seven, maybe eight, but the Trockadero and Pilobolus are the most successful ones. And he feels very close to us, a part of us, because he was there, and he had the courage at the beginning to help us grow. And push us and get us jobs and be willing to take the risk along with us. In a sense, he's responsible for us having the freedom to do what we want to do because he gets us the work which gives us the money which gives us all those things. Of course, we're basically broke anyway. But if it weren't for Sheldon, we might not be here. He's sold us to people even when they didn't want a dance company, they wanted a musician."
"First thing," says Soffer, "was to legitimize them and give them respectability. I got them organized as not-for-profit. I said to myself, 'Sheldon, if those conceptual people like Yvonne Rainer and all those people that move one piece of furniture and walk for a whole evening can be on the NEA Dance Touring Program, I'm going to get the Trocks on the NEA.' I went down to Washington and made a big stink. Those were the years when there were no 'quality' qualifications - if you had X number of performances and you were not-for-profit, you were automatically on the program. But I had to fight."
That didn't last too long. Two years or so later the program was cut sharply and the Trocks were one of the many dance companies that got axed. " 'Sheldon,' I said", says Soffer, " 'how do I get them respectable and professional?' We must consider ourselves a first-class attraction. We have to act first class, present ourselves in a first-class manner because this is what is expected of us. It's not a spoof unless it's performed extremely well and presented well. Well, they took class every day, they started to improve their repertoire -- with Les Sylphides, choreographed by Sacha (Alexander) Minz, Giselle staged by Elena Tchernichova who's at ABT. I mean, they were able to perform the steps. And well."
"Then, how do you sell them? 'Cause you can't explain it. You say male ballerinas to a sponsor and they'll laugh in your face. So the following year we went up to the Martinique Theater on 32nd Street, which was in a welfare hotel. Just dreadful. Fires in the hallway every day. Meanwhile, here was the ACUSA, the meeting of all the university artists series, which convenes annually in December in New York. I'd arranged a special performance for them and I had refreshments, some champagne, and I asked whoever wanted to come. We had 40 of the universities. They flipped out, but some said, 'I'd be fired if I brought them', or 'I could never explain to the trustees.' These were the big series, they were bringing in Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey. I knew the woman who ran the series at Berkeley extremely well, and I said. 'Come on...' She said she'd allocated all the funds. 'O.K.', I said, "we'll play it on a percentage.' Because I knew the San Francisco area, I knew going over the Oakland bridge is nothing. So we played four performances on a percentage and made out very well."
"Once I could say UC Berkeley had them I got UCLA, then Stanford, and that's how it snowballed. I got respectability. If you see who got Graham, Taylor, Ailey, all the headliners, and they bring in the Trocks, then the others can follow. Even though they say, 'It's San Francisco, you know.' Still, that started us. Slowly, not very quickly. Subsequently, they played the Music Center in L.A., twice, and we play the San Francisco Opera House every year. So this isn't just respectability, but financial returns to the sponsors. If the Trocks can fill the San Francisco Opera House, which seats almost 4000, and we play four performances, that's nothing to sneeze at. The sponsors say the only real earners on the road are Pilobolus and the Trocks. Alvin Ailey makes money, but they're very expensive because it's a big company..."
"Now how do we get the Trocks to Europe? Europe is very hard. I got them to South America three times. All the big opera houses where everyone else goes. But they can't go back now because the devaluation is such a disaster. "A very good friend of mine is head of the Holland Festival And I said, 'You must bring the Trocks.' And he said, 'They were here.' See, the Gloxinia payed Paris, Amsterdam, London. The same old story. 'It's not the same company', I said. So they played Holland, they've been to Frankfurt twice running, they go to Italy every year. We're playing Paris - the Olympia - this fall, and they're going to do a film in France. And that might open up England, because once they play the Olympia, that's like paying the Palladium of London. Once we get out of this rut - that they were here already. And now they're in Japan. One of the impresarios was here and he saw To Tell the Truth, they were on that, it was a rerun like at four o'clock in the afternoon. They had a one-minute excerpt from a dance on it. They were in Japan last year for two weeks, now they're there for four."
Soffer digs out this year's opulent Japanese souvenir program. When I mention it to Taylor, he says, "Last year's was nice, and we were going 'Wow, that's incredible.' But this year's put that to shame. It's phenomenal. When we first went to Japan, we had no idea what to expect." In japan, as elsewhere, their audience isn't just the dance audience. "The dance audience in Japan is..."
"Nine people," I mutter. ".....Infinitesimal," he continues. "I mean, we were outselling the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi. The Royal was touring Japan along with us, playing thew same houses and they'd get maybe 50 per cent and we'd be there two nights with maybe 90 per cent attendance each night. And the Bolshoi - we outsold them apparently, based on their tour last year. And it's because we're not just dance, we're entertainment."
"When you look at the audiences in Japan, for us anyway, they're, I'd say, 90 per cent female, and 50 per cent of those are between the ages of 15, maybe 18, and 25. It's like a rock show crowd. We get fan mail, we get love letters, we get presents. After, like Dying Swan, we have planned curtain calls. We couldn't get on with them because every time the ballerina went out somebody was giving him a bottle of sake, or flowers, or a parasol. So we're able to sell out. Producers like that, so they make big beautiful programs. Also to sell."
Back to Soffer. "So what happens in the United States? They play Scottsdale, Arizona every year. They play Fort Wayne, Indiana. We play Halifax to Vancouver with a Canadian impresario, every 14 months. We sell out in Houston, Regina and Calgary, and Fort Wayne and Scottsdale - these are not university towns. And this year we finally broke into Chicago - the big auditorium. So now they're a world attraction, except in New York City. "I've been asking at the box office downstairs who's coming, what percentage of straights, gays, etc. They've only been open a few days for us. They said it's about 50 per cent each way, but the straight audience is old ladies who know exactly what performance they want to go to and what they want to see because they’ve seen them already. In San Francisco, it's the third year they've played there. The first year the audience was maybe 80/20 per cent gay. Now it's 40/60. You see husbands and wives and their children coming. We play Detroit every year, that depressed economic town. I mean, the Renaissance Center's folding. And the sponsor makes money with us."
"I tell the sponsors 'don't promote it for a specialized audience. Sell the Trocks as family entertainment.' For most of the commercial impresarios, it takes time to build up the audience. When we play Regina, Saskatchewan, or Calgary, Alberta, the impresario says it'll take three or four years before we have our audience. But, they're investing in constructing an audience. Its not like in New York where if you don't have a smash, you fold, goodbye. These impresarios work these cities. "Three weeks at City Center. It might be chutzpah. Who knows? You spend $150,000 on advertising. In one week, you'll never amortize it." You might as well.
When my June 2 New York Times fell open to a full-page ad for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, I was astonished. “smashing, isn’t it?” says Sheldon Soffer, who manages the troupe. “Big! Big.” But three weeks at City Center? Cunningham does two. Nikolais has gradually worked up from one to two to three. Martha Graham couldn't hack a season this year at all. And this flock of male ballerinas making fun of die heilige Kunst of dance dares book itself into this huge house for three weeks? What is this world coming to?
"It's an outrageous ad," says Soffer happily. "Outrageous. But that's what I wanted. I didn't want a regular little thing - Ballets Trockadero at City Center with three reviews. The ad agent who did it did that Paul Taylor ad a year or two ago. Remember? It talked about sex, love, passion, anything but dance. I was outraged. Everyone in the industry talked about it for weeks. How disgraceful! But it produced."
Soffer fills me in on his involvement with the Trocks, whom he has managed since 1975. "Before I saw them, I saw the Gloxinia (Larry Ree's Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet), the original. It was at the Cubiculo after midnight sometime, and they were extravagant. Their outfits were phenomenal, but it was a drag act. It looked beautiful, but after three minutes, it was just one laugh, because they went around in circles, like something you'd see in Reno or Las Vegas. A year later, someone from Yale who was working in my office became enamored of the Trocks when they split off. He worked as an usher for them and for months he tried to get me to go down and see them. I said, "I saw them already." This confusion still persists, and there's Antony Bassae's Ballets Trockadero de la Karpova ("the black rhinestone of the Russian ballet") as well.
"This is the same thing that happens in Europe," says Soffer, because the Gloxinia was there first. "Or I speak to someone at the Philharmonic and they say, 'I saw them.' 'No, you haven't seen them' I tell them. 'They haven't performed here in four years. "Anyway, he phoned a friend of mine who lived downtown to ask me to supper, and then, lo and behold, there were seats for the Trocks. It was a hot night, June, and I went in and I saw the cash register clicking. 'If they can get their act together and work this up,' I thought, 'it could be what we don't have in dance: a spoof."
The company's artistic director, Natch Taylor (aka Suzina LaFuzzivitch) worked with the Gloxinia, as had the company's other founders, Peter Anastos and Antony Bassae. But they wanted a more rigorous focus on dancing and choreography, less mushing around onstage. "Anyway, we started our own company with not really anything great in mind, I don't think. In the summer, we went around looking for places to perform and the West Side Discussion Group, a gay discussion center, said, sure, you can use our space. Anyway, we started doing shows at midnight, and we'd do a couple of nights a week, and after the first or second season there we decided maybe we should try for the eight o'clock show and see if we can be more normal and compete with other companies in town. And we did, we got the people."
After a while, competition for space and scheduling conflicts spurred the to the Church of the Beloved Disciple on 14th Street, where similar kinds of problems started them looking for yet another theater. They ended up at the Van Dam, where they had their longest run. "That must have been the spring and summer of 1975. And that's where we met Sheldon. And he signed us."
"I guess," Taylor continues, "in 1975 we had one or two performances out of town, which isn't exactly touring. We went to Rhode Island and Toronto. And, then, in 1976, when Sheldon had time to get us engagements, we hired Betteanne Terrell, who's now my associate artistic director, to come in and teach class, and to rehearse ballets and stage some for us, and we've literally been touring ever since. So, what started as a joke has turned into an international business."
"A number of bookers were interested at the beginning," says Taylor. "Sheldon was the only one who had the guts to say, 'O.K., I'm going to put my name on the line with your name and go out in front of the University Dance Association and all those associations that he's part of or was president of, and say, 'Listen, I have this company - it's kind of strange, kind of funny, but..."
Soffer represents mostly musicians, composers, conductors. "He's never been a major dance promoter or management agent," says Taylor. "He's always had six, seven, maybe eight, but the Trockadero and Pilobolus are the most successful ones. And he feels very close to us, a part of us, because he was there, and he had the courage at the beginning to help us grow. And push us and get us jobs and be willing to take the risk along with us. In a sense, he's responsible for us having the freedom to do what we want to do because he gets us the work which gives us the money which gives us all those things. Of course, we're basically broke anyway. But if it weren't for Sheldon, we might not be here. He's sold us to people even when they didn't want a dance company, they wanted a musician."
"First thing," says Soffer, "was to legitimize them and give them respectability. I got them organized as not-for-profit. I said to myself, 'Sheldon, if those conceptual people like Yvonne Rainer and all those people that move one piece of furniture and walk for a whole evening can be on the NEA Dance Touring Program, I'm going to get the Trocks on the NEA.' I went down to Washington and made a big stink. Those were the years when there were no 'quality' qualifications - if you had X number of performances and you were not-for-profit, you were automatically on the program. But I had to fight."
That didn't last too long. Two years or so later the program was cut sharply and the Trocks were one of the many dance companies that got axed. " 'Sheldon,' I said", says Soffer, " 'how do I get them respectable and professional?' We must consider ourselves a first-class attraction. We have to act first class, present ourselves in a first-class manner because this is what is expected of us. It's not a spoof unless it's performed extremely well and presented well. Well, they took class every day, they started to improve their repertoire -- with Les Sylphides, choreographed by Sacha (Alexander) Minz, Giselle staged by Elena Tchernichova who's at ABT. I mean, they were able to perform the steps. And well."
"Then, how do you sell them? 'Cause you can't explain it. You say male ballerinas to a sponsor and they'll laugh in your face. So the following year we went up to the Martinique Theater on 32nd Street, which was in a welfare hotel. Just dreadful. Fires in the hallway every day. Meanwhile, here was the ACUSA, the meeting of all the university artists series, which convenes annually in December in New York. I'd arranged a special performance for them and I had refreshments, some champagne, and I asked whoever wanted to come. We had 40 of the universities. They flipped out, but some said, 'I'd be fired if I brought them', or 'I could never explain to the trustees.' These were the big series, they were bringing in Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey. I knew the woman who ran the series at Berkeley extremely well, and I said. 'Come on...' She said she'd allocated all the funds. 'O.K.', I said, "we'll play it on a percentage.' Because I knew the San Francisco area, I knew going over the Oakland bridge is nothing. So we played four performances on a percentage and made out very well."
"Once I could say UC Berkeley had them I got UCLA, then Stanford, and that's how it snowballed. I got respectability. If you see who got Graham, Taylor, Ailey, all the headliners, and they bring in the Trocks, then the others can follow. Even though they say, 'It's San Francisco, you know.' Still, that started us. Slowly, not very quickly. Subsequently, they played the Music Center in L.A., twice, and we play the San Francisco Opera House every year. So this isn't just respectability, but financial returns to the sponsors. If the Trocks can fill the San Francisco Opera House, which seats almost 4000, and we play four performances, that's nothing to sneeze at. The sponsors say the only real earners on the road are Pilobolus and the Trocks. Alvin Ailey makes money, but they're very expensive because it's a big company..."
"Now how do we get the Trocks to Europe? Europe is very hard. I got them to South America three times. All the big opera houses where everyone else goes. But they can't go back now because the devaluation is such a disaster. "A very good friend of mine is head of the Holland Festival And I said, 'You must bring the Trocks.' And he said, 'They were here.' See, the Gloxinia payed Paris, Amsterdam, London. The same old story. 'It's not the same company', I said. So they played Holland, they've been to Frankfurt twice running, they go to Italy every year. We're playing Paris - the Olympia - this fall, and they're going to do a film in France. And that might open up England, because once they play the Olympia, that's like paying the Palladium of London. Once we get out of this rut - that they were here already. And now they're in Japan. One of the impresarios was here and he saw To Tell the Truth, they were on that, it was a rerun like at four o'clock in the afternoon. They had a one-minute excerpt from a dance on it. They were in Japan last year for two weeks, now they're there for four."
Soffer digs out this year's opulent Japanese souvenir program. When I mention it to Taylor, he says, "Last year's was nice, and we were going 'Wow, that's incredible.' But this year's put that to shame. It's phenomenal. When we first went to Japan, we had no idea what to expect." In japan, as elsewhere, their audience isn't just the dance audience. "The dance audience in Japan is..."
"Nine people," I mutter. ".....Infinitesimal," he continues. "I mean, we were outselling the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi. The Royal was touring Japan along with us, playing thew same houses and they'd get maybe 50 per cent and we'd be there two nights with maybe 90 per cent attendance each night. And the Bolshoi - we outsold them apparently, based on their tour last year. And it's because we're not just dance, we're entertainment."
"When you look at the audiences in Japan, for us anyway, they're, I'd say, 90 per cent female, and 50 per cent of those are between the ages of 15, maybe 18, and 25. It's like a rock show crowd. We get fan mail, we get love letters, we get presents. After, like Dying Swan, we have planned curtain calls. We couldn't get on with them because every time the ballerina went out somebody was giving him a bottle of sake, or flowers, or a parasol. So we're able to sell out. Producers like that, so they make big beautiful programs. Also to sell."
Back to Soffer. "So what happens in the United States? They play Scottsdale, Arizona every year. They play Fort Wayne, Indiana. We play Halifax to Vancouver with a Canadian impresario, every 14 months. We sell out in Houston, Regina and Calgary, and Fort Wayne and Scottsdale - these are not university towns. And this year we finally broke into Chicago - the big auditorium. So now they're a world attraction, except in New York City. "I've been asking at the box office downstairs who's coming, what percentage of straights, gays, etc. They've only been open a few days for us. They said it's about 50 per cent each way, but the straight audience is old ladies who know exactly what performance they want to go to and what they want to see because they’ve seen them already. In San Francisco, it's the third year they've played there. The first year the audience was maybe 80/20 per cent gay. Now it's 40/60. You see husbands and wives and their children coming. We play Detroit every year, that depressed economic town. I mean, the Renaissance Center's folding. And the sponsor makes money with us."
"I tell the sponsors 'don't promote it for a specialized audience. Sell the Trocks as family entertainment.' For most of the commercial impresarios, it takes time to build up the audience. When we play Regina, Saskatchewan, or Calgary, Alberta, the impresario says it'll take three or four years before we have our audience. But, they're investing in constructing an audience. Its not like in New York where if you don't have a smash, you fold, goodbye. These impresarios work these cities. "Three weeks at City Center. It might be chutzpah. Who knows? You spend $150,000 on advertising. In one week, you'll never amortize it." You might as well.
Pray for Me, I Drive I-95
August 9
Much of Mary Luft's seven-part performance collage Miami, See It Like a Native, is a kind of crooning reverie. Composer Jack Tamui, in a curious Chinese-flavored outfit, with pointy hat and purple socks, leads into it with a small voice ("I am the sneak preview") and a quiet, tinkly tune on a music box. Luft comes from alongside the audience like some smooth, gleaming undersea creature with claws or gloves extending on ticks from her hands, which also hold lit flashlights, and a box mask over her head featuring a photo-portrait of herself. When we see her clearly, her huge-collared costume, patterned with oranges and flamingos, makes her a sort of clown/harlequin. Her moves are circling, caressing, the voice-over is sleepily persistent, repetitious, insidious, vague. Then Luft becomes all elbows, with jerky mechanical gestures. The tape gives an amiable, slimy lesson on salesmanship, and to an admonition about the importance of a "warm, friendly personality", Luft removes her mask to reveal sunglasses, a flower in her hair and a glossy smile. "Call back when I have just stepped out," she says in a retarded telephone voice. "Call back when I'll be back in a moment." The message is a kind of incantation.
Miami relies a good deal on text, slides and a dreamy, rhythmic, sometimes foreboding musical atmosphere by Tamui. We're inundated with projections - portraits, the Atlantic seashore with waves breaking, sand etched with tire tracks, hotels, Art Deco buildings, fruit markets, people in the streets, festivals, news photos of Haitians arriving by boat, blue sky and clouds. And there's an extreme level of vocal artifice in Luft's uncomfortably measured speech, in the way she'll switch from a normal voice to a nasal, squealing, insistent whine. Sometimes she speaks through a ----- its yellow speaker on her chest, to falsify her voice. Luft's texts range from quotes to "questions for migrating geese and other transplants" ("Is this your last season? "Is your mate still living?") to a wearisome dream of a swimmer and some iridescent object she sees, to list of fruits and vegetables in English and Spanish, to twanging, monotone chants and songs ("What do you do when your Mercedes breaks down and the only car you can rent is a Chevrolet? What do you do when you can't find a job...?") to a cheerful color-coded territorial lesson on the racial population of the Miami area. Pink is for whites, yellow's for blacks, aqua's for Cubans.
Something's saggy and phlegmatic about sections of Miami. Funny, incisive bits poke up out of lulling wash of visual and textual elements that keep floating around. Partly, there's an absence of magic in Luft's juxtapositions - no surprises or accidental fusions that make those loose and disparate elements click. Somehow, we never do get under the surfaces Luft presents. She keeps us slightly unsympathetic, disaffected. The moments that focus for me are those when the style of delivery belies the information, when Luft gives a very direct double message and politely leaves us up to our nostrils in hypocrisy, when the piece is most narrative or instructive, when her point of view is sharp, decisive and disturbingly droll.
Like the long last section, "Letter from Miami", detailing suburban agonies ("what with inflation, we're doing the pool ourselves") that make us pitiless, undercut by a concern for quality of life that's perfectly reasonable if exaggerated in its materialism, and an ever-present bubbling fear ("what are you going to do with that gun?") Luft herself comes across strongest when she becomes a character like that housewife, ridiculous and touching. Worrying about what people will think if her husband gets a little un-American Honda to drive to work instead of the Buick. She'd be lost, of course, without the station wagon. Anyway, "we've got to keep one that can haul the boat." And this nice lady gives us all little gifts for when we come down to visit. Crude little cutout paper guns.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 4 to 7).
Much of Mary Luft's seven-part performance collage Miami, See It Like a Native, is a kind of crooning reverie. Composer Jack Tamui, in a curious Chinese-flavored outfit, with pointy hat and purple socks, leads into it with a small voice ("I am the sneak preview") and a quiet, tinkly tune on a music box. Luft comes from alongside the audience like some smooth, gleaming undersea creature with claws or gloves extending on ticks from her hands, which also hold lit flashlights, and a box mask over her head featuring a photo-portrait of herself. When we see her clearly, her huge-collared costume, patterned with oranges and flamingos, makes her a sort of clown/harlequin. Her moves are circling, caressing, the voice-over is sleepily persistent, repetitious, insidious, vague. Then Luft becomes all elbows, with jerky mechanical gestures. The tape gives an amiable, slimy lesson on salesmanship, and to an admonition about the importance of a "warm, friendly personality", Luft removes her mask to reveal sunglasses, a flower in her hair and a glossy smile. "Call back when I have just stepped out," she says in a retarded telephone voice. "Call back when I'll be back in a moment." The message is a kind of incantation.
Miami relies a good deal on text, slides and a dreamy, rhythmic, sometimes foreboding musical atmosphere by Tamui. We're inundated with projections - portraits, the Atlantic seashore with waves breaking, sand etched with tire tracks, hotels, Art Deco buildings, fruit markets, people in the streets, festivals, news photos of Haitians arriving by boat, blue sky and clouds. And there's an extreme level of vocal artifice in Luft's uncomfortably measured speech, in the way she'll switch from a normal voice to a nasal, squealing, insistent whine. Sometimes she speaks through a ----- its yellow speaker on her chest, to falsify her voice. Luft's texts range from quotes to "questions for migrating geese and other transplants" ("Is this your last season? "Is your mate still living?") to a wearisome dream of a swimmer and some iridescent object she sees, to list of fruits and vegetables in English and Spanish, to twanging, monotone chants and songs ("What do you do when your Mercedes breaks down and the only car you can rent is a Chevrolet? What do you do when you can't find a job...?") to a cheerful color-coded territorial lesson on the racial population of the Miami area. Pink is for whites, yellow's for blacks, aqua's for Cubans.
Something's saggy and phlegmatic about sections of Miami. Funny, incisive bits poke up out of lulling wash of visual and textual elements that keep floating around. Partly, there's an absence of magic in Luft's juxtapositions - no surprises or accidental fusions that make those loose and disparate elements click. Somehow, we never do get under the surfaces Luft presents. She keeps us slightly unsympathetic, disaffected. The moments that focus for me are those when the style of delivery belies the information, when Luft gives a very direct double message and politely leaves us up to our nostrils in hypocrisy, when the piece is most narrative or instructive, when her point of view is sharp, decisive and disturbingly droll.
Like the long last section, "Letter from Miami", detailing suburban agonies ("what with inflation, we're doing the pool ourselves") that make us pitiless, undercut by a concern for quality of life that's perfectly reasonable if exaggerated in its materialism, and an ever-present bubbling fear ("what are you going to do with that gun?") Luft herself comes across strongest when she becomes a character like that housewife, ridiculous and touching. Worrying about what people will think if her husband gets a little un-American Honda to drive to work instead of the Buick. She'd be lost, of course, without the station wagon. Anyway, "we've got to keep one that can haul the boat." And this nice lady gives us all little gifts for when we come down to visit. Crude little cutout paper guns.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 4 to 7).
Ruby's Cubes
June 28
Ruby Shang danced with Paul Taylor from 1971 to 1975 and has been presenting her own work since 19878. She started her concert at NYU strangely, with trivial questions to the audience, for something to write in her journal, told a couple of personal tidbits of information that didn't tell much, and danced a brisk, sketchy "journal" of jumps, walking and springy turns. The three works that followed used white wooden forms - cubes about a foot high and long, low boxes like the ones florists use -and they demonstrated and intriguing and growing sophistication.
Three Boxes (l981) was for three women in big, loose white shirts over black Milliskin tights, moving with low, quick, skipping steps around and among an arrangement of three cubes. There's lots of turning, quick changes of direction, sharp, stamping stops. The women sit sometimes, posing like models for a girlie magazine of a quainter era. They roll and twist in unison, parade snappily. But the cheerful rhythmic repetitions of Three Boxes become a kind of white noise, not a high. Why do something once when you can do it 100 times? The next two box pieces, of the next two years, showed that Shang has a lively notion of interacting, with a sculptural arrangement.
Five Boxes: A Still Life (1983) has six dancers in colored unitards running around and over, sitting and standing at three cubes and two long boxes. The dancers flood through, settle briefly into sociable group configurations, and lean and pull and walk out of them. A man comes in and sits a woman bends back over his lap, another lays over her, and both roll off. The man sits elsewhere, a woman lays over his thighs as before, another woman pulls her up, other people collect on the floor around them and on nearby boxes. They pull and support each other, moving from one location to another. They use the boxes for brief meetings, bend or fold or fling themselves over them. Once someone curls over a tipped cube; he''s carried frozen to another cube while the original cube is held on end. There's a playful inventiveness in the rolling action that makes the dances and the boxes (which the dancers occasionally shift, one at a time) equal partners. The dance gathers speed and sprawl - there's more flashing in and out, duets of springy jumping and swinging and place-exchanging that pivot on handshakes. The dancers cleanly incorporate the boxes in the flow of the movement acknowledging without fuss, their plain distinction. The curving lines of bodies bending and pulling, the switching around, the general flexibility and changeableness, the temporary quality of groupings that coalesce only to disband, have a kind of liveliness, a sense of being-in-the-moment, that is its own justification.
In Four Boxes: A Square Dance (l982) four long boxes are attached to each other to form a square shape like the rim of a pool or tub. Shang shakes hands with each of four men as they enter (and again at the end when they leave). She's in the middle, doing slow, swivelly stuff, while they march tightly forward, about-face, etc. in clear, changing rhythms around the square. Sunk low, Shang slides back, like she's lolling in the bathtub in some soap commercial. The men slow, bump, change direction, and then they're gong in and out, over the boxes, through the tub, in an intricately twisting jumble, and wind up sitting and standing looking at the audience with the blank confidence of GQ models. Shang bounces and jumps in and out while they're still. Then they slide out of position, slowly pulling or helping each other up or down to stretch out on the floor, roll over crawl back over the boxes, in a sensuous sequences that foams smoothly in and out and laps back in over the edge of the tub.
Shang's newest piece, Memories, is episodic and long-winded, though in contains some powerful and curious material. And it makes me wonder, as I often do, why many choreographers seem to prefer the distancing of vagueness and repetition to incisiveness and brevity. They'll rub you with an image till it loses force and its original impression fades. Even when specific points are being made, they're delivered to the audience in a context that garbles them and deprives them of their moral force. The cast of Memories is all women, all Oriental. Five seat themselves on flat pillows at ow, diamond-shaped tables, and tuck their legs under them Japanese-style. One scoots through with little, grounded, "feminine" steps, hands held against her thighs. There is a sense of formality and constraint; the women don't look at each other but kneel, trade places, incline their heads, bow. Three lean as if they're tired; two bend over, distraught. Suddenly, they flipflop all over. The, on the other side of the stage, they stand still, vibrating with a stiff, small, side-to-side motion as if barely containing their fear and anger. As the music throbs and roars like a bomber overhead, some twist, flail, drop and tremble. Memories expands, with Shang and a young girl crossing from opposite sides; the girl is later protected and carried off, in a table turned sideways, as if in a litter. (Later, Shang drags her back in.) Two bossy, speaking women come in and out from one side, working their way back faster and faster, doubling syllables in what sounds like nonsense Japanese. Dancers flail and stagger around. A huge white three-sided box works its way onstage, while pillowy, ameboid things, designed to approximate the flags of the U.S., China and Japan, crawl in. They stretch and flatten out. The walls of the "box" fall outward to expose Shang nude, and the little girl nervously peeking out from behind her. Is it foolish to want straight talk?
Shang's surely not timid. But she allows me to interpret the images and relations in Memories more freely than I want to. That liberty doesn't seem quite appropriate here: it's as if the choreographer won't come clean. Whether these memories are real or imaginary, personal or cultural, I want to know exactly where I a, what's happening, exactly who these people are.
At NYU Tisch School of the Arts (June 1 to 31).
Ruby Shang danced with Paul Taylor from 1971 to 1975 and has been presenting her own work since 19878. She started her concert at NYU strangely, with trivial questions to the audience, for something to write in her journal, told a couple of personal tidbits of information that didn't tell much, and danced a brisk, sketchy "journal" of jumps, walking and springy turns. The three works that followed used white wooden forms - cubes about a foot high and long, low boxes like the ones florists use -and they demonstrated and intriguing and growing sophistication.
Three Boxes (l981) was for three women in big, loose white shirts over black Milliskin tights, moving with low, quick, skipping steps around and among an arrangement of three cubes. There's lots of turning, quick changes of direction, sharp, stamping stops. The women sit sometimes, posing like models for a girlie magazine of a quainter era. They roll and twist in unison, parade snappily. But the cheerful rhythmic repetitions of Three Boxes become a kind of white noise, not a high. Why do something once when you can do it 100 times? The next two box pieces, of the next two years, showed that Shang has a lively notion of interacting, with a sculptural arrangement.
Five Boxes: A Still Life (1983) has six dancers in colored unitards running around and over, sitting and standing at three cubes and two long boxes. The dancers flood through, settle briefly into sociable group configurations, and lean and pull and walk out of them. A man comes in and sits a woman bends back over his lap, another lays over her, and both roll off. The man sits elsewhere, a woman lays over his thighs as before, another woman pulls her up, other people collect on the floor around them and on nearby boxes. They pull and support each other, moving from one location to another. They use the boxes for brief meetings, bend or fold or fling themselves over them. Once someone curls over a tipped cube; he''s carried frozen to another cube while the original cube is held on end. There's a playful inventiveness in the rolling action that makes the dances and the boxes (which the dancers occasionally shift, one at a time) equal partners. The dance gathers speed and sprawl - there's more flashing in and out, duets of springy jumping and swinging and place-exchanging that pivot on handshakes. The dancers cleanly incorporate the boxes in the flow of the movement acknowledging without fuss, their plain distinction. The curving lines of bodies bending and pulling, the switching around, the general flexibility and changeableness, the temporary quality of groupings that coalesce only to disband, have a kind of liveliness, a sense of being-in-the-moment, that is its own justification.
In Four Boxes: A Square Dance (l982) four long boxes are attached to each other to form a square shape like the rim of a pool or tub. Shang shakes hands with each of four men as they enter (and again at the end when they leave). She's in the middle, doing slow, swivelly stuff, while they march tightly forward, about-face, etc. in clear, changing rhythms around the square. Sunk low, Shang slides back, like she's lolling in the bathtub in some soap commercial. The men slow, bump, change direction, and then they're gong in and out, over the boxes, through the tub, in an intricately twisting jumble, and wind up sitting and standing looking at the audience with the blank confidence of GQ models. Shang bounces and jumps in and out while they're still. Then they slide out of position, slowly pulling or helping each other up or down to stretch out on the floor, roll over crawl back over the boxes, in a sensuous sequences that foams smoothly in and out and laps back in over the edge of the tub.
Shang's newest piece, Memories, is episodic and long-winded, though in contains some powerful and curious material. And it makes me wonder, as I often do, why many choreographers seem to prefer the distancing of vagueness and repetition to incisiveness and brevity. They'll rub you with an image till it loses force and its original impression fades. Even when specific points are being made, they're delivered to the audience in a context that garbles them and deprives them of their moral force. The cast of Memories is all women, all Oriental. Five seat themselves on flat pillows at ow, diamond-shaped tables, and tuck their legs under them Japanese-style. One scoots through with little, grounded, "feminine" steps, hands held against her thighs. There is a sense of formality and constraint; the women don't look at each other but kneel, trade places, incline their heads, bow. Three lean as if they're tired; two bend over, distraught. Suddenly, they flipflop all over. The, on the other side of the stage, they stand still, vibrating with a stiff, small, side-to-side motion as if barely containing their fear and anger. As the music throbs and roars like a bomber overhead, some twist, flail, drop and tremble. Memories expands, with Shang and a young girl crossing from opposite sides; the girl is later protected and carried off, in a table turned sideways, as if in a litter. (Later, Shang drags her back in.) Two bossy, speaking women come in and out from one side, working their way back faster and faster, doubling syllables in what sounds like nonsense Japanese. Dancers flail and stagger around. A huge white three-sided box works its way onstage, while pillowy, ameboid things, designed to approximate the flags of the U.S., China and Japan, crawl in. They stretch and flatten out. The walls of the "box" fall outward to expose Shang nude, and the little girl nervously peeking out from behind her. Is it foolish to want straight talk?
Shang's surely not timid. But she allows me to interpret the images and relations in Memories more freely than I want to. That liberty doesn't seem quite appropriate here: it's as if the choreographer won't come clean. Whether these memories are real or imaginary, personal or cultural, I want to know exactly where I a, what's happening, exactly who these people are.
At NYU Tisch School of the Arts (June 1 to 31).
Sauve Qui Proust
August 2
For all the wealth of its production, Roland Petit's Proust - Les Intermittences du Coeur is surprisingly without atmosphere. What is pungent in it is the aroma of self-interest, self-obsession projected by most of its characters, whom we see almost exclusively in one-to-one encounters with their "love objects." Because we don't know them in different aspects, they appear monochrome. And we must infer the pretentiousness and deceit of the society they inhabit.
The 13 scenes are episodic shards, but fragmentation doesn't make them confusing. Because we see most of the characters only once or twice we're not tempted to imagine any complex interrelationships. But when all's done, what we remember best are the gimmicks: Albertine being carried off like a sultana on a bed of bent over young girls, the long white curtain of Albertine's bedroom falling in a rippling gush, Madame Verdurin's salon furniture flying off piece by piece. The spine of the ballet is its series of pas de deux, or solos that evolve into pas de deux. Petit often deflects the movement at peak moments, inferring a kind of sneakiness, like the way the brilliant, feline Jana-Charles Gil, in the first Swann/Odette duet, insinuates his way out of a spin into a lunge. Or the movement will snap at an apparent climax, changing direction in stead of blooming. But there's a good deal of specific emotional suggestion. Swann's or Proust's arms swoop up and down in S-curves of distress or frustration. Swann and Odette (Luigi Bonino and Florence Faure) argue in hard, flicking hand gestures; they walk belly to back; he wraps her passionately in his arms. Most convincing is the way a thrust of her shoulder can make his body recoil. The exaggerated effect of her movements on his body nicely suggests her power over him. In the somnambulistic Proust/Albertine duet ------ (--- and Richard Cragun, or Dominique Khalfouni and Denys Ganio), she never quite wakes, but keeps fleeing him anyway; she curls over his back or into herself as if to stay sleeping; shoots her legs out to the side in a lift as if still escaping. When she bourrees away from him, he can hardly catch her. Overall, the choreography is frustratingly unmusical and monotonous. Long repetitions are empty of connotation the second time around.
All this to a melange of music - lots of Saint-Saens (including what we may term the "love theme" from the Organ Symphony), Debussy, Faure, Wagner. Though thick and melancholy on the whole, it never seems a patchwork. But the steps are, well, just steps. The choreography rarely flows - it blunders along with starts and stops, hooked into the music in a pedestrian way. Although the design of the movement is often curvilinear or lyric, the undercurrent is rhetorical and interrupted. The phrases can't give the dancers a lift by the way they're linked, so an inertia must be overcome at the start of every phrase. Unresponsiveness is built in. This effect is continued, for example, in the way the pas de deux fail to illuminate or reflect each other, despite much shared vocabulary. Several scenes don't add much to the whole. In the opening salon, we meet Madame Verdurin and her guests and furniture and an immobile, caricature Proust. Verdurin makes no particular impression and we never see her again. In another scene, we find a group of young girls smooshing their arms and arabesquing and doing yawny stretches in front of a shower curtain. Blah blah blah innocence, blah blah. In the second act, Charlus visits his "black angel", Morel, the rooster of a haunt of prostitutes. Morel (Jean-Charles Gil) saunters on in a loose robe, Charlus watches, twitches, implores. Aloof and cold, Morel strips for a suddenly appearing Prince de Guermantes. So Morel is revealed as an insolent whore - but we knew that from before when Charlus's dithering fascination was fully exposed, too. In yet another scene, a quartet of mix-and-match ---- perform pretty, prissy sex pictures - literal, naive and squeaky clean.
The four second-act scenes involving Morel, Charlus and Saint-Loup have more continuity than any other part of the ballet, which gives them a plodding strength and impact. Charlus (excellently danced by Gerard Taillade) watches Morel dancing a spectacular two-dimensional pattern of pirouettes and whipping turns, soaring leaps and dazzlingly fast footwork. Charlus hovers and fusses and begs. And two scenes later, we're shown the aggressive side of Charlus's masochism. The duet of Saint-Loup (Patrick Dupond or Jean-Pierre Aviotte) and Morel, supposed exemplars of good and evil, is an intimate, rhythmic contest, con ------ they're not so different after all. Little in the gestures of the characters makes them individual - what they express on the whole are intense generalities. But Makarova, as Albertine in one cast, is extraordinary in a sequence of three scenes - from down by the shore with a gaggle of maidens through the sleepwalking duet with Prous/Cragun. She creates the whole giddy, idle seaside scene in her moves -- in her kittenish smile, in the lightness of her arms, in even the way her foot beats, as if she's testing the water, making it ripple and splash. Patrick Dupond, too, ass Saint-Loup, isn't merely vulnerable, but allows the rather undetailed movement in his slow solo to transform him from second to second. It's not just his emotional coloring that's chameleonlike, but he seems to change physically - from thin to brawny in a moment Other characters seem ironclad, immutable. Makarova's and Dupond's changeability, their different moods and responses, lighten them up. It is only heir personal, tender aliveness that gives any weight at all to whatever contrasts are intended between "good" and evil".
Otherwise, I don't find Proust's voyeuristic possessiveness any less loathsome than Charlus's masochism, or Morel's licentious disdain worse than Odette's fickleness and self-satisfaction. Petit's other full-length ballet, Notre Dame de Paris, is grim and grotesque with all the sophistication and hocus-pocus of an elementary school production. Petit shuffles and marches his creepy-crawly mob with effective clarity, but everybody dances like spiders and frogs and other vermin. Gil is sinister and sexy and demonically fast as the archdeacon Frollo, and Cragun sometimes touching as Quasimodo, particularly when he smooths down his distorted shoulder for a few moments of poetic normality. Maurice Jarr is guilty of the music, which is booming, but no help. I liked the archdeacon's black net and leatherette S/M outfit, and I liked seeing Esmeralda's black bikini under her whirling red dress (costumes by Yves Saint-Laurent). The very end of the ballet does work though: Esmeralda hangs, Quasimodo kills Frollo almost passively with one hand, almost not noticing. He carries off Esmeralda's body, swinging it around his ----- hell into a blaze of glory.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 18 to 30).
For all the wealth of its production, Roland Petit's Proust - Les Intermittences du Coeur is surprisingly without atmosphere. What is pungent in it is the aroma of self-interest, self-obsession projected by most of its characters, whom we see almost exclusively in one-to-one encounters with their "love objects." Because we don't know them in different aspects, they appear monochrome. And we must infer the pretentiousness and deceit of the society they inhabit.
The 13 scenes are episodic shards, but fragmentation doesn't make them confusing. Because we see most of the characters only once or twice we're not tempted to imagine any complex interrelationships. But when all's done, what we remember best are the gimmicks: Albertine being carried off like a sultana on a bed of bent over young girls, the long white curtain of Albertine's bedroom falling in a rippling gush, Madame Verdurin's salon furniture flying off piece by piece. The spine of the ballet is its series of pas de deux, or solos that evolve into pas de deux. Petit often deflects the movement at peak moments, inferring a kind of sneakiness, like the way the brilliant, feline Jana-Charles Gil, in the first Swann/Odette duet, insinuates his way out of a spin into a lunge. Or the movement will snap at an apparent climax, changing direction in stead of blooming. But there's a good deal of specific emotional suggestion. Swann's or Proust's arms swoop up and down in S-curves of distress or frustration. Swann and Odette (Luigi Bonino and Florence Faure) argue in hard, flicking hand gestures; they walk belly to back; he wraps her passionately in his arms. Most convincing is the way a thrust of her shoulder can make his body recoil. The exaggerated effect of her movements on his body nicely suggests her power over him. In the somnambulistic Proust/Albertine duet ------ (--- and Richard Cragun, or Dominique Khalfouni and Denys Ganio), she never quite wakes, but keeps fleeing him anyway; she curls over his back or into herself as if to stay sleeping; shoots her legs out to the side in a lift as if still escaping. When she bourrees away from him, he can hardly catch her. Overall, the choreography is frustratingly unmusical and monotonous. Long repetitions are empty of connotation the second time around.
All this to a melange of music - lots of Saint-Saens (including what we may term the "love theme" from the Organ Symphony), Debussy, Faure, Wagner. Though thick and melancholy on the whole, it never seems a patchwork. But the steps are, well, just steps. The choreography rarely flows - it blunders along with starts and stops, hooked into the music in a pedestrian way. Although the design of the movement is often curvilinear or lyric, the undercurrent is rhetorical and interrupted. The phrases can't give the dancers a lift by the way they're linked, so an inertia must be overcome at the start of every phrase. Unresponsiveness is built in. This effect is continued, for example, in the way the pas de deux fail to illuminate or reflect each other, despite much shared vocabulary. Several scenes don't add much to the whole. In the opening salon, we meet Madame Verdurin and her guests and furniture and an immobile, caricature Proust. Verdurin makes no particular impression and we never see her again. In another scene, we find a group of young girls smooshing their arms and arabesquing and doing yawny stretches in front of a shower curtain. Blah blah blah innocence, blah blah. In the second act, Charlus visits his "black angel", Morel, the rooster of a haunt of prostitutes. Morel (Jean-Charles Gil) saunters on in a loose robe, Charlus watches, twitches, implores. Aloof and cold, Morel strips for a suddenly appearing Prince de Guermantes. So Morel is revealed as an insolent whore - but we knew that from before when Charlus's dithering fascination was fully exposed, too. In yet another scene, a quartet of mix-and-match ---- perform pretty, prissy sex pictures - literal, naive and squeaky clean.
The four second-act scenes involving Morel, Charlus and Saint-Loup have more continuity than any other part of the ballet, which gives them a plodding strength and impact. Charlus (excellently danced by Gerard Taillade) watches Morel dancing a spectacular two-dimensional pattern of pirouettes and whipping turns, soaring leaps and dazzlingly fast footwork. Charlus hovers and fusses and begs. And two scenes later, we're shown the aggressive side of Charlus's masochism. The duet of Saint-Loup (Patrick Dupond or Jean-Pierre Aviotte) and Morel, supposed exemplars of good and evil, is an intimate, rhythmic contest, con ------ they're not so different after all. Little in the gestures of the characters makes them individual - what they express on the whole are intense generalities. But Makarova, as Albertine in one cast, is extraordinary in a sequence of three scenes - from down by the shore with a gaggle of maidens through the sleepwalking duet with Prous/Cragun. She creates the whole giddy, idle seaside scene in her moves -- in her kittenish smile, in the lightness of her arms, in even the way her foot beats, as if she's testing the water, making it ripple and splash. Patrick Dupond, too, ass Saint-Loup, isn't merely vulnerable, but allows the rather undetailed movement in his slow solo to transform him from second to second. It's not just his emotional coloring that's chameleonlike, but he seems to change physically - from thin to brawny in a moment Other characters seem ironclad, immutable. Makarova's and Dupond's changeability, their different moods and responses, lighten them up. It is only heir personal, tender aliveness that gives any weight at all to whatever contrasts are intended between "good" and evil".
Otherwise, I don't find Proust's voyeuristic possessiveness any less loathsome than Charlus's masochism, or Morel's licentious disdain worse than Odette's fickleness and self-satisfaction. Petit's other full-length ballet, Notre Dame de Paris, is grim and grotesque with all the sophistication and hocus-pocus of an elementary school production. Petit shuffles and marches his creepy-crawly mob with effective clarity, but everybody dances like spiders and frogs and other vermin. Gil is sinister and sexy and demonically fast as the archdeacon Frollo, and Cragun sometimes touching as Quasimodo, particularly when he smooths down his distorted shoulder for a few moments of poetic normality. Maurice Jarr is guilty of the music, which is booming, but no help. I liked the archdeacon's black net and leatherette S/M outfit, and I liked seeing Esmeralda's black bikini under her whirling red dress (costumes by Yves Saint-Laurent). The very end of the ballet does work though: Esmeralda hangs, Quasimodo kills Frollo almost passively with one hand, almost not noticing. He carries off Esmeralda's body, swinging it around his ----- hell into a blaze of glory.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 18 to 30).