1984 continued
Fun City Girls
January 24
Relocated California choreographer Rhonda Martyn, artistic director of the San Francisco Moving Company from 1976 to 1983, gave her first concert here at the Ohio Theater, though an injury prevented her from dancing one of the scheduled pieces, Mark Morris’s solo, Bijoux.
Of the three works by Martyn, the first, “Prelude”, from Mind of Winter, was a mld, wafty solo for Nora Reynolds in a sheer, blowsy dress. It used the marvelous depth of the oho space nicely, as well as its impressive, framing rows of solid square pillars. But, except for intermittent interruptions in its flow,, the piece seemed to be a typically expectant, swirly, curvy arching, sometimes sinking, stretch-release opus - what I think of as an “ah” dance. Unfortunately the recorded excerpts of Bach’s Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello as too loud. Not painfully so, just enough to seem unnatural.
Seachange, a 1983 duet to familiar Philip Glass music, was skillfully danced by Guillermo Resto and Diane Epstein in turquoise leotards and tights but was oddly titled for a dance so deliberately designed, so symmetrical, so Pilobolite. The pair starts atop one another, him on her, flat on their bellies. Their heads slowly raise and drop. He lifts her partway up, holding under her arms. He points his legs overhead in a diamond shape, and she manages a similar exercise. Rolled up to sitting, she clamps herself around his waist; they switch and he wraps his legs around her. They share the duties of partnering pretty fairly, staying well coupled as they get on their feet and move through the space. The movement acquires a kind of regular surge, and Resto and Epstein row their bodies almost as regularly as galley slaves. They swing each other, lock onto each other, lift each other over their backs. All this is cleanly and prettily engineered, but the partnership is purely physical, plastic, tactile. The dancers’ energy is kept contained within themselves. None of it spills into the surrounding space. The overlapping waves of the musical environment have no sensual equivalent in the dance. The air around the dancers is empty, not alive. Which finally makes the dancers, no matter how forceful, personable and glamorous, seem ineffectual.
Martyn’s Witchmouth is based on a Nigerian story-poem by Stephen Vincent, of a man who unwittingly kills one of his two wives (both of whom are secret witches) while she’s sleeping in the form of a moth, trying to reenter her sleeping woman’s body but prevented because the mosquito net protecting the bed keeps her away. At the husband’s trial, the second wife explains that the husband didn’t slaughter the woman but swatted the moth, not recognizing it as his wife. She must then verify her own identity as a witch. The beginning of the piece had little interest for me - the two wives, one in white, one in black, rushing and leaping around the deep, dramatic space, burning a pot of twigs, making horrid faces, doing witchy things. A dozen masked animal spirits or demons come crawling around and I can’t help thinking of them as mice escaped from The Nutcracker.
But, suddenly, the piece comes together with great impact. David Landis appears robed as a judge. He raises and lowers his arms in opposition, like the scales of justice. A cat-woman (the courtroom transformation of the second wife) moves sinuously, responsive to him, underneath the platform. Becoming the husband, removing his robes, Landis dangles his legs over the edge of the platform, climbs down, and fiercely enwraps the woman, presses and holds her, spins her across his shoulders. We can see the other women through dark scrims behind the platform. The images are fascinatingly compressed and interlocked in tis section, and Landis’s compelling dramatic force welds them together. Nets fall from the ceiling throughout the space. The witch-wife in white runs into them, thrashes, falls. Meantime, Landis, on the platform, strikes and smashes with crushing power. Not at all the harmless husband we’ve imagined from the poem. Then, we see the wife’s bloodied body plastered still against an upright white board.
Legs, A Revue at the Rainbow Room.
Legs. And belly buttons. And most of seven white girl tushies. And two black guys who are mostly dressed and, like the girls, can kick and do attitudes and shake their things. Only one girl gets to show off her lovely little adolescent titties. But everyone can run and parade around on a postage-stamp stage and not bump.
The revue, Legs, at the Rainbow Grill, with lots of lip-synch mime to songs, is an ostensible tour of some kind of New York - not the one I recognize, but possibly one in an alternative galaxy. There’s a routine tap routine in sailor suits celebrating the Circle Line. Slutty tangos in the village. In Chinatown, two girls in shortie, black-belted coats in karate class sing their legs and chop their arms, and flip head-over-head. I forget what happens in Harlem (except that most everyone is, perforce, still white) and in jazz-dance class, but I was sipping a mellow wine and contentedly stuffed with a good dinner on the house. There was a live singer, with recorded backup, and the obligatory Broadway tribute: a toast to Cats with the music borrowed from Most Happy Fella, Dreamgirls with a girl and the two guys flipping red feather boas. A girl mouthing “You Can Eat Crackers in My Bed Anytime” is slotted up to her waist into a sort of bed-envelope on a black cloth, while messily munching Ritz crackers.
It’s interesting to me that those strutting and smiling girls aren’t voluptuous - they’re close to the Balanchine-Barbie doll type, but their bones are nicely covered. The Rainbow Grill’s a great spot even with a snowstorm blotting the wraparound windows. And the waiters couldn’t be more friendly or attentive. I’m naive to be surprised, but despite some bright spots, I wonder that this sort of material is considered “sophisticated” in some circles. It is, god knows, upbeat, and it’s got lots of costumes. I like best, I think, something the girls wear at the end - caps bursting with yellow feathers and dripping diamonds., with strings of diamonds hanging off the shoulder girdle and ending in free-swinging, hip-level skirts of big, fluffy yellow feathers. You don’t see this in alphabet city. Nothing is subtle or detailed. Or remotely honest. The nine dancers really work on hat stage, but they’re not people. They express a purely commercial sensibility. They’re slick toys to illustrate the safest sort of middlebrow fantasies. There’s nothing you couldn’t take your old mother to see.
Relocated California choreographer Rhonda Martyn, artistic director of the San Francisco Moving Company from 1976 to 1983, gave her first concert here at the Ohio Theater, though an injury prevented her from dancing one of the scheduled pieces, Mark Morris’s solo, Bijoux.
Of the three works by Martyn, the first, “Prelude”, from Mind of Winter, was a mld, wafty solo for Nora Reynolds in a sheer, blowsy dress. It used the marvelous depth of the oho space nicely, as well as its impressive, framing rows of solid square pillars. But, except for intermittent interruptions in its flow,, the piece seemed to be a typically expectant, swirly, curvy arching, sometimes sinking, stretch-release opus - what I think of as an “ah” dance. Unfortunately the recorded excerpts of Bach’s Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello as too loud. Not painfully so, just enough to seem unnatural.
Seachange, a 1983 duet to familiar Philip Glass music, was skillfully danced by Guillermo Resto and Diane Epstein in turquoise leotards and tights but was oddly titled for a dance so deliberately designed, so symmetrical, so Pilobolite. The pair starts atop one another, him on her, flat on their bellies. Their heads slowly raise and drop. He lifts her partway up, holding under her arms. He points his legs overhead in a diamond shape, and she manages a similar exercise. Rolled up to sitting, she clamps herself around his waist; they switch and he wraps his legs around her. They share the duties of partnering pretty fairly, staying well coupled as they get on their feet and move through the space. The movement acquires a kind of regular surge, and Resto and Epstein row their bodies almost as regularly as galley slaves. They swing each other, lock onto each other, lift each other over their backs. All this is cleanly and prettily engineered, but the partnership is purely physical, plastic, tactile. The dancers’ energy is kept contained within themselves. None of it spills into the surrounding space. The overlapping waves of the musical environment have no sensual equivalent in the dance. The air around the dancers is empty, not alive. Which finally makes the dancers, no matter how forceful, personable and glamorous, seem ineffectual.
Martyn’s Witchmouth is based on a Nigerian story-poem by Stephen Vincent, of a man who unwittingly kills one of his two wives (both of whom are secret witches) while she’s sleeping in the form of a moth, trying to reenter her sleeping woman’s body but prevented because the mosquito net protecting the bed keeps her away. At the husband’s trial, the second wife explains that the husband didn’t slaughter the woman but swatted the moth, not recognizing it as his wife. She must then verify her own identity as a witch. The beginning of the piece had little interest for me - the two wives, one in white, one in black, rushing and leaping around the deep, dramatic space, burning a pot of twigs, making horrid faces, doing witchy things. A dozen masked animal spirits or demons come crawling around and I can’t help thinking of them as mice escaped from The Nutcracker.
But, suddenly, the piece comes together with great impact. David Landis appears robed as a judge. He raises and lowers his arms in opposition, like the scales of justice. A cat-woman (the courtroom transformation of the second wife) moves sinuously, responsive to him, underneath the platform. Becoming the husband, removing his robes, Landis dangles his legs over the edge of the platform, climbs down, and fiercely enwraps the woman, presses and holds her, spins her across his shoulders. We can see the other women through dark scrims behind the platform. The images are fascinatingly compressed and interlocked in tis section, and Landis’s compelling dramatic force welds them together. Nets fall from the ceiling throughout the space. The witch-wife in white runs into them, thrashes, falls. Meantime, Landis, on the platform, strikes and smashes with crushing power. Not at all the harmless husband we’ve imagined from the poem. Then, we see the wife’s bloodied body plastered still against an upright white board.
Legs, A Revue at the Rainbow Room.
Legs. And belly buttons. And most of seven white girl tushies. And two black guys who are mostly dressed and, like the girls, can kick and do attitudes and shake their things. Only one girl gets to show off her lovely little adolescent titties. But everyone can run and parade around on a postage-stamp stage and not bump.
The revue, Legs, at the Rainbow Grill, with lots of lip-synch mime to songs, is an ostensible tour of some kind of New York - not the one I recognize, but possibly one in an alternative galaxy. There’s a routine tap routine in sailor suits celebrating the Circle Line. Slutty tangos in the village. In Chinatown, two girls in shortie, black-belted coats in karate class sing their legs and chop their arms, and flip head-over-head. I forget what happens in Harlem (except that most everyone is, perforce, still white) and in jazz-dance class, but I was sipping a mellow wine and contentedly stuffed with a good dinner on the house. There was a live singer, with recorded backup, and the obligatory Broadway tribute: a toast to Cats with the music borrowed from Most Happy Fella, Dreamgirls with a girl and the two guys flipping red feather boas. A girl mouthing “You Can Eat Crackers in My Bed Anytime” is slotted up to her waist into a sort of bed-envelope on a black cloth, while messily munching Ritz crackers.
It’s interesting to me that those strutting and smiling girls aren’t voluptuous - they’re close to the Balanchine-Barbie doll type, but their bones are nicely covered. The Rainbow Grill’s a great spot even with a snowstorm blotting the wraparound windows. And the waiters couldn’t be more friendly or attentive. I’m naive to be surprised, but despite some bright spots, I wonder that this sort of material is considered “sophisticated” in some circles. It is, god knows, upbeat, and it’s got lots of costumes. I like best, I think, something the girls wear at the end - caps bursting with yellow feathers and dripping diamonds., with strings of diamonds hanging off the shoulder girdle and ending in free-swinging, hip-level skirts of big, fluffy yellow feathers. You don’t see this in alphabet city. Nothing is subtle or detailed. Or remotely honest. The nine dancers really work on hat stage, but they’re not people. They express a purely commercial sensibility. They’re slick toys to illustrate the safest sort of middlebrow fantasies. There’s nothing you couldn’t take your old mother to see.
No Voyager
January 17
Ensemble No. 3, a performance collective working together since 1979 “with no supervision whatsoever,” presented three literate and intriguing works at P.S. 122 in mid-December.
In David Warren’s World’s Fair, the least elaborate piece, Warren appears as a correct, affable fellow. He fondly remembers the 1964 World’s Fair (the miracle of warm Hostess cupcakes!) and it’s theme, “unity through understanding,” which he views with wide-eyed cynicism. This leads into a simplistic sort of pad-and-easel lecture on deconstruction, with classroom voices n tape and Warren pointing to formulaic messages on his pad. The class’s precocious intellectual questions plague him. But I lost touch with Warren’s feeling during this section, and was disconcerted when he finally becomes frightened --- the audience, and is pelted with cupcakes.
In Dan Hurlin’s The Second Strange Thing, a 12-foot table is arrayed with a row of five identical cassette recorders, each standing under a small reading lamp. Patricia Henritze, the only live figure, first appears to be a sort f caretaker/technician , switching n the tapes at once, turning on the light for each recorder when a voice speaks from it. But sometimes she’ll put on an article of clothing, like a party hat, and lip-synch the words, standing behind the machine, identifying with the voice while parodying it. When each tape episode ends, the machine “dies.” Henritze turns it face down and turns out its light. Second Strange Thing unravels the complicated story of “Mary Alice” (who Henritze gradually becomes) told by the voices of her friends. It is jumbled through different periods of history; she dies at least five times. The pice plays a kind of sly, offhand, joking quality against portents and the recurrent nightmare of a car crash. It starts out drily as a distanced, technical feat of coordination, changes into a warmer, cruder and more humorous puppet show, and finishes , with the physical disarray of the scene nearly complete, as a dramatic monologue. The little black boxes become “humanized” as Henritze puts sunglasses on one, a cap on another. Laid one on another, they make love. It’s wonderfully sweet and homey when a couple breaks up (he wears a bow tie, and Henritze puts a little red coat on her when she’s ready to be walked out the door. But eventually Henritze is completely alone. The performers and the Mary Alice character are blurred together. Nervous, intense, perplexed, Henritze surreptitiously weighs the patterns of omens and coincidences that she turns out to have entirely misread; she’s been dreading the wrong catastrophe.
Hurlin’s second piece, A Musical Salute to Tourism, is beautiful, light, poignantly familiar and quirky, and very funny all the way to the end - until its rosy memories turn out to be rigged and its romantic, biographical stories turn out to be wish-fulfilling fabrications. Hurlin stands wound in a telephone cord, asking his best friend about how to be successful and meet people at parties. His friend gives him precise instructions. Hurlin is innocently cheerful, persistent, whimsical, giddy, garrulous, as he remembers childhood games and shame in Antrim, New Hampshire, and confidentially recalls blissful winter vacations with his lover of five years. All the while, he stands immobilized center stage on a wooden square painted with rural topography - greenery, and a road. From time to time, his friend, Billy Barnes, passes through, writes him a huge postcard with some homey detail (“the cat food is under the sink”) and a casual reference to a contemporary travel disaster (the Hindenburg, Flight 501). Time sprawls in this piece, too. “The Man in the Suit Visits the First of Many Lands,” is how Barnes is first announced, and we see him often, garbed for some swinging traveler’s paradise. Tightly strung and emotionally vibrant, not to mention hyper, Hurlin does several short and wonderfully vivid gesture dances - one fearful, one about sex, one about traveling ( hula hands and ijggly Latin shoulders). The hard-edge, extravagant concentration of the in-place dances makes them funny, but Hurlin’s inhibited =fears and desires read quite nakedly in them. They’re intense, frontal, obsessive dances, containing small allusions to escape or voyage - hands climbing a ladder fingers wriggling like the “eensie beensie spider,” arms swinging as if the feet were pacing, forearms arcing side-to-side like windshield wipers. A big downward diagonal movement of the arm almost twists his body out of place. A version of patty-cake finishes with one arm carried down to the knee, which Hurlin taps firmly. Then he daintily circles his pinkie, arches back, rolls his eye up, and drops his mouth open in a moment of tame, ridiculous, and, in retrospect, terrifying ecstasy. Hurlin recalls playing indoors one rainy day and accidentally breaking one of his mother’s antiques. He resists what he deems an unfair exile to the back room and decides to run away. Later, when Hurlin rambles on about his love life, Barnes reattaches the telephone cord to Hurlin’s shirt. Then Barnes finishes the running away story for us, and accuses Hurlin of not even being able to run away without permission. His spoiled fantasies snarled about him as thoroughly as the phone cord at the beginning, Hurlin explodes, shoots Barnes in the head. He steps out of his shoes, which remain attached to the board, calls Delta airlines - and Delta airlines puts him on hold.
Ensemble No. 3, a performance collective working together since 1979 “with no supervision whatsoever,” presented three literate and intriguing works at P.S. 122 in mid-December.
In David Warren’s World’s Fair, the least elaborate piece, Warren appears as a correct, affable fellow. He fondly remembers the 1964 World’s Fair (the miracle of warm Hostess cupcakes!) and it’s theme, “unity through understanding,” which he views with wide-eyed cynicism. This leads into a simplistic sort of pad-and-easel lecture on deconstruction, with classroom voices n tape and Warren pointing to formulaic messages on his pad. The class’s precocious intellectual questions plague him. But I lost touch with Warren’s feeling during this section, and was disconcerted when he finally becomes frightened --- the audience, and is pelted with cupcakes.
In Dan Hurlin’s The Second Strange Thing, a 12-foot table is arrayed with a row of five identical cassette recorders, each standing under a small reading lamp. Patricia Henritze, the only live figure, first appears to be a sort f caretaker/technician , switching n the tapes at once, turning on the light for each recorder when a voice speaks from it. But sometimes she’ll put on an article of clothing, like a party hat, and lip-synch the words, standing behind the machine, identifying with the voice while parodying it. When each tape episode ends, the machine “dies.” Henritze turns it face down and turns out its light. Second Strange Thing unravels the complicated story of “Mary Alice” (who Henritze gradually becomes) told by the voices of her friends. It is jumbled through different periods of history; she dies at least five times. The pice plays a kind of sly, offhand, joking quality against portents and the recurrent nightmare of a car crash. It starts out drily as a distanced, technical feat of coordination, changes into a warmer, cruder and more humorous puppet show, and finishes , with the physical disarray of the scene nearly complete, as a dramatic monologue. The little black boxes become “humanized” as Henritze puts sunglasses on one, a cap on another. Laid one on another, they make love. It’s wonderfully sweet and homey when a couple breaks up (he wears a bow tie, and Henritze puts a little red coat on her when she’s ready to be walked out the door. But eventually Henritze is completely alone. The performers and the Mary Alice character are blurred together. Nervous, intense, perplexed, Henritze surreptitiously weighs the patterns of omens and coincidences that she turns out to have entirely misread; she’s been dreading the wrong catastrophe.
Hurlin’s second piece, A Musical Salute to Tourism, is beautiful, light, poignantly familiar and quirky, and very funny all the way to the end - until its rosy memories turn out to be rigged and its romantic, biographical stories turn out to be wish-fulfilling fabrications. Hurlin stands wound in a telephone cord, asking his best friend about how to be successful and meet people at parties. His friend gives him precise instructions. Hurlin is innocently cheerful, persistent, whimsical, giddy, garrulous, as he remembers childhood games and shame in Antrim, New Hampshire, and confidentially recalls blissful winter vacations with his lover of five years. All the while, he stands immobilized center stage on a wooden square painted with rural topography - greenery, and a road. From time to time, his friend, Billy Barnes, passes through, writes him a huge postcard with some homey detail (“the cat food is under the sink”) and a casual reference to a contemporary travel disaster (the Hindenburg, Flight 501). Time sprawls in this piece, too. “The Man in the Suit Visits the First of Many Lands,” is how Barnes is first announced, and we see him often, garbed for some swinging traveler’s paradise. Tightly strung and emotionally vibrant, not to mention hyper, Hurlin does several short and wonderfully vivid gesture dances - one fearful, one about sex, one about traveling ( hula hands and ijggly Latin shoulders). The hard-edge, extravagant concentration of the in-place dances makes them funny, but Hurlin’s inhibited =fears and desires read quite nakedly in them. They’re intense, frontal, obsessive dances, containing small allusions to escape or voyage - hands climbing a ladder fingers wriggling like the “eensie beensie spider,” arms swinging as if the feet were pacing, forearms arcing side-to-side like windshield wipers. A big downward diagonal movement of the arm almost twists his body out of place. A version of patty-cake finishes with one arm carried down to the knee, which Hurlin taps firmly. Then he daintily circles his pinkie, arches back, rolls his eye up, and drops his mouth open in a moment of tame, ridiculous, and, in retrospect, terrifying ecstasy. Hurlin recalls playing indoors one rainy day and accidentally breaking one of his mother’s antiques. He resists what he deems an unfair exile to the back room and decides to run away. Later, when Hurlin rambles on about his love life, Barnes reattaches the telephone cord to Hurlin’s shirt. Then Barnes finishes the running away story for us, and accuses Hurlin of not even being able to run away without permission. His spoiled fantasies snarled about him as thoroughly as the phone cord at the beginning, Hurlin explodes, shoots Barnes in the head. He steps out of his shoes, which remain attached to the board, calls Delta airlines - and Delta airlines puts him on hold.
A Laugh at Extinction
August 7
Butoh, a theatrical dance style which developed in Japan in the 1960s., seems to be a flower of catastrophe, drawn out of and embodying a cruel and precious knowledge of horror and suffering. Far from the restraints and charms of traditional Japanese dance, Butoh shows us people (or creatures who are scarcely human, or almost human) stripped to the bone, who shudder and tremble and go numb with emotion and privation. With their heads shaved and bodies nude, or nearly so, chalky with powder, their response to elemental but usually unidentifiable, forces and needs, is a laugh in the face of extinction. Butoh is grotesque, but not gloomy, and often astonishingly beautiful. It contains a surprising wealth of clowning.
The anonymous denizens of a piece like Sankai Juku’s Kinkan Shonen - the group’s signature piece, first presented in 1978 in Tokyo - barely but intensely alive, seems to celebrate human unconsciousness and uncover a kind of ecstasy in near obliteration. Among the familiar performers who are close to Butoh are Min Tanaka and Eiko and Koma, who worked with Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers of Butoh, and with a disciple of Mary Wigman). And the old German expressionist tradition, now resurgent, has also informed the Butoh aesthetic. But Ushio Amagatsu’s Sankai Juku is only the second Butoh group to perform in the United States. Two summers ago, Akaji Maro’s huge troupe, Dai Rakuda Kan, also performed at SUNY Purchase; it was spectacular, exquisite, more extreme in its torments, louder and more aggravating than Sankai Juku, a smaller company of five men in quieter, more sculptural work.
Kinkan Shonen: A Young Boy’s Dream of the Origins of Life and Death, in seven episodes that alternate single figures with the group, is not narrative. Certainly, the piece’s subtitle and the titles and descriptions of the individual sections (fort example: “Higyo: Conveying an impossible legend - some point in the town”) are no help in experiencing or interpreting it. Characteristically, each scene evolves slowly and painstakingly, in small increments and gradual transformations riddled with shocks. In the first scene, a lone, ashen figure, clad in cap and knickers like some pre-war schoolboy, sways behind a glass pane in which a circle is outlined. At target center, he stops, opens his mouth, and falls abruptly, stiffly backwards. His arms freeze in a clawing reach. Contorted, pedaling his feet, he struggles to rise, twists though a moment of apparent sleep, crouches low, opens his mouth again and again and lurches slightly forward as if to catch some appetizing edible bug in it. A buzz blasts like an air raid. The “boy”, standing in a heap of powder, pounds handfuls of it into his mouth and spew it out as the sound roar and clang. Four men, wearing small, almost faceless masks, and long, plastery, scummy skirts, make robot-like claw gestures with their hands, and trace the veins in their forearms, to music that’s thick, percussive, blotto.
The sculptural effect of the figures, with their bare torsos rising out of formal drapery, is curiously Egyptian, or like Michaelangelo’s “slaves” pulling themselves out of the raw stone. Their movements are spidery and mechanical; they yelp and coo, lean towards and away from each other. They wander in a slow, writhing progress within their small corner, and then move out across the stage dragging their rancid skirts. They turn in profile, crouch, and reach up...What terror is coming from the sky?
Then they’re back to writhing and howling, as their skirts slip down just below their buttocks and they waggle their asses with tauntingly sexual glee. Observing the will-less behavior and the ghoulish gestures of those prematurely hatched beings, I briefly wonder if we’re just watching a refinement of the monster movie for which the Japanese have shown such a predilection. Two figures enter, slowly, evenly, zombielike. Immobile, they place their hands simultaneously on their rib cages and almost gasp. Two others repeat the actions of the original pair. The first two bend further, walk in a crouch with their arms stretched behind them like a bird’s wings in mid-flap. They do small molding gestures with their hands, drop their mouths open in awe, and sink to the floor where, with one knee up, they lounge like odalisques in a dope den (accompanied by the vibraphonic shimmer of the Modern Jazz Quartet.) One pair begins to wrestle. A guy on his back wiggles his feet. The wrestling men get wilder, more sexual, as one of them becomes clearly dominant, twisting the other upside down and pinning him there as the music whirrs. All alone, the fourth man wrestles himself silly, violently bouncing his legs around while he keeps his shoulders glued to one spot. Later he talks soundlessly, and pleads, to no effect. He finds a companion; but they look skyward, and, GAH! they see something appalling and tumble backwards.
Moments later, while the older man strokes the other’s arms and legs as if to show their miraculous smoothness, a new figure peeks out from the back: a grinning dwarf. The dwarf, a dancer in a chopped-off lilac garment, wearing an indecipherably friendly/evil smile, walks in a squatting waddle, hobbles onto a low platform and falls over, wildly laughing or crying. It hardly matters which - with joy and pain, life and death, so inextricably knotted. He falls into that old powder heap, and in it, to bagpipes wailing, emerges from his kimono-cocoon curling up, wriggling, laughing, crying, babbling in a fit of stupid bliss.
In this sullen and archaic world the humdrum physical and emotional paraphernalia of “relationships” and acquisition is irrelevant. The ordinary is non-existent. Behavior we perceive as ritualistic doesn’t accomplish anything beyond its own opaque routines. But a pure and positive quality of unquestioning, unconditional acceptance thrives. Because there is no reflection and no blame, it’s not strange that what’s loathsome is beautiful, that feebleness is as thrilling as might, that debilitation and decay are not shameful, that death is no disaster. Every step is a kind of transformation and every moment a miracle of survival. To the electric sizzle of a space war, three dressed figures flutter their hands and slowly wiggle, suggesting the fishy ripple of fins. Then they pluck short rods from their head wraps and dash them at the ground. From a crouch, they fall to one side and the other, again and again, linking hunter and quarry, killer and victim, the way riffling a picture sequence makes the drawn figures move. A thin, vertical section of intense blue light opens at the center rear of the stage. A red triangle hangs from the top, and dangling from its tip is a saclike cluster, which gradually uncurls. It is a man, hanging upside down like St. Peter crucified. His hands twist gently, his arms stretch down, his fingers curl and uncurl in a gnarly way. He feels his lower ribs, his belly, with scratching hands. He turns sideways, back, sideways, and begins to spin himself slowly. That piercing, vibrant blue light, that dead man entertaining himself, create an image of surprising and sublime optimism. Faster and faster, we whirl into eternity, as the light goes swiftly black.
At Pepsico’s Summerfare ’84, Center for the Arts, SUNY-Purchase (July 20 and 21).
Butoh, a theatrical dance style which developed in Japan in the 1960s., seems to be a flower of catastrophe, drawn out of and embodying a cruel and precious knowledge of horror and suffering. Far from the restraints and charms of traditional Japanese dance, Butoh shows us people (or creatures who are scarcely human, or almost human) stripped to the bone, who shudder and tremble and go numb with emotion and privation. With their heads shaved and bodies nude, or nearly so, chalky with powder, their response to elemental but usually unidentifiable, forces and needs, is a laugh in the face of extinction. Butoh is grotesque, but not gloomy, and often astonishingly beautiful. It contains a surprising wealth of clowning.
The anonymous denizens of a piece like Sankai Juku’s Kinkan Shonen - the group’s signature piece, first presented in 1978 in Tokyo - barely but intensely alive, seems to celebrate human unconsciousness and uncover a kind of ecstasy in near obliteration. Among the familiar performers who are close to Butoh are Min Tanaka and Eiko and Koma, who worked with Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers of Butoh, and with a disciple of Mary Wigman). And the old German expressionist tradition, now resurgent, has also informed the Butoh aesthetic. But Ushio Amagatsu’s Sankai Juku is only the second Butoh group to perform in the United States. Two summers ago, Akaji Maro’s huge troupe, Dai Rakuda Kan, also performed at SUNY Purchase; it was spectacular, exquisite, more extreme in its torments, louder and more aggravating than Sankai Juku, a smaller company of five men in quieter, more sculptural work.
Kinkan Shonen: A Young Boy’s Dream of the Origins of Life and Death, in seven episodes that alternate single figures with the group, is not narrative. Certainly, the piece’s subtitle and the titles and descriptions of the individual sections (fort example: “Higyo: Conveying an impossible legend - some point in the town”) are no help in experiencing or interpreting it. Characteristically, each scene evolves slowly and painstakingly, in small increments and gradual transformations riddled with shocks. In the first scene, a lone, ashen figure, clad in cap and knickers like some pre-war schoolboy, sways behind a glass pane in which a circle is outlined. At target center, he stops, opens his mouth, and falls abruptly, stiffly backwards. His arms freeze in a clawing reach. Contorted, pedaling his feet, he struggles to rise, twists though a moment of apparent sleep, crouches low, opens his mouth again and again and lurches slightly forward as if to catch some appetizing edible bug in it. A buzz blasts like an air raid. The “boy”, standing in a heap of powder, pounds handfuls of it into his mouth and spew it out as the sound roar and clang. Four men, wearing small, almost faceless masks, and long, plastery, scummy skirts, make robot-like claw gestures with their hands, and trace the veins in their forearms, to music that’s thick, percussive, blotto.
The sculptural effect of the figures, with their bare torsos rising out of formal drapery, is curiously Egyptian, or like Michaelangelo’s “slaves” pulling themselves out of the raw stone. Their movements are spidery and mechanical; they yelp and coo, lean towards and away from each other. They wander in a slow, writhing progress within their small corner, and then move out across the stage dragging their rancid skirts. They turn in profile, crouch, and reach up...What terror is coming from the sky?
Then they’re back to writhing and howling, as their skirts slip down just below their buttocks and they waggle their asses with tauntingly sexual glee. Observing the will-less behavior and the ghoulish gestures of those prematurely hatched beings, I briefly wonder if we’re just watching a refinement of the monster movie for which the Japanese have shown such a predilection. Two figures enter, slowly, evenly, zombielike. Immobile, they place their hands simultaneously on their rib cages and almost gasp. Two others repeat the actions of the original pair. The first two bend further, walk in a crouch with their arms stretched behind them like a bird’s wings in mid-flap. They do small molding gestures with their hands, drop their mouths open in awe, and sink to the floor where, with one knee up, they lounge like odalisques in a dope den (accompanied by the vibraphonic shimmer of the Modern Jazz Quartet.) One pair begins to wrestle. A guy on his back wiggles his feet. The wrestling men get wilder, more sexual, as one of them becomes clearly dominant, twisting the other upside down and pinning him there as the music whirrs. All alone, the fourth man wrestles himself silly, violently bouncing his legs around while he keeps his shoulders glued to one spot. Later he talks soundlessly, and pleads, to no effect. He finds a companion; but they look skyward, and, GAH! they see something appalling and tumble backwards.
Moments later, while the older man strokes the other’s arms and legs as if to show their miraculous smoothness, a new figure peeks out from the back: a grinning dwarf. The dwarf, a dancer in a chopped-off lilac garment, wearing an indecipherably friendly/evil smile, walks in a squatting waddle, hobbles onto a low platform and falls over, wildly laughing or crying. It hardly matters which - with joy and pain, life and death, so inextricably knotted. He falls into that old powder heap, and in it, to bagpipes wailing, emerges from his kimono-cocoon curling up, wriggling, laughing, crying, babbling in a fit of stupid bliss.
In this sullen and archaic world the humdrum physical and emotional paraphernalia of “relationships” and acquisition is irrelevant. The ordinary is non-existent. Behavior we perceive as ritualistic doesn’t accomplish anything beyond its own opaque routines. But a pure and positive quality of unquestioning, unconditional acceptance thrives. Because there is no reflection and no blame, it’s not strange that what’s loathsome is beautiful, that feebleness is as thrilling as might, that debilitation and decay are not shameful, that death is no disaster. Every step is a kind of transformation and every moment a miracle of survival. To the electric sizzle of a space war, three dressed figures flutter their hands and slowly wiggle, suggesting the fishy ripple of fins. Then they pluck short rods from their head wraps and dash them at the ground. From a crouch, they fall to one side and the other, again and again, linking hunter and quarry, killer and victim, the way riffling a picture sequence makes the drawn figures move. A thin, vertical section of intense blue light opens at the center rear of the stage. A red triangle hangs from the top, and dangling from its tip is a saclike cluster, which gradually uncurls. It is a man, hanging upside down like St. Peter crucified. His hands twist gently, his arms stretch down, his fingers curl and uncurl in a gnarly way. He feels his lower ribs, his belly, with scratching hands. He turns sideways, back, sideways, and begins to spin himself slowly. That piercing, vibrant blue light, that dead man entertaining himself, create an image of surprising and sublime optimism. Faster and faster, we whirl into eternity, as the light goes swiftly black.
At Pepsico’s Summerfare ’84, Center for the Arts, SUNY-Purchase (July 20 and 21).
Beat Out That Rhythm
July 24
After making their United States debut at the American Dance Festival in Durham, the troupe of dancers and musicians from the Jakarta Art Institute performed excellently crafted re-workings of traditional Sumatran material at Asia Society. Who knew what to expect? I
n any case, these works were worlds away from the exquisite, mythic delicacies of Bali and Java, and marvelously refined and intricate in their own ways. Both involved chanting/singing recitation of Islamic poetry (excerpts from the Koran and the life of Mohammed in the second piece) by soloists and the group, and dug joyously into their rhythms. The flexible combination of singing and movement and percussion, with the focus swinging among them, with dancers and musicians doubling and switching roles with the smoothest and most symbolic teamwork, made for the kind of evening that lifted the spirits. It seemed obvious, then, that dancing is praise, and watching it is praise as well. Across the back of the stage were arrayed flat drums, white bowls, small gongs like a kind of totemic hat-rack dead center that soon got shifted out of the way.
The first piece, Awan Bailau, choreographed by Deddy Luthan and Tom Ibnur, is a seamless suite of dances based on West Sumatran traditions, and rooted in the martial art of the region, penca-silat, which forms the essential training of any dancer. It begins in near-darkness, with a wavery, reedy sounds, an occasional chime, the deep, continuous foghorn tones, sounding almost bowed, of some kind of bamboo flute. A singsong chant with the devotional urgency of davenning starts as a solo figure emerges from a double row of seated men and women, and four other dancer, still seated, turn sideways, then front, as the lights come up. Everyone, men and women, wears dark tops and pants, with red headcloths and sashes. And surprisingly, for dance emerging from a devout Islamic tradition, the roles of men and women are very alike. They employ the same movements, and often dance together. The soloist moves in a deep swinging crouch at first, softly working filigree hands and posing with fingers trembling. His movement reaches and withdraws, always in balance, giving equal attention to each side of the body. Basic, too, is a spiral twist of the body which, I think, extends into a penchant for diagonal design. He slowly turns, corkscrewing his body, opens his arms, stretching out those stiffly, shivery fingers; he stretches one leg out, then pulls it sharply back.
Something in the boldness and wide curve of the movement, and in the way it’s accented, seems akin to Graham. It’s the grand and expressive way the movement is shaped. Four women join in. Their deft, back-and-forth hand moves are like kung fu preparations. Everyone chants, then the leader picks up the song, which seem Near Eastern in its long sliding line The dancing’s pace is even and rhythmic; it’s dotted with momentary pauses, folds sometimes to the floor, addresses various directions with tilting arms and shifting gazes. Stamping, slapping thighs and hips add to the rhythmic mix; performers subtly feed into or fade out of the dancing without fuss as the geometric patterns are varied with great finesse. Three dancers spin into a diagonal, flipping their hands up and down; the drums beat faster as the dancers stamp and smack the floor. Two figures dance with whirling umbrellas. Six or seven dancers swirl and swing flattish white bowls, loop-the-loop them in swiftly lacing patterns. A group of dancers sinks to the floor, one leg tucked under, the other bent outward, and initiates, bit by bit, a snappy visual and rhythmic pattern of turning heads, snapping fingers and tapping, windshield-wiper feet. Turning, twisting, reaching away with their drums and slapping them as they pull them close, they rap their drums every which way in response to a soloist sparkling with flicking, stamping, flexing footwork that complements his flashing arms. Four men return with that hat-rack structure on a litter: it’s a winged Garuda with a tall howdah set over it, studded with fluffy little red and white umbrellas. Their kicking, skipping, stamping, jumping up and down sets the umbrellas bobbing, the wings flapping, in a thumping, giddy fury.
The second piece, Noerdin, Daud and Maruki Hasan’s Huuuu...based on North Sumatran dance traditions, features chanting in alternation by a leader and the group, combined with rhythmical body movement that grows faster and faster and faster within each brief section. In your mind, this is colored by the moment, which never happens, when the playful, clever challenges get so fast that the whole thing dissolves into flubs and giggles. This starts with men, in white, with white headbands, and purple and black hip wraps, gathering and chanting, then starting a seated pattern of slapping the floor, slapping the chest, swinging the head, crossing arms across the chest, turning back, swinging forward. The group chanting alternates with a soloist, and speeds up. More elements are added to the pattern; swings through the torso, side to side shifts of balance, slaps on the thighs with the back of the hands as well as the palms. The patterns dazzle. Then a line of women with a slight tilt to their bodies and their arms curved open, scrunches together. They sit center stage and sway. Then men, still seated, swing their heads side to side, uttering a deep, breathy “hu hu hu.” Switch to the women slapping and singing, touching the floor, their forearms, each others’ hands. The men cluster at either end of the line of women, extending it, and sit. Everyone flutters their hands diagonally across the body, touching thighs and shoulders.
Together now, starting simply, men and women build more and more complicated rhythmic slapping and touching patterns, adding twists of the torso, overhead swings, quick darting gestures. Adjusting into a double line, they link arms and break, and link again, in an astonishing frontal rowing pattern. In a very similar vein, Charles Moulton’s rhythmic ball-passing and card-flipping pieces, which had much in common with this, seemed to grow drier as they grew more difficult and elaborate. But these intricate patterns are never reduced to a technical feat. They become more and more robust. The second part of Huuu... takes the dancers off the floor, into a loose circle for frequent paired challenges, with sauntering walks, slaps on the buttocks, finger popping and constant teasing, tricky twisting of the torso. But the structure is similar -each section building to a dizzying finish. And the end finds half the crew collapsed on the floor. Just pretending, of course, but they ought to be wrecked.
At Asia Society (July 8 and 9).
After making their United States debut at the American Dance Festival in Durham, the troupe of dancers and musicians from the Jakarta Art Institute performed excellently crafted re-workings of traditional Sumatran material at Asia Society. Who knew what to expect? I
n any case, these works were worlds away from the exquisite, mythic delicacies of Bali and Java, and marvelously refined and intricate in their own ways. Both involved chanting/singing recitation of Islamic poetry (excerpts from the Koran and the life of Mohammed in the second piece) by soloists and the group, and dug joyously into their rhythms. The flexible combination of singing and movement and percussion, with the focus swinging among them, with dancers and musicians doubling and switching roles with the smoothest and most symbolic teamwork, made for the kind of evening that lifted the spirits. It seemed obvious, then, that dancing is praise, and watching it is praise as well. Across the back of the stage were arrayed flat drums, white bowls, small gongs like a kind of totemic hat-rack dead center that soon got shifted out of the way.
The first piece, Awan Bailau, choreographed by Deddy Luthan and Tom Ibnur, is a seamless suite of dances based on West Sumatran traditions, and rooted in the martial art of the region, penca-silat, which forms the essential training of any dancer. It begins in near-darkness, with a wavery, reedy sounds, an occasional chime, the deep, continuous foghorn tones, sounding almost bowed, of some kind of bamboo flute. A singsong chant with the devotional urgency of davenning starts as a solo figure emerges from a double row of seated men and women, and four other dancer, still seated, turn sideways, then front, as the lights come up. Everyone, men and women, wears dark tops and pants, with red headcloths and sashes. And surprisingly, for dance emerging from a devout Islamic tradition, the roles of men and women are very alike. They employ the same movements, and often dance together. The soloist moves in a deep swinging crouch at first, softly working filigree hands and posing with fingers trembling. His movement reaches and withdraws, always in balance, giving equal attention to each side of the body. Basic, too, is a spiral twist of the body which, I think, extends into a penchant for diagonal design. He slowly turns, corkscrewing his body, opens his arms, stretching out those stiffly, shivery fingers; he stretches one leg out, then pulls it sharply back.
Something in the boldness and wide curve of the movement, and in the way it’s accented, seems akin to Graham. It’s the grand and expressive way the movement is shaped. Four women join in. Their deft, back-and-forth hand moves are like kung fu preparations. Everyone chants, then the leader picks up the song, which seem Near Eastern in its long sliding line The dancing’s pace is even and rhythmic; it’s dotted with momentary pauses, folds sometimes to the floor, addresses various directions with tilting arms and shifting gazes. Stamping, slapping thighs and hips add to the rhythmic mix; performers subtly feed into or fade out of the dancing without fuss as the geometric patterns are varied with great finesse. Three dancers spin into a diagonal, flipping their hands up and down; the drums beat faster as the dancers stamp and smack the floor. Two figures dance with whirling umbrellas. Six or seven dancers swirl and swing flattish white bowls, loop-the-loop them in swiftly lacing patterns. A group of dancers sinks to the floor, one leg tucked under, the other bent outward, and initiates, bit by bit, a snappy visual and rhythmic pattern of turning heads, snapping fingers and tapping, windshield-wiper feet. Turning, twisting, reaching away with their drums and slapping them as they pull them close, they rap their drums every which way in response to a soloist sparkling with flicking, stamping, flexing footwork that complements his flashing arms. Four men return with that hat-rack structure on a litter: it’s a winged Garuda with a tall howdah set over it, studded with fluffy little red and white umbrellas. Their kicking, skipping, stamping, jumping up and down sets the umbrellas bobbing, the wings flapping, in a thumping, giddy fury.
The second piece, Noerdin, Daud and Maruki Hasan’s Huuuu...based on North Sumatran dance traditions, features chanting in alternation by a leader and the group, combined with rhythmical body movement that grows faster and faster and faster within each brief section. In your mind, this is colored by the moment, which never happens, when the playful, clever challenges get so fast that the whole thing dissolves into flubs and giggles. This starts with men, in white, with white headbands, and purple and black hip wraps, gathering and chanting, then starting a seated pattern of slapping the floor, slapping the chest, swinging the head, crossing arms across the chest, turning back, swinging forward. The group chanting alternates with a soloist, and speeds up. More elements are added to the pattern; swings through the torso, side to side shifts of balance, slaps on the thighs with the back of the hands as well as the palms. The patterns dazzle. Then a line of women with a slight tilt to their bodies and their arms curved open, scrunches together. They sit center stage and sway. Then men, still seated, swing their heads side to side, uttering a deep, breathy “hu hu hu.” Switch to the women slapping and singing, touching the floor, their forearms, each others’ hands. The men cluster at either end of the line of women, extending it, and sit. Everyone flutters their hands diagonally across the body, touching thighs and shoulders.
Together now, starting simply, men and women build more and more complicated rhythmic slapping and touching patterns, adding twists of the torso, overhead swings, quick darting gestures. Adjusting into a double line, they link arms and break, and link again, in an astonishing frontal rowing pattern. In a very similar vein, Charles Moulton’s rhythmic ball-passing and card-flipping pieces, which had much in common with this, seemed to grow drier as they grew more difficult and elaborate. But these intricate patterns are never reduced to a technical feat. They become more and more robust. The second part of Huuu... takes the dancers off the floor, into a loose circle for frequent paired challenges, with sauntering walks, slaps on the buttocks, finger popping and constant teasing, tricky twisting of the torso. But the structure is similar -each section building to a dizzying finish. And the end finds half the crew collapsed on the floor. Just pretending, of course, but they ought to be wrecked.
At Asia Society (July 8 and 9).
Building on the Breath
October 2
Breath patterns governed the structure of Angela Caponigro’s solo, Generating, Organizing and Destroying, from the first steady aah she harmonized with singer Wahe Guru Kaur Khalsa, to the sharply controlled breathing that took over shortly after. The singing - of lovely Sikh hymns in an ancient form of Punjabi - accompanied on harmonium, a boxy, toylike bellows instrument, and later by Franc Menusan on tabla, seemed to have both calming and searching qualities. With patience and urgency coloring its sweet yearning, the music was the sort of thing that, very possibly, helps the energies or spirits of the planet arrange themselves into an optimum configuration.
Caponigro danced with Laura Dean from 1976 to 1982, and has studied Kundalini yoga since 1973, as well as, more recently, Indian music and Sikh swordfighting. And in her performance there was a scholastic plainness and efficiency, as if she’d laid down her rules and followed them absolutely. No fuss or adornment, no attention to the audience. But I liked her directness and clarity, her fierce, impartial privacy. In a white, hip-length top (whose V-neck amplifies the breadth of her chest) and close-fitting white pants, her long hair in a single braid, she stands tall, hands waist high, eyes downcast, and breathes percussively in steady rhythm. Her upper body swings, her hands press down. Breathing through the nostrils, she pulls air sharply into her head, then changes the stress of her breathing from inhalation to exhalation. She allows her hands a tight little filigree as they begin to snap up. And taking a wider stance, she begins to strike her hands downward with determination, and works he arms into a swing, bending tirelessly down and up, down and up, whacking her braid to the floor.
Her stamina is prodigious. Her movement peaks and gentles into twisting and a flicking, arcing gesture of the head. Then, tense and hard, she razes back and forth, spins, and stops to hiss and press her breath out, contracting her body, puling her shoulders together. She shakes her hands together as if she’s at a craps table, about to fling the dice. She spins again with her hands symmetrically flicking and rippling like flames. And, from here on, images of fire often seem to enter her dancing. There’s a fascination in the precise, defining articulations of her hands and fingers, the way her hand curls and twines upward in front of her. Quietly, she refocuses on the breathing. In and in and in and in. Out and out and out and out. Her arms rise and fall and rise, and then she also sinks and rises.
We see her control, and the strength of her intention; but the person is invisible. She’s trembling, panting, and begins to move quickly on twisting feet, holding her arms tightly to her. Leaping and spinning, there’s now a lightness to her as she flings herself up and down, flashing flame images that are as clearly stylized in shape as a Malay dagger. She crouches, bounces like a tightrope dancer from on side of the space to another, generates a turbulence as she rolls her arms from flexible elbows and wrists. In preparing for the last section, in which she whirls a saberlike blade, Caponigro winds her hair into a bun wraps an orange scarf into a kind of helmet around her hair, and binds it with a deep blue one - all with the brisk deftness of a sushi chef. There’s a bounce in her steps, a vining in the floor patterns, an abrupt, fizzy, impulsive quality in the movement. Bending, almost prancing, twirling the blade as brightly as a drum majorette, skipping and spinning with the blade under her arm, she radiates an impersonal kind of gaiety.
At first, I assumed that the piece was in three sections - though I couldn’t decide for sure where part one became part two - going from the labor of building energy to a refined turmoil, to the springy display of the end. The sword bit the most joyous part, was definitely the “destroying” part. Now I think that Caponigro’s descriptive title also refers, in a literal way, to the constant cycle of movement impulses in flux at any moment, from generation to decay to regeneration, transformation, and embellishment. I appreciate Caponigro’s reduction, but was disappointed by a certain illustrative dryness. Instead of illuminating the body, the energy and spirit she aroused remained caged within it.
At the New Dance Alliance (September 7 and 8).
Breath patterns governed the structure of Angela Caponigro’s solo, Generating, Organizing and Destroying, from the first steady aah she harmonized with singer Wahe Guru Kaur Khalsa, to the sharply controlled breathing that took over shortly after. The singing - of lovely Sikh hymns in an ancient form of Punjabi - accompanied on harmonium, a boxy, toylike bellows instrument, and later by Franc Menusan on tabla, seemed to have both calming and searching qualities. With patience and urgency coloring its sweet yearning, the music was the sort of thing that, very possibly, helps the energies or spirits of the planet arrange themselves into an optimum configuration.
Caponigro danced with Laura Dean from 1976 to 1982, and has studied Kundalini yoga since 1973, as well as, more recently, Indian music and Sikh swordfighting. And in her performance there was a scholastic plainness and efficiency, as if she’d laid down her rules and followed them absolutely. No fuss or adornment, no attention to the audience. But I liked her directness and clarity, her fierce, impartial privacy. In a white, hip-length top (whose V-neck amplifies the breadth of her chest) and close-fitting white pants, her long hair in a single braid, she stands tall, hands waist high, eyes downcast, and breathes percussively in steady rhythm. Her upper body swings, her hands press down. Breathing through the nostrils, she pulls air sharply into her head, then changes the stress of her breathing from inhalation to exhalation. She allows her hands a tight little filigree as they begin to snap up. And taking a wider stance, she begins to strike her hands downward with determination, and works he arms into a swing, bending tirelessly down and up, down and up, whacking her braid to the floor.
Her stamina is prodigious. Her movement peaks and gentles into twisting and a flicking, arcing gesture of the head. Then, tense and hard, she razes back and forth, spins, and stops to hiss and press her breath out, contracting her body, puling her shoulders together. She shakes her hands together as if she’s at a craps table, about to fling the dice. She spins again with her hands symmetrically flicking and rippling like flames. And, from here on, images of fire often seem to enter her dancing. There’s a fascination in the precise, defining articulations of her hands and fingers, the way her hand curls and twines upward in front of her. Quietly, she refocuses on the breathing. In and in and in and in. Out and out and out and out. Her arms rise and fall and rise, and then she also sinks and rises.
We see her control, and the strength of her intention; but the person is invisible. She’s trembling, panting, and begins to move quickly on twisting feet, holding her arms tightly to her. Leaping and spinning, there’s now a lightness to her as she flings herself up and down, flashing flame images that are as clearly stylized in shape as a Malay dagger. She crouches, bounces like a tightrope dancer from on side of the space to another, generates a turbulence as she rolls her arms from flexible elbows and wrists. In preparing for the last section, in which she whirls a saberlike blade, Caponigro winds her hair into a bun wraps an orange scarf into a kind of helmet around her hair, and binds it with a deep blue one - all with the brisk deftness of a sushi chef. There’s a bounce in her steps, a vining in the floor patterns, an abrupt, fizzy, impulsive quality in the movement. Bending, almost prancing, twirling the blade as brightly as a drum majorette, skipping and spinning with the blade under her arm, she radiates an impersonal kind of gaiety.
At first, I assumed that the piece was in three sections - though I couldn’t decide for sure where part one became part two - going from the labor of building energy to a refined turmoil, to the springy display of the end. The sword bit the most joyous part, was definitely the “destroying” part. Now I think that Caponigro’s descriptive title also refers, in a literal way, to the constant cycle of movement impulses in flux at any moment, from generation to decay to regeneration, transformation, and embellishment. I appreciate Caponigro’s reduction, but was disappointed by a certain illustrative dryness. Instead of illuminating the body, the energy and spirit she aroused remained caged within it.
At the New Dance Alliance (September 7 and 8).
Can’t Cut It
September 11
Whoever’s been going around impersonating Nureyev for the past several years isn’t doing it very well, and it’s time to call off the joke. Even if the yahoos and the people who used to admire him, and the people who want to like him can still be spurred to cheers, it’s not amusing. It is pathetic to watch this man, who transformed the popular estimation of the male dancer and did so much to stimulate enthusiasm for dance in this country, driving himself through an exhausting evening of performances that he just can’t pull off.
Always a spendthrift with his gifts, Nureyev used to court his audiences with dazzling feats and a sensual presence. Extravagant, exotic, he could sometimes be a crude partner, or flaunt his indifference to routine aspects of the choreography, but he could afford to. One of the very few bankable dance stars, he seemed to perform incessantly as well as carelessly. He was a handy man for a gala. But he rarely took sufficient time from a hectic schedule to learn a new part properly, to do much but skim the surface.
Nureyev hasn’t been the kind of dancer that refines and deepens his art so you can continue to appreciate his intelligence and understanding when his technique falters and his range narrows. When Martha Graham was still dancing late in life - and watching her do those huge battements or sudden drops to the knees was terrifying - she could still fascinate a whole theater with the way she’d pull apiece of fabric through her fingers. Her range extended to the small. But Nureyev is struggling to fulfill the image of the Nureyev of 20 years ago. So we watch his arms flail, his face contort as he executes pitiful leaps and hideous rond de jambes en l’air. And now that he can’t deliver the thrills his audiences expect, he seems to have almost no resources.
The subject is painful. Nureyev is certainly more the victim of his career than anyone in his audience. But it was dreary to see Jean Guizerix (of the Paris Opera Ballet) have to play down to the star’s level in Bejart’s Songs of a Wayfarer (made for Nureyev 13 years ago), even though its strained exclamations and heaviness suited Nureyev best of anything on the program. Of course, Guizerix’s consideration was essential as well as modest and kind: the alter-ego duet would have been idiotic otherwise. In The Moor’s Pavane, which closed the program, Guizerix was strong, if not slimy, as Iago and the women were a treat. Evelyne DeSutter (on her way to join the Australian Ballet) delicate and light but well-tempered and yielding as Desdemona and Marie-Christine Mouis (of the Boston Ballet) tenacious and avid as Emilia. In the company of these three, whose dynamic energy filled the space, Nureyev seemed puny, his intensity ingrown.
Balanchine’s durable Apollo was flabby, rocky, fragmented, and seemed, a week into the run, insufficiently rehearsed. And the Stravinsky, which should grab you, was timid and muffled. I don’t know if the orchestra was just too small, or if the acoustics at he Gershwin are lousy. Maybe both. Nureyev seemed hunched, crumpled. New York City Ballet’s Stephanie Saland was a striking and composed Calliope, and Mouis bit into Polyhymnia’s solo with impulsive spirit, but Eva Evdokinova (of the Berlin Opera Ballet) was etiolated as Terpsichore. I remember enjoying her musicality in the Berlin’s Giselle a few years ago, but now she seems incapable of much variety.
The pas de deux from Flower Festival at Genzaro she did with a crick-necked Nureyev was self-important instead of tossed-off, as if every pose had to be a big deal. And plodding tempi helped keep any spring ut of the innocent flirtation. The four ladies brought off Anton Dolin’s update of Pas de Quatre - Jules Perrot’s mid-9th-century showcase for rival ballerinas making nice - with the necessary airy grace and polite charm, though Evdokinova’s appropriately floaty Taglioni was a bit of a stick. Mouis gave the Grahn variation an agreeable wry edge and reveled in her tidy jumps. Saland was a sensitive Grisi, both light and sinuous, and radiated a marvelous coolness in the turns. DeSutter was lively as a moth, pixieish and mischievous (who, me?) as Cerrito. I’d wanted the chance to see some of these “friends,” but the evening only rarely showed them to an advantage, To Nureyev himself, the program was a complete disservice.
At the Gershwin Theatre (August 16 to 26).
Whoever’s been going around impersonating Nureyev for the past several years isn’t doing it very well, and it’s time to call off the joke. Even if the yahoos and the people who used to admire him, and the people who want to like him can still be spurred to cheers, it’s not amusing. It is pathetic to watch this man, who transformed the popular estimation of the male dancer and did so much to stimulate enthusiasm for dance in this country, driving himself through an exhausting evening of performances that he just can’t pull off.
Always a spendthrift with his gifts, Nureyev used to court his audiences with dazzling feats and a sensual presence. Extravagant, exotic, he could sometimes be a crude partner, or flaunt his indifference to routine aspects of the choreography, but he could afford to. One of the very few bankable dance stars, he seemed to perform incessantly as well as carelessly. He was a handy man for a gala. But he rarely took sufficient time from a hectic schedule to learn a new part properly, to do much but skim the surface.
Nureyev hasn’t been the kind of dancer that refines and deepens his art so you can continue to appreciate his intelligence and understanding when his technique falters and his range narrows. When Martha Graham was still dancing late in life - and watching her do those huge battements or sudden drops to the knees was terrifying - she could still fascinate a whole theater with the way she’d pull apiece of fabric through her fingers. Her range extended to the small. But Nureyev is struggling to fulfill the image of the Nureyev of 20 years ago. So we watch his arms flail, his face contort as he executes pitiful leaps and hideous rond de jambes en l’air. And now that he can’t deliver the thrills his audiences expect, he seems to have almost no resources.
The subject is painful. Nureyev is certainly more the victim of his career than anyone in his audience. But it was dreary to see Jean Guizerix (of the Paris Opera Ballet) have to play down to the star’s level in Bejart’s Songs of a Wayfarer (made for Nureyev 13 years ago), even though its strained exclamations and heaviness suited Nureyev best of anything on the program. Of course, Guizerix’s consideration was essential as well as modest and kind: the alter-ego duet would have been idiotic otherwise. In The Moor’s Pavane, which closed the program, Guizerix was strong, if not slimy, as Iago and the women were a treat. Evelyne DeSutter (on her way to join the Australian Ballet) delicate and light but well-tempered and yielding as Desdemona and Marie-Christine Mouis (of the Boston Ballet) tenacious and avid as Emilia. In the company of these three, whose dynamic energy filled the space, Nureyev seemed puny, his intensity ingrown.
Balanchine’s durable Apollo was flabby, rocky, fragmented, and seemed, a week into the run, insufficiently rehearsed. And the Stravinsky, which should grab you, was timid and muffled. I don’t know if the orchestra was just too small, or if the acoustics at he Gershwin are lousy. Maybe both. Nureyev seemed hunched, crumpled. New York City Ballet’s Stephanie Saland was a striking and composed Calliope, and Mouis bit into Polyhymnia’s solo with impulsive spirit, but Eva Evdokinova (of the Berlin Opera Ballet) was etiolated as Terpsichore. I remember enjoying her musicality in the Berlin’s Giselle a few years ago, but now she seems incapable of much variety.
The pas de deux from Flower Festival at Genzaro she did with a crick-necked Nureyev was self-important instead of tossed-off, as if every pose had to be a big deal. And plodding tempi helped keep any spring ut of the innocent flirtation. The four ladies brought off Anton Dolin’s update of Pas de Quatre - Jules Perrot’s mid-9th-century showcase for rival ballerinas making nice - with the necessary airy grace and polite charm, though Evdokinova’s appropriately floaty Taglioni was a bit of a stick. Mouis gave the Grahn variation an agreeable wry edge and reveled in her tidy jumps. Saland was a sensitive Grisi, both light and sinuous, and radiated a marvelous coolness in the turns. DeSutter was lively as a moth, pixieish and mischievous (who, me?) as Cerrito. I’d wanted the chance to see some of these “friends,” but the evening only rarely showed them to an advantage, To Nureyev himself, the program was a complete disservice.
At the Gershwin Theatre (August 16 to 26).
Company Manners
April 10
Established in 1977 in Lyon, Michel Hallet Eghayan’s company on its first visit here, brought a pleasant and genteel air to the Theater of the Riverside Church. Hallet removed the wings to open up the space and widen the focus. That was fitting, because Hallet’s Retour en Avant, to eight reasonably familiar works of Bach and intermittent silences, has the unstressed feeling of a field of dancing, even though the stage is always pictorially composed, somewhat flat and the action always happens where you expect it to. Although Hallet enjoys the fluttery entertainment of little surprises like endings that aren’t, occasional coy “mistakes,” and people running on only to run off, these sorts of things become characteristic of his format. The company of seven, two men and five women, have an agreeable and gracious, if rather distant manner.
There’s nothing personal here, or perhaps there is just a decorous sense of what is appropriately public and what private. Hallet, who studied in New York with Margaret Craske and Merce Cunningham, generally uses a cool balleto-Cunningham vocabulary, with little physical contact between dancers and very few lifts. Hallet likes that storky, perching look. The dancing is mostly pulled up straight, the footwork close to the floor, the arms assertive and blunt. They signal and frame and indicate but never yield. In the beginning, three dancers walk the perimeter of the space, trace paths along perpendicular lines, sometimes briefly latch hands in passing. Maybe that will be enough to turn the dancer into a new direction, or maybe that will just happen on its own. From time to time, the dancers drop singly into a sort of courteous, dipping pose with one arm lifted. Bach harpsichord music, which has been barely audible, increases in volume all the way to soft. Phrases build with a dry and elegant simplicity; a formal little combination involving a tendu and a dip enlarges to a big jete in place and drop.
But it’s not mechanical; there is a sense of style akin to the kind of traditional good manners that politely keep an insubstantial conversation going (and can make it a source of pleasure besides). A pair of women come in across the rear of the stage, one behind and echoing the other with just a tiny delay, doing spare, repetitive phrases including modest assembles and jetes, that move only slightly in space and settle into place. A second pair repeats the material, but faster and with a shade more swing. Three girls together, directly behind each other, work in the same vein, unified except for the timing of the sideways flick of their legs.
The title of the piece, Retour en Avant|, seems to address the joining of a modern movement sensibility with centuries-old music, as well as the internal links within the piece. The Bach provides a steady ground for the dancing to ride on. It may bounce along double time, or shift obedience from the beat to the melodic filigree, or glide on independently. But it never digs into the music or strongly counters it. Calm and ornamental, though not at all fancy, the dancing’s traditional sort of development gives a sense of propriety and security, even with variations that are broken up or reworked in an informal frame. Even casual incidents or poses, like a left-out girl at the back hanging her head as she stands, remind you of earlier, stricter moments; it’s like a mopey version of that initial dip. There’s a calculated playfulness in the temporary entrances and exits, in the sudden fizzy moments, in a rash of swatting, “I give up”” gestures. There’s an alfresco strolling quality in the dancers as they pick their way through many floor patterns. Impulses pass and ricochet quietly through the group, like when the dancers bump serially in a cautious lineup and begin to fan apart like well-behaved balls on a pool table.
like the subtle trickery of a section to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” if I remember right, that starts off with a soloist, turns into a trio for a moment, and keeps changing personnel as different small combinations jump in and disappear. If I expect a pair to enter, what crops up is a quartet. That section breezily quicksteps over the music, ignoring its soupy connotations. Other moments, in the latter part of the piece, have an inner weight and savor that gives them special impact. Like a smudgy solo of abrupt twists and jumps done by a girl in a loose top of fire engine red. Or Cunninghamesque tilts of the body in mid-air. Or a sluggish push of the hand on one hip that sends the opposite leg drifting up or down. The dancing develops with agreeable logic and finesse. Hallet demonstrates a sure lightness of touch in the way he constructs a whole body of decorative rhetoric without polemic or excuse. In a way, it’s as reliably patterned as wallpaper. It seems very French, whatever that means. It’s not severe. It is confident, but not insistent. You wouldn’t have to approve of it to find it attractive.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (March 2 to 25).
Established in 1977 in Lyon, Michel Hallet Eghayan’s company on its first visit here, brought a pleasant and genteel air to the Theater of the Riverside Church. Hallet removed the wings to open up the space and widen the focus. That was fitting, because Hallet’s Retour en Avant, to eight reasonably familiar works of Bach and intermittent silences, has the unstressed feeling of a field of dancing, even though the stage is always pictorially composed, somewhat flat and the action always happens where you expect it to. Although Hallet enjoys the fluttery entertainment of little surprises like endings that aren’t, occasional coy “mistakes,” and people running on only to run off, these sorts of things become characteristic of his format. The company of seven, two men and five women, have an agreeable and gracious, if rather distant manner.
There’s nothing personal here, or perhaps there is just a decorous sense of what is appropriately public and what private. Hallet, who studied in New York with Margaret Craske and Merce Cunningham, generally uses a cool balleto-Cunningham vocabulary, with little physical contact between dancers and very few lifts. Hallet likes that storky, perching look. The dancing is mostly pulled up straight, the footwork close to the floor, the arms assertive and blunt. They signal and frame and indicate but never yield. In the beginning, three dancers walk the perimeter of the space, trace paths along perpendicular lines, sometimes briefly latch hands in passing. Maybe that will be enough to turn the dancer into a new direction, or maybe that will just happen on its own. From time to time, the dancers drop singly into a sort of courteous, dipping pose with one arm lifted. Bach harpsichord music, which has been barely audible, increases in volume all the way to soft. Phrases build with a dry and elegant simplicity; a formal little combination involving a tendu and a dip enlarges to a big jete in place and drop.
But it’s not mechanical; there is a sense of style akin to the kind of traditional good manners that politely keep an insubstantial conversation going (and can make it a source of pleasure besides). A pair of women come in across the rear of the stage, one behind and echoing the other with just a tiny delay, doing spare, repetitive phrases including modest assembles and jetes, that move only slightly in space and settle into place. A second pair repeats the material, but faster and with a shade more swing. Three girls together, directly behind each other, work in the same vein, unified except for the timing of the sideways flick of their legs.
The title of the piece, Retour en Avant|, seems to address the joining of a modern movement sensibility with centuries-old music, as well as the internal links within the piece. The Bach provides a steady ground for the dancing to ride on. It may bounce along double time, or shift obedience from the beat to the melodic filigree, or glide on independently. But it never digs into the music or strongly counters it. Calm and ornamental, though not at all fancy, the dancing’s traditional sort of development gives a sense of propriety and security, even with variations that are broken up or reworked in an informal frame. Even casual incidents or poses, like a left-out girl at the back hanging her head as she stands, remind you of earlier, stricter moments; it’s like a mopey version of that initial dip. There’s a calculated playfulness in the temporary entrances and exits, in the sudden fizzy moments, in a rash of swatting, “I give up”” gestures. There’s an alfresco strolling quality in the dancers as they pick their way through many floor patterns. Impulses pass and ricochet quietly through the group, like when the dancers bump serially in a cautious lineup and begin to fan apart like well-behaved balls on a pool table.
like the subtle trickery of a section to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” if I remember right, that starts off with a soloist, turns into a trio for a moment, and keeps changing personnel as different small combinations jump in and disappear. If I expect a pair to enter, what crops up is a quartet. That section breezily quicksteps over the music, ignoring its soupy connotations. Other moments, in the latter part of the piece, have an inner weight and savor that gives them special impact. Like a smudgy solo of abrupt twists and jumps done by a girl in a loose top of fire engine red. Or Cunninghamesque tilts of the body in mid-air. Or a sluggish push of the hand on one hip that sends the opposite leg drifting up or down. The dancing develops with agreeable logic and finesse. Hallet demonstrates a sure lightness of touch in the way he constructs a whole body of decorative rhetoric without polemic or excuse. In a way, it’s as reliably patterned as wallpaper. It seems very French, whatever that means. It’s not severe. It is confident, but not insistent. You wouldn’t have to approve of it to find it attractive.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (March 2 to 25).
Demonic Diversions
March 27
When Martha Clarke told me last fall she was thinking of doing a theater piece based on Hieronymous Bosch’s 16th century altarpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, I thought she was crazy. Now it’s actually happening. “Twelve years ago,” says Clarke, “when Pilobolus (she was one of the first six members) did Monkshood’s Farewell, I was thinking of Bosch. So it goes way back.” Producer Lyn Austin of the Music Theater Group/Lenox Arts Center called her in September to urge her to think of doing a new piece for this spring. When Austin called back to nudge her, Clarke blurted out, “Why don’t we do something based on Hieronymous Bosch?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” says Clarke. “It was like a light bulb in a cartoon!” The same thing happened with Metamorphosis. Clarke had an NEA artistic associate grant for Lenox Arts Center two years ago. She had scheduled May for Austin and saved the rest of her time for her dance company, Crowsnest (with Felix Blaska and Pilobolite, Robby Barnett).
We got invited to do a terrific tour somewhere, like the Canary Islands,” says Clarke, “so I called Lyn and I said, ‘Ummm, if you want me to fulfill this project, I’ll have to do it in two weeks.’ And she said, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ And I said, ‘Not a one.’ So I went to her office and she played some Pergolesi and then I just turned to her and said, ‘Why don’t we do Kafka’s Metamorphosis?’ Absolutely out of the blue like that. Same with Bosch. “Anyway, Eugene Friesen, our cellist, and his wife (who’s Nora, the stage manager) were coming for dinner and I was exhilarated, thinking, ‘Oh, what fun this would be!’ He’d brought his cello and he started to play and it sounded beautiful. The following Saturday we did a recording session at my house of musicians jamming on old instruments, looking at pictures of Bosch, and literally running over to the corner and improvising Hell, improvising Eden. It took off with a leap. Airborne from the moment of conception.”
Didn’t you tell me before that you did it just so you could fly? “That’s true, too,” says Clarke. “Back last summer sometimes Lyn asked me what I’d like to do and I told her I’d like to fly. At that time, I was thinking of doing a Chagall bride, with lilacs, and I wanted to work with dogs. And it did in a strange way go into Bosch. We can’t afford dogs right now. We were going to have a flock of live birds. But we have extra lights instead.”
When I poke my head into rehearsal at St. Clement’s, where the show starts March 27, it is just about airborne. The entrance is clogged with piles of slender logs, long, fresh, pale-barked branches. Around the perimeter of the naked stage, the bones of a set of bark-stripped saplings and posts like bridges and arcades and arching ladders is being constructed. Wires hang down from stationary flying rigs in two upstage corners. The back of the stage is cluttered with drums, chimes, a piano, covered instruments. Except for what’s nailed to the walls, it’s all in flux. One of the arching bridge-shapes is being thatched with bundles of twigs. The seven performers have just been working out the Seven Deadly Sins.
We’re having a bitch of a time,” says Clarke. “You wouldn’t think people like us would have such trouble with it.” “It’s a little burlesque of seven sins in seven minutes,” she clues me in later. “In rehearsal, I get in a bad mood because it’s so hard not to be hammy. It falls apart in ten minutes and turns into kindergarten.” It’s a noodling around day, without the musicians who’ve been working collaboratively with composer Richard Peaslee.
Anyway, I’ve seen the sweet stuff. They’re about to move on to Hell. Two of the women put on their flying harnesses, which strap under the butt and around the tops of the thighs. Marie Fourcault jumps off a tree stump and soars. Margie Gillis rotates between the wires slowly, then hauls on the rope attached to a pulley to get higher. Marie floats in a flat circle, then swings a bit wildly into one of the constructions and crawls along it for a sense of safety, giving it some of her weight. I’m not sure it’s meant to be clambered over yet; it seems slightly precarious and impermanent. But Marie’s a little scared and needs that contact to control her movement. She pedals rapidly midair, following somebody’s suggestion to try running, while grabbing momentarily onto any handy object. Polly Styron in the other rigging, her hands held tentatively like paws while her legs are bent, spins and pauses, spins and pauses like a ferris wheel dropping off passengers. Then she lowers herself down onto Margie Gillis’s back, fiercely flapping her arms. Clarke, in the other rigging now, lies nearly motionless, rotating slightly. “It’s the first time I’ve been up for a week,” she says. “It’s scary now.”
“We started working in November,” says Clarke. “About two hours a day. When you’re first hatching a piece that’s plenty because you don’t really want to batter the thing into the wall. You need to let it breathe. We didn’t have any budget at that point, and because we all live in Connecticut, we went outside for props. Rob Faust is a terrific mask maker and he wanted to work with masks. I kept resisting because I find it a trap in a way, but we started with sticks and dried basil from the garden, and rocks, and putting old vines in our hair off the stone walls, and cutting little saplings down and bringing them in. I found something in my compost heap - old tin lids from cooking pans - and they became wonderful masks and appendages. Roots off dead trees became arms...It started to take on a life of its own. All the found objects gave a style. Since we can’t afford to do a Bosch as he painted it, with wonderful colors and fountains and pools of water and crows standing on their heads, we just started taking natural things that were lying around. And I think low-budget has brought us a kind of naive charm.”
“Early in the morning, I’m in a bad mood,” Clarkes tells me. “I want to be in the cosmetics department of Bloomingdale’s. But by the end of the day I don’t want to leave. It’s been the freest working process I’ve ever been involved with.” Like nursery school, I say. “Like recess,” says she.
“I work by smell. I don’t respond until something unknown to me makes me do something The first several weeks of this thing I just sat like a blob and choreographed and worked with everybody else. Now I’m pulling myself out more and more and saying, ‘This is working, this isn’t working, try it in this order.’ It’s fascinating to be selecting from an extraordinary well of talent. If it was talent IQ time here, in terms of pure burning on a hot day, your teeth would drop out.” What’s the script? Is there a script?
“You know Peter Beagle?” Clarke asks. “Well, this is a personal story but I’ll tell you anyway. My father died nine years ago. And the last book he read was a novel of Peter’s. He was intrigued with it and after he died I read it as a way of keeping him around for me. Then I was performing with Crowsnest last October at Kennedy Center and my mother wanted me to come home to Baltimore for a family reunion. At her house, she had a book on The Garden of Earthly Delights by Peter Beagle and looked in the back and there’s a kind of attractive young face with a beard, and it said, Peter Beagle lives in Watsonville, California, and I got on the phone at one in the morning and called him and said, ‘You don’t know me but...’ But he did, and I flew out the next week to talk to him and ask him if he’d help us with the scenario.
The painting is kind of up and down. It’s vertical, and we needed something linear to make it go through time. Then he happily came for a week in February to watch rehearsals and hounded me on the weekend to work out a scenario. “One of the problems is that the painting is inhabited by hundreds of people and our budget can afford seven.” She trips into a long hearty laugh “That’s a problem. So what we’re trying to do is extrapolate the concentrated crystals and hope that we will pick up the qualities that are in the painting. The first part is sort of Primordial Ooze, and in Eden there are gloppy or kind of creepy demons coming out of pools of water in the painting. I mean, all is not well with Adam and Eve. In the second panel, people are enjoying the Garden of Earthly Delights, but they’re beginning to do awful things to each other. Then you get to Hell. Our Hell is mostly flying and the musical tortures. In the painting, people are incarcerated in harps, have recorders stuck up their asses. The nice thing, the thing I think is beautiful about Bosch, is that he sees us with a kind of deep compassion and humanity as doomed creatures. But with terrific naivete. People in Hell doing awful things have the same sweetness as in Eden and the Garden.”
Polly jumps up and down like a bellringer to pull Felix into the air. Margie practices a stiff, convulsing walk while she hyperextends her elbows enough to make you cringe. Robbie Barnett limps with a slow, bobbing walk, with a twisted stick stuck between the top if his foot and his upper lip. He’s also concerned about the people who’ll be tumbling out of the sky, possibly from above the light grids. And how to get more people whirling in. It’s still uncertain whether people will play demons and souls interchangeably or whether the time it takes to get in and out of harness will mean that demons stay demons and souls souls. Faust swings wildly, tiptoes across the top of the shrouded xylophone, softly smashes over a music stand, and crash lands. He bounces on and off the floor and grabs Felix’s throat from behind. Felix manages to wrap his legs around Faust’s ankles. Faust grabs Felix, and they dangle together in midair.
Impalement is a popular notion And the eye-gouge is a popular hit. Barnett practices the gouge with Martha, who wants to see if you can sort of flip the gougee over and over. Barnett holds his fist protectively around the end of the long, twisted walking stick that seems all too close to his left eye. Then Clarke jabs it and appears to screw it into his eye and turn the victim over. “Pull it out,” recommends Barnett. “Lift me a little bit, then jerk it out.” Truly gruesome. Felix bangs a bass drum down on Faust, runs headfirst into it himself while it’s swinging on a rope. Faust tries tolling the drum like a juggernaut over Barnett. But the drum rolling with a kind of shudder across the floor on its own is stranger and more terrible. Clarke, sitting on Barnett, softly lifts and drops his head a few inches to the floor with a dullish thunk. It doesn’t hurt, he says. The less she lifts it, the closer his head is to the floor when she delicately drops it, the quieter and more real and worse the sound is.
The concern now, though, is not to dream up more tricks, but to develop them into phrases. Faust strangles Marie with a long vine loose in his hands as she holds his wrists and they whirl around. Barnett remembers that when they did it before “You looked like you were going to pop her head off!” Polly accompanies the whirling with the hideous low whine of the wind machine. Reversing position, Marie hooks herself over Faust’s chest like a baby in a carrier. Her head drops back as the vine swings wide. “If you could only strangle her down to the floor...” wishes Martha, hopefully, “and then drag her out in some tortuous way.” Marie and the two Robs, Faust and Barnett, try rolling over each other in a lumpy, interlocking three-man pile. It looks wonderful, but you imagine heads and bony bodily projections being squashed. “We didn’t like it,” say the three of them, lying on their bellies with their chins propped on their hands.
“No pain, no gain, “ needles Clarke. But no way is she going to see that again. “Usually, with Crowsnest or Pilobolus, we didn’t put stuff on till we felt it was ready. I keep wanting more hours, more weeks. We’re not getting the rigging till Friday. The rigging’s so expensive it couldn’t be put in till the last minute. None of us has flown through the space yet.” Without the ceiling tracks, they’ve only be able to practice going up and down. “Hell has barely been started. Though we do have a lot of stuff with musical instruments. I get impaled by the cello, You know it has that point. I do a kind of sexual writhing around while he’s playing a very very haunting kind of Bach-like thing.”
You’ve always shown a great enjoyment of the grotesque, I remark. “It’s true. I love the paintings of Ensor, Goya, when they’re really grotesque. I’ve an appetite for it. I don’t know why. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. I went to a nice private school and summer camps. Why it should happen to me I don’t know.” Bosch is a natural subject for her. Though you’d think the scope of the project might be daunting. But it is the sort of subject where you don’t have to worry about making the ultimate statement on the subject. “And,” says Clarke. “Bosch is dead. The playwright isn’t going to come in and pull his hair out.”
“Painting,” she says, shifting gears from gleeful to reflective, “has been an extraordinary source for me. It’s absolutely a free-for-all. Because there’s so much within one frame. A whole world is set up. Characters. Dramatic tensions. There’s a way of looking and moving, there’s clothing suggested, lighting suggested. It’s all there. You just have to find the painters that you respond to. Don’t you think that’s true?” “Didn’t Martha Graham say something like, ‘One has to be a great thief.’ And there’s one painter after another to steal from. I can work till I’m a thousand years old.
When Martha Clarke told me last fall she was thinking of doing a theater piece based on Hieronymous Bosch’s 16th century altarpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, I thought she was crazy. Now it’s actually happening. “Twelve years ago,” says Clarke, “when Pilobolus (she was one of the first six members) did Monkshood’s Farewell, I was thinking of Bosch. So it goes way back.” Producer Lyn Austin of the Music Theater Group/Lenox Arts Center called her in September to urge her to think of doing a new piece for this spring. When Austin called back to nudge her, Clarke blurted out, “Why don’t we do something based on Hieronymous Bosch?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” says Clarke. “It was like a light bulb in a cartoon!” The same thing happened with Metamorphosis. Clarke had an NEA artistic associate grant for Lenox Arts Center two years ago. She had scheduled May for Austin and saved the rest of her time for her dance company, Crowsnest (with Felix Blaska and Pilobolite, Robby Barnett).
We got invited to do a terrific tour somewhere, like the Canary Islands,” says Clarke, “so I called Lyn and I said, ‘Ummm, if you want me to fulfill this project, I’ll have to do it in two weeks.’ And she said, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ And I said, ‘Not a one.’ So I went to her office and she played some Pergolesi and then I just turned to her and said, ‘Why don’t we do Kafka’s Metamorphosis?’ Absolutely out of the blue like that. Same with Bosch. “Anyway, Eugene Friesen, our cellist, and his wife (who’s Nora, the stage manager) were coming for dinner and I was exhilarated, thinking, ‘Oh, what fun this would be!’ He’d brought his cello and he started to play and it sounded beautiful. The following Saturday we did a recording session at my house of musicians jamming on old instruments, looking at pictures of Bosch, and literally running over to the corner and improvising Hell, improvising Eden. It took off with a leap. Airborne from the moment of conception.”
Didn’t you tell me before that you did it just so you could fly? “That’s true, too,” says Clarke. “Back last summer sometimes Lyn asked me what I’d like to do and I told her I’d like to fly. At that time, I was thinking of doing a Chagall bride, with lilacs, and I wanted to work with dogs. And it did in a strange way go into Bosch. We can’t afford dogs right now. We were going to have a flock of live birds. But we have extra lights instead.”
When I poke my head into rehearsal at St. Clement’s, where the show starts March 27, it is just about airborne. The entrance is clogged with piles of slender logs, long, fresh, pale-barked branches. Around the perimeter of the naked stage, the bones of a set of bark-stripped saplings and posts like bridges and arcades and arching ladders is being constructed. Wires hang down from stationary flying rigs in two upstage corners. The back of the stage is cluttered with drums, chimes, a piano, covered instruments. Except for what’s nailed to the walls, it’s all in flux. One of the arching bridge-shapes is being thatched with bundles of twigs. The seven performers have just been working out the Seven Deadly Sins.
We’re having a bitch of a time,” says Clarke. “You wouldn’t think people like us would have such trouble with it.” “It’s a little burlesque of seven sins in seven minutes,” she clues me in later. “In rehearsal, I get in a bad mood because it’s so hard not to be hammy. It falls apart in ten minutes and turns into kindergarten.” It’s a noodling around day, without the musicians who’ve been working collaboratively with composer Richard Peaslee.
Anyway, I’ve seen the sweet stuff. They’re about to move on to Hell. Two of the women put on their flying harnesses, which strap under the butt and around the tops of the thighs. Marie Fourcault jumps off a tree stump and soars. Margie Gillis rotates between the wires slowly, then hauls on the rope attached to a pulley to get higher. Marie floats in a flat circle, then swings a bit wildly into one of the constructions and crawls along it for a sense of safety, giving it some of her weight. I’m not sure it’s meant to be clambered over yet; it seems slightly precarious and impermanent. But Marie’s a little scared and needs that contact to control her movement. She pedals rapidly midair, following somebody’s suggestion to try running, while grabbing momentarily onto any handy object. Polly Styron in the other rigging, her hands held tentatively like paws while her legs are bent, spins and pauses, spins and pauses like a ferris wheel dropping off passengers. Then she lowers herself down onto Margie Gillis’s back, fiercely flapping her arms. Clarke, in the other rigging now, lies nearly motionless, rotating slightly. “It’s the first time I’ve been up for a week,” she says. “It’s scary now.”
“We started working in November,” says Clarke. “About two hours a day. When you’re first hatching a piece that’s plenty because you don’t really want to batter the thing into the wall. You need to let it breathe. We didn’t have any budget at that point, and because we all live in Connecticut, we went outside for props. Rob Faust is a terrific mask maker and he wanted to work with masks. I kept resisting because I find it a trap in a way, but we started with sticks and dried basil from the garden, and rocks, and putting old vines in our hair off the stone walls, and cutting little saplings down and bringing them in. I found something in my compost heap - old tin lids from cooking pans - and they became wonderful masks and appendages. Roots off dead trees became arms...It started to take on a life of its own. All the found objects gave a style. Since we can’t afford to do a Bosch as he painted it, with wonderful colors and fountains and pools of water and crows standing on their heads, we just started taking natural things that were lying around. And I think low-budget has brought us a kind of naive charm.”
“Early in the morning, I’m in a bad mood,” Clarkes tells me. “I want to be in the cosmetics department of Bloomingdale’s. But by the end of the day I don’t want to leave. It’s been the freest working process I’ve ever been involved with.” Like nursery school, I say. “Like recess,” says she.
“I work by smell. I don’t respond until something unknown to me makes me do something The first several weeks of this thing I just sat like a blob and choreographed and worked with everybody else. Now I’m pulling myself out more and more and saying, ‘This is working, this isn’t working, try it in this order.’ It’s fascinating to be selecting from an extraordinary well of talent. If it was talent IQ time here, in terms of pure burning on a hot day, your teeth would drop out.” What’s the script? Is there a script?
“You know Peter Beagle?” Clarke asks. “Well, this is a personal story but I’ll tell you anyway. My father died nine years ago. And the last book he read was a novel of Peter’s. He was intrigued with it and after he died I read it as a way of keeping him around for me. Then I was performing with Crowsnest last October at Kennedy Center and my mother wanted me to come home to Baltimore for a family reunion. At her house, she had a book on The Garden of Earthly Delights by Peter Beagle and looked in the back and there’s a kind of attractive young face with a beard, and it said, Peter Beagle lives in Watsonville, California, and I got on the phone at one in the morning and called him and said, ‘You don’t know me but...’ But he did, and I flew out the next week to talk to him and ask him if he’d help us with the scenario.
The painting is kind of up and down. It’s vertical, and we needed something linear to make it go through time. Then he happily came for a week in February to watch rehearsals and hounded me on the weekend to work out a scenario. “One of the problems is that the painting is inhabited by hundreds of people and our budget can afford seven.” She trips into a long hearty laugh “That’s a problem. So what we’re trying to do is extrapolate the concentrated crystals and hope that we will pick up the qualities that are in the painting. The first part is sort of Primordial Ooze, and in Eden there are gloppy or kind of creepy demons coming out of pools of water in the painting. I mean, all is not well with Adam and Eve. In the second panel, people are enjoying the Garden of Earthly Delights, but they’re beginning to do awful things to each other. Then you get to Hell. Our Hell is mostly flying and the musical tortures. In the painting, people are incarcerated in harps, have recorders stuck up their asses. The nice thing, the thing I think is beautiful about Bosch, is that he sees us with a kind of deep compassion and humanity as doomed creatures. But with terrific naivete. People in Hell doing awful things have the same sweetness as in Eden and the Garden.”
Polly jumps up and down like a bellringer to pull Felix into the air. Margie practices a stiff, convulsing walk while she hyperextends her elbows enough to make you cringe. Robbie Barnett limps with a slow, bobbing walk, with a twisted stick stuck between the top if his foot and his upper lip. He’s also concerned about the people who’ll be tumbling out of the sky, possibly from above the light grids. And how to get more people whirling in. It’s still uncertain whether people will play demons and souls interchangeably or whether the time it takes to get in and out of harness will mean that demons stay demons and souls souls. Faust swings wildly, tiptoes across the top of the shrouded xylophone, softly smashes over a music stand, and crash lands. He bounces on and off the floor and grabs Felix’s throat from behind. Felix manages to wrap his legs around Faust’s ankles. Faust grabs Felix, and they dangle together in midair.
Impalement is a popular notion And the eye-gouge is a popular hit. Barnett practices the gouge with Martha, who wants to see if you can sort of flip the gougee over and over. Barnett holds his fist protectively around the end of the long, twisted walking stick that seems all too close to his left eye. Then Clarke jabs it and appears to screw it into his eye and turn the victim over. “Pull it out,” recommends Barnett. “Lift me a little bit, then jerk it out.” Truly gruesome. Felix bangs a bass drum down on Faust, runs headfirst into it himself while it’s swinging on a rope. Faust tries tolling the drum like a juggernaut over Barnett. But the drum rolling with a kind of shudder across the floor on its own is stranger and more terrible. Clarke, sitting on Barnett, softly lifts and drops his head a few inches to the floor with a dullish thunk. It doesn’t hurt, he says. The less she lifts it, the closer his head is to the floor when she delicately drops it, the quieter and more real and worse the sound is.
The concern now, though, is not to dream up more tricks, but to develop them into phrases. Faust strangles Marie with a long vine loose in his hands as she holds his wrists and they whirl around. Barnett remembers that when they did it before “You looked like you were going to pop her head off!” Polly accompanies the whirling with the hideous low whine of the wind machine. Reversing position, Marie hooks herself over Faust’s chest like a baby in a carrier. Her head drops back as the vine swings wide. “If you could only strangle her down to the floor...” wishes Martha, hopefully, “and then drag her out in some tortuous way.” Marie and the two Robs, Faust and Barnett, try rolling over each other in a lumpy, interlocking three-man pile. It looks wonderful, but you imagine heads and bony bodily projections being squashed. “We didn’t like it,” say the three of them, lying on their bellies with their chins propped on their hands.
“No pain, no gain, “ needles Clarke. But no way is she going to see that again. “Usually, with Crowsnest or Pilobolus, we didn’t put stuff on till we felt it was ready. I keep wanting more hours, more weeks. We’re not getting the rigging till Friday. The rigging’s so expensive it couldn’t be put in till the last minute. None of us has flown through the space yet.” Without the ceiling tracks, they’ve only be able to practice going up and down. “Hell has barely been started. Though we do have a lot of stuff with musical instruments. I get impaled by the cello, You know it has that point. I do a kind of sexual writhing around while he’s playing a very very haunting kind of Bach-like thing.”
You’ve always shown a great enjoyment of the grotesque, I remark. “It’s true. I love the paintings of Ensor, Goya, when they’re really grotesque. I’ve an appetite for it. I don’t know why. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. I went to a nice private school and summer camps. Why it should happen to me I don’t know.” Bosch is a natural subject for her. Though you’d think the scope of the project might be daunting. But it is the sort of subject where you don’t have to worry about making the ultimate statement on the subject. “And,” says Clarke. “Bosch is dead. The playwright isn’t going to come in and pull his hair out.”
“Painting,” she says, shifting gears from gleeful to reflective, “has been an extraordinary source for me. It’s absolutely a free-for-all. Because there’s so much within one frame. A whole world is set up. Characters. Dramatic tensions. There’s a way of looking and moving, there’s clothing suggested, lighting suggested. It’s all there. You just have to find the painters that you respond to. Don’t you think that’s true?” “Didn’t Martha Graham say something like, ‘One has to be a great thief.’ And there’s one painter after another to steal from. I can work till I’m a thousand years old.
Follow the Bouncing Bods
April 17
M.J. Becker’s quickie concert of hit-and-run dances at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery had wild drive and a delirious, rhythmic bounce. Breakout is an acrobatic circus for Becker, Karen Booth, Amy Harlib, and Christian White, crammed into a couple of minutes of kangaroo backflips, kicks, choppy arm moves and sharp, squiggly play through the upper body. Becker runs on first, bubbling with the vigor of a pot on a hard, rolling boil. The others bound in a couple of minutes later, in flying cartwheels or however - who can remember? A double-jointed girl ties herself in a knot. The guy spins himself on his back; after a handstand he falls slowly backward like an accident you can’t interrupt, into a bridge. Slams through the space later in a triple series of flips.
Not all of the first four pieces build to a steady pulse, but all were foaming with energy, like dazzling, rather voluptuous invasions. A series of small explosions with big bangs and no damage. Think about What, composed of collaborative back-to-back duets with Amy Finkel and Susan Brown, happens as quiet, or more reflective sinuous, wriggling, swaying, stamping episodes. The second part, with Brown, has a musing quality, full of sharp, vertical contrasts, long reaches, and swift retreats.
Ego was a peppy, pushy solo for Becker, which finally drops her splat on the floor. Heartbeat, for five women in groups of two and three, reminds me of some bubbling, whizbang ladies’ exercise team of the post-World War II period. But I liked best Put Us in Red, a mammoth piece (cast of 31) from 1981 that starts with a trio of dancers doing rather quiet, wide-stanced moves mixed with sharp, sudden turns, leaps, twists, bounces. The space steadily fills with small teams, dressed, like the first trio, in black, though the focus of action remains with the trio for a good while. The small groups of two or three or four or five stick together pretty much I think, concentratedly crawling, or rolling, or twisting, or trembling, back-somersaulting, or smoothing their foreheads. Some are plieing against the wall of the altar alcove; a couple of others are up in the balcony. It’s as if each team is involved in its own special exercise program or peculiar meditation. Suddenly, it’s all wild hysteria, a froth of splashing and wriggling and thrashing during which the space very rapidly empties. I thought it wonderfully strange and spectacular, but I wished that, fast as it all happened, I had been deprived of the few minutes in the middle when my eye had time to idly roam and inspect the various groups. What I adored was the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t effect, having it over before you know what hit you.
At St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (March 29 to 31).
It’s evident from Deborah Gladstein’s five-part Burning Through that she’s found her true voice - one that’s lyric and gentle, but persistent and strong too. Last year’s Wild Patience, with Gladstein, Julie Simpson, Suzanne Stern Freedman and Robyn Scott - was the first part, with a sinuous, almost underwater softness, urgent reaches and easy swings. The dancing, some of it in unison, has a resilient changeableness as it winds and pauses and changes direction with fluid ease and frequency. Its quiet swing, delicate and precise, grows looser, even a little wild, and that swing’s picked up and expanded in later sections.
Gestures of Abundance is a series of three quiet, exquisite duets. The first, for Freedman and Dorothea Rust, starts with smooth, contained gestures, sharp, neat flings to the chime of a brush-tapped cymbal that’s like the dropping of water in a pool. They stand in place with hands curling, arms stretching up or drawing down, heads dipping to the side, arching and reaching with tender concentration, In the second duet, Jennifer Lane and Simpson bend and roll and stretch with the dreamy, slightly melancholy absorption of Gislebertus’s Romanesque sculpture of Eve at Autun. Gladstein and Scott, in the last duet, speed up playfully with swinging arms, staggering runs, sharply tugging turns. But they keep returning their attention to each other, swinging away and pulling back; the way they touch when they do, is plain and tender.
“Kalahari,” the middle section, is a superb video interlude by Gladstein and Sam Kantor. It’s almost like a flowing series of paintings in rich color, emerging on a matte black surface. Portions of dancers’ bodies - hips, feet, shoulders, sweep quickly across the velvety darkness of the screen. There’s slow motion. The outlines of the bodies seem temporarily doubled. The whole group, briefly encompassed, bursts apart. The camera seems to float around all this, sometimes locating the group in a space you can gauge, but I was happier on the fly. Sometimes the dancing freezes in abstraction, like Morris Louis’s poured paintings. Or the dancers pass like comets trailing brushstroke echoes of themselves.
“Return,” follows, a long, strongly rooted solo for Gladstein. Scooping, gathering, stretching, probing, the movement curls into itself at times in a sensual but self-absorbed way. But Gladstein stays alert, creating a small storm of urgency and pressure as more of her gestures seem instantaneous decisions, diversions, and culminating in a flurry of flings and rests. “Burning Through,” the final section, starts as a soft, gliding trio punctuated with stamps and stops, but it mounts swiftly into a sharp, rhythmic, flinging quintet. There’s an exhilarating looseness in the way the dancers throw themselves after their gestures or springily recoil from them in another direction. The dancing has the swinging, lilting dynamic of a Roumanian boro, tapping into a source of perennial energy. The dancers’ attack is sharp and greedy, and the lavish spray of back-and-forth movement is highlighted by flings and jumps, clapping and stamping, as the five split into groups and counter-groups, intercutting and recombining. But the mutual responsiveness and sense of self of the earlier sections isn’t lost in this splashy celebration.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 31 to April 2).
Victoria Uris and Jill Eathorne Bahr presented joint and individually choreographed dances on their program at RIverside Church. Although I found most of the program heavy-handed, partly because they don’t seem to have found their choreographic identities yet, the first and last pieces Snips (1983) and the new Dialects (with live music by Daniel Levitan), which are the most assemblage-like, temperamentally flexible, and episodic works, have nice moments.
Dialects is handsome and lively, though it starts formal and tame. It meanders into snuggly crawls, crybaby gestures, goat-like frolics, and gets busy and staccato, pulling in opposite directions. The end has the swing and speed of the last part of Gladstein’s Burning Through, but with more force and infinitely less spirit.
Snips is a storehouse of mostly funny bits to an appealing score by Eric Valinsky, but something disproportionate in the presentational manner made me feel like I was in the room with a loudmouth. Watching a clumsy few TV minutes of Lucille Ball and Bob Hope being palsy and “witty” and pretending to be offhand gave me the same sort of uncomfortable feeling a couple of nights later. A glossy, self-conscious attitude and dancerly poise weren’t what the piece wanted, because its jokes are minor and need to be tossed lightly. After the six dancers roll out of a kind of frieze, one guy straightens up, fixes himself, and a second, bigger guy does too. They both begin a classroom-type combination, but in a moment the big guy gets hammy and extravagant, flopping all over the stage. I couldn’t tell if he’s carried away or fooling around. But even without an “applause” sign blinking, the audience knows to laugh and clap. Later on, the littler guy has a hurtling, leaping, rolling, cartwheeling moment of glory. There’s vaudeville skit-type stuff. A little psuedo-Apollo section for a man and three women. Everyone running around back to fluff the cyclorama. A tough, gelid, apache episode for dancers whose gears won’t quite turn. Snips is annoying because it seems willfully thick-headed; condescending because it seems dumber than the choreographers can be.
But what’s maddening about the program generally is that it’s so...suburban, wasting a substantial measure of competence in the service of mediocre ideas. The three middle works - more serious and constant in mood, reveal a murkiness and lack of particularity. Night Subjects, another premiere choreographed by both women, has bundles of people laying around the floor, three couples as it turns out. They reach and roll and snarl themselves up, sometimes walk around with blankets over their heads. The men carry the women or drag them over their backs. It’s like some horrid pajama party, I’m thinking, when all is revealed as a bad dream.
Uris’s Sea Dreams reminded me often of out takes from Kathryn Posin’s Waves, as it heaved and swooped, with slow rolls with legs and arms poking out and folding under, with back somersaults and profiled shoulder stands. Open Wound was the all-purpose dramatic bummer for Stanley and Stella types, him overwrought in an undershirt, her disconsolate in a red dress. To ominous music, they flounder in an equal-opportunity illustration of the supremely tiresome subject of now-you-love-me-now-I-don’t love you.
M.J. Becker’s quickie concert of hit-and-run dances at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery had wild drive and a delirious, rhythmic bounce. Breakout is an acrobatic circus for Becker, Karen Booth, Amy Harlib, and Christian White, crammed into a couple of minutes of kangaroo backflips, kicks, choppy arm moves and sharp, squiggly play through the upper body. Becker runs on first, bubbling with the vigor of a pot on a hard, rolling boil. The others bound in a couple of minutes later, in flying cartwheels or however - who can remember? A double-jointed girl ties herself in a knot. The guy spins himself on his back; after a handstand he falls slowly backward like an accident you can’t interrupt, into a bridge. Slams through the space later in a triple series of flips.
Not all of the first four pieces build to a steady pulse, but all were foaming with energy, like dazzling, rather voluptuous invasions. A series of small explosions with big bangs and no damage. Think about What, composed of collaborative back-to-back duets with Amy Finkel and Susan Brown, happens as quiet, or more reflective sinuous, wriggling, swaying, stamping episodes. The second part, with Brown, has a musing quality, full of sharp, vertical contrasts, long reaches, and swift retreats.
Ego was a peppy, pushy solo for Becker, which finally drops her splat on the floor. Heartbeat, for five women in groups of two and three, reminds me of some bubbling, whizbang ladies’ exercise team of the post-World War II period. But I liked best Put Us in Red, a mammoth piece (cast of 31) from 1981 that starts with a trio of dancers doing rather quiet, wide-stanced moves mixed with sharp, sudden turns, leaps, twists, bounces. The space steadily fills with small teams, dressed, like the first trio, in black, though the focus of action remains with the trio for a good while. The small groups of two or three or four or five stick together pretty much I think, concentratedly crawling, or rolling, or twisting, or trembling, back-somersaulting, or smoothing their foreheads. Some are plieing against the wall of the altar alcove; a couple of others are up in the balcony. It’s as if each team is involved in its own special exercise program or peculiar meditation. Suddenly, it’s all wild hysteria, a froth of splashing and wriggling and thrashing during which the space very rapidly empties. I thought it wonderfully strange and spectacular, but I wished that, fast as it all happened, I had been deprived of the few minutes in the middle when my eye had time to idly roam and inspect the various groups. What I adored was the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t effect, having it over before you know what hit you.
At St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (March 29 to 31).
It’s evident from Deborah Gladstein’s five-part Burning Through that she’s found her true voice - one that’s lyric and gentle, but persistent and strong too. Last year’s Wild Patience, with Gladstein, Julie Simpson, Suzanne Stern Freedman and Robyn Scott - was the first part, with a sinuous, almost underwater softness, urgent reaches and easy swings. The dancing, some of it in unison, has a resilient changeableness as it winds and pauses and changes direction with fluid ease and frequency. Its quiet swing, delicate and precise, grows looser, even a little wild, and that swing’s picked up and expanded in later sections.
Gestures of Abundance is a series of three quiet, exquisite duets. The first, for Freedman and Dorothea Rust, starts with smooth, contained gestures, sharp, neat flings to the chime of a brush-tapped cymbal that’s like the dropping of water in a pool. They stand in place with hands curling, arms stretching up or drawing down, heads dipping to the side, arching and reaching with tender concentration, In the second duet, Jennifer Lane and Simpson bend and roll and stretch with the dreamy, slightly melancholy absorption of Gislebertus’s Romanesque sculpture of Eve at Autun. Gladstein and Scott, in the last duet, speed up playfully with swinging arms, staggering runs, sharply tugging turns. But they keep returning their attention to each other, swinging away and pulling back; the way they touch when they do, is plain and tender.
“Kalahari,” the middle section, is a superb video interlude by Gladstein and Sam Kantor. It’s almost like a flowing series of paintings in rich color, emerging on a matte black surface. Portions of dancers’ bodies - hips, feet, shoulders, sweep quickly across the velvety darkness of the screen. There’s slow motion. The outlines of the bodies seem temporarily doubled. The whole group, briefly encompassed, bursts apart. The camera seems to float around all this, sometimes locating the group in a space you can gauge, but I was happier on the fly. Sometimes the dancing freezes in abstraction, like Morris Louis’s poured paintings. Or the dancers pass like comets trailing brushstroke echoes of themselves.
“Return,” follows, a long, strongly rooted solo for Gladstein. Scooping, gathering, stretching, probing, the movement curls into itself at times in a sensual but self-absorbed way. But Gladstein stays alert, creating a small storm of urgency and pressure as more of her gestures seem instantaneous decisions, diversions, and culminating in a flurry of flings and rests. “Burning Through,” the final section, starts as a soft, gliding trio punctuated with stamps and stops, but it mounts swiftly into a sharp, rhythmic, flinging quintet. There’s an exhilarating looseness in the way the dancers throw themselves after their gestures or springily recoil from them in another direction. The dancing has the swinging, lilting dynamic of a Roumanian boro, tapping into a source of perennial energy. The dancers’ attack is sharp and greedy, and the lavish spray of back-and-forth movement is highlighted by flings and jumps, clapping and stamping, as the five split into groups and counter-groups, intercutting and recombining. But the mutual responsiveness and sense of self of the earlier sections isn’t lost in this splashy celebration.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 31 to April 2).
Victoria Uris and Jill Eathorne Bahr presented joint and individually choreographed dances on their program at RIverside Church. Although I found most of the program heavy-handed, partly because they don’t seem to have found their choreographic identities yet, the first and last pieces Snips (1983) and the new Dialects (with live music by Daniel Levitan), which are the most assemblage-like, temperamentally flexible, and episodic works, have nice moments.
Dialects is handsome and lively, though it starts formal and tame. It meanders into snuggly crawls, crybaby gestures, goat-like frolics, and gets busy and staccato, pulling in opposite directions. The end has the swing and speed of the last part of Gladstein’s Burning Through, but with more force and infinitely less spirit.
Snips is a storehouse of mostly funny bits to an appealing score by Eric Valinsky, but something disproportionate in the presentational manner made me feel like I was in the room with a loudmouth. Watching a clumsy few TV minutes of Lucille Ball and Bob Hope being palsy and “witty” and pretending to be offhand gave me the same sort of uncomfortable feeling a couple of nights later. A glossy, self-conscious attitude and dancerly poise weren’t what the piece wanted, because its jokes are minor and need to be tossed lightly. After the six dancers roll out of a kind of frieze, one guy straightens up, fixes himself, and a second, bigger guy does too. They both begin a classroom-type combination, but in a moment the big guy gets hammy and extravagant, flopping all over the stage. I couldn’t tell if he’s carried away or fooling around. But even without an “applause” sign blinking, the audience knows to laugh and clap. Later on, the littler guy has a hurtling, leaping, rolling, cartwheeling moment of glory. There’s vaudeville skit-type stuff. A little psuedo-Apollo section for a man and three women. Everyone running around back to fluff the cyclorama. A tough, gelid, apache episode for dancers whose gears won’t quite turn. Snips is annoying because it seems willfully thick-headed; condescending because it seems dumber than the choreographers can be.
But what’s maddening about the program generally is that it’s so...suburban, wasting a substantial measure of competence in the service of mediocre ideas. The three middle works - more serious and constant in mood, reveal a murkiness and lack of particularity. Night Subjects, another premiere choreographed by both women, has bundles of people laying around the floor, three couples as it turns out. They reach and roll and snarl themselves up, sometimes walk around with blankets over their heads. The men carry the women or drag them over their backs. It’s like some horrid pajama party, I’m thinking, when all is revealed as a bad dream.
Uris’s Sea Dreams reminded me often of out takes from Kathryn Posin’s Waves, as it heaved and swooped, with slow rolls with legs and arms poking out and folding under, with back somersaults and profiled shoulder stands. Open Wound was the all-purpose dramatic bummer for Stanley and Stella types, him overwrought in an undershirt, her disconsolate in a red dress. To ominous music, they flounder in an equal-opportunity illustration of the supremely tiresome subject of now-you-love-me-now-I-don’t love you.
Great Love Themes from Shakespeare
June 19
The title of Joseph Russillo’s opening night work, Shakespeare, and its grandiose conception, did not bode well for his two-week debut engagement at the Joyce. American-born, but established in France, Russillo founded this Toulouse-based company with Adniel Agesilas, in 1973. And in Shakespeare, clumping together the meaty love/murder/suicide stuff of four tragedies and some reconciliations and apotheosis stuff apparently rooted in two more, plays, Russillo has made apiece that is as puffed up and pretentious as could be. What does he need six plays for?
The piece opens with a huge, spectral tree, without leaves, which cradles a girl in white, and has a man asleep at its foot This couple of innocents - irritating g cute and smiley - mediate between us and the nastiness to come, witness it, even, to my mind, engineer it. Their namby-pamby frolics, set to Alfred Deller’s singing of songs from Shakespeare, alternate with the dark, passionate scenes, usually introduced by ominous music, which all the other characters, hovering conspiratorially in the background, generally watch and whisper about and reflect. Dressed in black Renaissance opulence, highlighted with brighter undergarments, the characters parade on in a stately way, crisscross the stage singly and swoop into dramatic poses. The floor is it up in a checkerboard of light, which sets up a sort of formal kind of battleground. What comes next is a jealous trio from Othello. Then Romeo and Juliet fall in love, run around with his huge cape rippling, and wrap themselves up in it. They get upset, she especially, convulsing and arching and crawling, and kill themselves determinedly several times. Three witches twitch to throbbing jungle drums, then MacBeth, Lady M. and Duncan do an elaborate, jealous trio, and, after Duncan gets dragged off, there’s along, nervous, bloody hands solo for her (to, I believe, Gundula Janowitz’s transcendent recording of the third of Strauss’s Four Last Songs).
In the middle of this, not being able to see my program, and having forgotten the witches, I’m thinking it’s Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius I’m watching. It might as well have been. Then Hamlet and Ophelia have the hots for each other - she wears naked-colored leotard and tights, he doesn’t have to take his clothes off. She manipulates him through some complicated choreographic snares, but when rejection strikes she goes batty, acts happy plucking posies. You can’t miss “Here’s rue for you.” He dances with screechingly regretful extravagance when her cortege carries her corpse across the stage. Plenty of Bong Bong Bong Bong in the Mahler that accompanies this section, though it started out a lot like “I’ll be Seeing You.” Katerina and Petruccio battle vigorously till she mellows for no good reason. And finally, for everyone, there’s a ritual one-at-a-time run around the tree. Each character freezes and gets healed by the girl in white who caresses their limbs or walks her fingers over their faces.
Sometime early in all that you’re blankly watching those wonderfully articulate but remote bodies, and idly speculating on who might be an interesting fuck. Not very involving, though the dancers are just fine, and give themselves fully to the action. The choreography goes down to the floor, clings to it, and springs from it with the flexibility of the Graham tradition, but there’s a sluggishness in the way the legs are used in traveling. One overall impression is of stiffness, of the movement being cored for effect, of generalized dramatic gestures demanding attention in a portentous and melodramatic atmosphere. Russillo makes use of only the broadest cues of the music. He is keen on extreme, contorted poses; he cleverly knots his people together in strange two-dimensional designs. In fact, his work seems to be about making weird, spiky shapes. He’s sometimes on the mark with vivid, emblematic images like Othello, Iago and Desdemona, motionless, stretched out and linked in a frieze, with Iago gripping and kissing the hem of her robe; or Duncan and Macbeth greeting each other. Duncan’s hands are open, Macbeth’s are tightening into claws as if to strangle him. But what Russillo does best is murders. Desdemona, braced on Othello’s knees and spasmodically clutching as he strangles her. Othello and Iago, one prone on the floor, the other erect behind him, bouncing up and down with urgent, percussive violence. I could have much more happily watched a whole slew of enthusiastically vicious murders than the muscular posturing that was pretending to be drama.
At the Joyce Theater (June 5 to 17).
The title of Joseph Russillo’s opening night work, Shakespeare, and its grandiose conception, did not bode well for his two-week debut engagement at the Joyce. American-born, but established in France, Russillo founded this Toulouse-based company with Adniel Agesilas, in 1973. And in Shakespeare, clumping together the meaty love/murder/suicide stuff of four tragedies and some reconciliations and apotheosis stuff apparently rooted in two more, plays, Russillo has made apiece that is as puffed up and pretentious as could be. What does he need six plays for?
The piece opens with a huge, spectral tree, without leaves, which cradles a girl in white, and has a man asleep at its foot This couple of innocents - irritating g cute and smiley - mediate between us and the nastiness to come, witness it, even, to my mind, engineer it. Their namby-pamby frolics, set to Alfred Deller’s singing of songs from Shakespeare, alternate with the dark, passionate scenes, usually introduced by ominous music, which all the other characters, hovering conspiratorially in the background, generally watch and whisper about and reflect. Dressed in black Renaissance opulence, highlighted with brighter undergarments, the characters parade on in a stately way, crisscross the stage singly and swoop into dramatic poses. The floor is it up in a checkerboard of light, which sets up a sort of formal kind of battleground. What comes next is a jealous trio from Othello. Then Romeo and Juliet fall in love, run around with his huge cape rippling, and wrap themselves up in it. They get upset, she especially, convulsing and arching and crawling, and kill themselves determinedly several times. Three witches twitch to throbbing jungle drums, then MacBeth, Lady M. and Duncan do an elaborate, jealous trio, and, after Duncan gets dragged off, there’s along, nervous, bloody hands solo for her (to, I believe, Gundula Janowitz’s transcendent recording of the third of Strauss’s Four Last Songs).
In the middle of this, not being able to see my program, and having forgotten the witches, I’m thinking it’s Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius I’m watching. It might as well have been. Then Hamlet and Ophelia have the hots for each other - she wears naked-colored leotard and tights, he doesn’t have to take his clothes off. She manipulates him through some complicated choreographic snares, but when rejection strikes she goes batty, acts happy plucking posies. You can’t miss “Here’s rue for you.” He dances with screechingly regretful extravagance when her cortege carries her corpse across the stage. Plenty of Bong Bong Bong Bong in the Mahler that accompanies this section, though it started out a lot like “I’ll be Seeing You.” Katerina and Petruccio battle vigorously till she mellows for no good reason. And finally, for everyone, there’s a ritual one-at-a-time run around the tree. Each character freezes and gets healed by the girl in white who caresses their limbs or walks her fingers over their faces.
Sometime early in all that you’re blankly watching those wonderfully articulate but remote bodies, and idly speculating on who might be an interesting fuck. Not very involving, though the dancers are just fine, and give themselves fully to the action. The choreography goes down to the floor, clings to it, and springs from it with the flexibility of the Graham tradition, but there’s a sluggishness in the way the legs are used in traveling. One overall impression is of stiffness, of the movement being cored for effect, of generalized dramatic gestures demanding attention in a portentous and melodramatic atmosphere. Russillo makes use of only the broadest cues of the music. He is keen on extreme, contorted poses; he cleverly knots his people together in strange two-dimensional designs. In fact, his work seems to be about making weird, spiky shapes. He’s sometimes on the mark with vivid, emblematic images like Othello, Iago and Desdemona, motionless, stretched out and linked in a frieze, with Iago gripping and kissing the hem of her robe; or Duncan and Macbeth greeting each other. Duncan’s hands are open, Macbeth’s are tightening into claws as if to strangle him. But what Russillo does best is murders. Desdemona, braced on Othello’s knees and spasmodically clutching as he strangles her. Othello and Iago, one prone on the floor, the other erect behind him, bouncing up and down with urgent, percussive violence. I could have much more happily watched a whole slew of enthusiastically vicious murders than the muscular posturing that was pretending to be drama.
At the Joyce Theater (June 5 to 17).
Mismatch
November 13
There doesn’t seen to be an unaesthetic bone in Susan Seizer’s body; she’s not the weaving, sinuous, introspective sort who seems to miraculously circumvent the rigid structures in which the body’s built. She asserts the power of her body in a straightforward way, looks to be enjoying herself, and radiates an undeniable freshness. But the two pieces she presented at Roulette, a Tribeca performance loft, were, unfortunately, more jumbled than she.
The elements in Good Instincts, a trio for herself, K.J. Holmes and Barbara Mahler, in whimsical, unalike outfits of red and gray, don’t yet click. In it Seizer puts together the gestures of common activities with brief evocations of stereotypical characters and with sudden, strong, but unsubtle physicalization of emotional states She joins these together with more abstract gestural and rhythmical material, live music on berimbau, whistle and rattle by Paula Potocki, and two kids’ taped but airy and spontaneous stories of dinosaurs and gore. Mahler moves with a kind of cool and lucid grandeur. Holmes can fling and kick with spineless ferocity, shuttle her arms with speedy sinuousness, or concentrate her attention into a pool of stillness and warmth. I liked the boldness of much of the movement, and the sensitive and resilient interplay of a couple of reflecting duets, but I couldn’t get much feeling for the piece as a whole. Why was Seizer stirring batter and wearing floppy slippers? Why was Holmes a trembling toothless hag? Or Mahler a snooty dame puckering her lips? Why was Mahler laughing as she rolled over, Holmes tense, glaring and smacking the floor with her fist?
None of this requires apology, or explanation; but I would rather not find myself asking these kinds of questions. I respect the intellectual appetite that made Seizer curious to explore how emotion might color movement, how the intrusion of an emotional display or some kind of character portrayal would affect and be affected by more abstract physical episodes. But because the performers have to work to hard to convince us, the character bits seem like Acting. The emotional displays and occasional monkey-shines come out of the blue/ How are we to look at them? Really, the piece hasn’t been fully developed or edited. And an audience that fondly responds to things before they happen is no help to a choreographer who needs and deserves the advantage of an honest and accurate reaction to take the measure of her work, and to go and do it better.
audience was even giddier and happier in the second piece, Slackrope. Seizer’s collaboration with Jennifer Miller. I guess they’re pals and wanted to work together, but their styles don’t contrast or jibe particularly well. Miller sets up the rope, secures it with wooden X-shaped supports, and tests it vigorously. Then Seizer begins: she reaches, arches, drifts with the stretch of her arm, deals with skewed balances and many moves that seem related to keeping one’s balance. Then she discards that focus in big, fat, squatting jumps, perhaps, or frenetic bounces. Miller comes in, androgynously garbed in a flat, flowered hat and purple coat/dress like a sort of medieval scholar cum clown. She demonstrates the narrow focus of a yeshiva bocher, or an urban treasure-seeker on a street with particularly good garbage. She squints through a magnifying glass, scribbles notes, drops things. Some of her paraphernalia she inattentively flings away. She stumbles over the slack rope and hangs over it by her hips while she sets up a little telescope and scratches for a safer position with her feet. Once, when she flips herself over the rope, a support topples, and through she’s safe, she crashes backwards in a mixture of pretend and real consternation.
Very with-it, very supportive, the audience laughs frequently, quite as much at what is intended as at what may actually happen. They know Miller’s funny so they laugh no matter what she does. She assumes a little of Buddy Hackett’s kind of goofiness, but there’s a kind of nervous messiness in the way events are arranged and overplayed. Everybody’s glad when she cautiously attempts to carry four cartons over the rope and whew! makes it. We’d feel no more relief for Chaplin’s Little Tramp. But my favorite moment was when she displayed a crude painting of some creature that looked like a cross between a green tapi and a long-legged alligator. Somehow that sweet mopey face looked just like her. At the end, Seizer’s on the ground, moving with big steps, balancing herself on the rope, rocking, letting chains of paper clips rain out of a cutout cloud she carries With Miller off the rope, Seizer puts one foot on it, stretches her arms up, and...she’s up! The creaking of wood and rope, like on a square-rigger in an old movie, becomes a very satisfying sound, accompanying Seizer’s now delicate and minimal arm and hand moves. Suddenly, Miller plops herself on the rope; Seizer falls off. Miller smiles at her. Together both get on, both fall off, both smile, confirming their friendship.
At Roulette (October 30).
There doesn’t seen to be an unaesthetic bone in Susan Seizer’s body; she’s not the weaving, sinuous, introspective sort who seems to miraculously circumvent the rigid structures in which the body’s built. She asserts the power of her body in a straightforward way, looks to be enjoying herself, and radiates an undeniable freshness. But the two pieces she presented at Roulette, a Tribeca performance loft, were, unfortunately, more jumbled than she.
The elements in Good Instincts, a trio for herself, K.J. Holmes and Barbara Mahler, in whimsical, unalike outfits of red and gray, don’t yet click. In it Seizer puts together the gestures of common activities with brief evocations of stereotypical characters and with sudden, strong, but unsubtle physicalization of emotional states She joins these together with more abstract gestural and rhythmical material, live music on berimbau, whistle and rattle by Paula Potocki, and two kids’ taped but airy and spontaneous stories of dinosaurs and gore. Mahler moves with a kind of cool and lucid grandeur. Holmes can fling and kick with spineless ferocity, shuttle her arms with speedy sinuousness, or concentrate her attention into a pool of stillness and warmth. I liked the boldness of much of the movement, and the sensitive and resilient interplay of a couple of reflecting duets, but I couldn’t get much feeling for the piece as a whole. Why was Seizer stirring batter and wearing floppy slippers? Why was Holmes a trembling toothless hag? Or Mahler a snooty dame puckering her lips? Why was Mahler laughing as she rolled over, Holmes tense, glaring and smacking the floor with her fist?
None of this requires apology, or explanation; but I would rather not find myself asking these kinds of questions. I respect the intellectual appetite that made Seizer curious to explore how emotion might color movement, how the intrusion of an emotional display or some kind of character portrayal would affect and be affected by more abstract physical episodes. But because the performers have to work to hard to convince us, the character bits seem like Acting. The emotional displays and occasional monkey-shines come out of the blue/ How are we to look at them? Really, the piece hasn’t been fully developed or edited. And an audience that fondly responds to things before they happen is no help to a choreographer who needs and deserves the advantage of an honest and accurate reaction to take the measure of her work, and to go and do it better.
audience was even giddier and happier in the second piece, Slackrope. Seizer’s collaboration with Jennifer Miller. I guess they’re pals and wanted to work together, but their styles don’t contrast or jibe particularly well. Miller sets up the rope, secures it with wooden X-shaped supports, and tests it vigorously. Then Seizer begins: she reaches, arches, drifts with the stretch of her arm, deals with skewed balances and many moves that seem related to keeping one’s balance. Then she discards that focus in big, fat, squatting jumps, perhaps, or frenetic bounces. Miller comes in, androgynously garbed in a flat, flowered hat and purple coat/dress like a sort of medieval scholar cum clown. She demonstrates the narrow focus of a yeshiva bocher, or an urban treasure-seeker on a street with particularly good garbage. She squints through a magnifying glass, scribbles notes, drops things. Some of her paraphernalia she inattentively flings away. She stumbles over the slack rope and hangs over it by her hips while she sets up a little telescope and scratches for a safer position with her feet. Once, when she flips herself over the rope, a support topples, and through she’s safe, she crashes backwards in a mixture of pretend and real consternation.
Very with-it, very supportive, the audience laughs frequently, quite as much at what is intended as at what may actually happen. They know Miller’s funny so they laugh no matter what she does. She assumes a little of Buddy Hackett’s kind of goofiness, but there’s a kind of nervous messiness in the way events are arranged and overplayed. Everybody’s glad when she cautiously attempts to carry four cartons over the rope and whew! makes it. We’d feel no more relief for Chaplin’s Little Tramp. But my favorite moment was when she displayed a crude painting of some creature that looked like a cross between a green tapi and a long-legged alligator. Somehow that sweet mopey face looked just like her. At the end, Seizer’s on the ground, moving with big steps, balancing herself on the rope, rocking, letting chains of paper clips rain out of a cutout cloud she carries With Miller off the rope, Seizer puts one foot on it, stretches her arms up, and...she’s up! The creaking of wood and rope, like on a square-rigger in an old movie, becomes a very satisfying sound, accompanying Seizer’s now delicate and minimal arm and hand moves. Suddenly, Miller plops herself on the rope; Seizer falls off. Miller smiles at her. Together both get on, both fall off, both smile, confirming their friendship.
At Roulette (October 30).
Rep for Today
May 22
Nancy Duncan, founder and artistic director of CoDanceCo (and a dancer with the company), has pulled off the surprisingly rare feat of building a modern dance repertory company - just two years old this month - with a vivid and flexible ensemble and an up-to-date repertory of consistently high caliber and liveliness. It must be hard to do because it doesn’t happen much. Maybe part of this neat trick is not to be a choreographer yourself, not to seek to repeat your own history in your selection of choreographers. It seems that Duncan (and whatever little birdies whisper in her ear) casts her eye wide to chose, on the whole, works of wide range and intelligence by young choreographers. Of the five works on the program, running from intense to flip, only the first was a disappointment - Nora Guthrie Rotante’s cleverly costumed Mulligan Made Me Do It, to two recordings by jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Even-textured and monotone in its thick smoothness and slow sing, by the end it seemed, well, gluey.
Susan Marshall’s sharply etched duet, Ward, made and premiered last fall, and danced with fierce eloquence by Donald Mouton and Jackie Goodrich, powerfully summed up a transforming relationship. I did wonder if Ward was the place where the piece occurs, or the man’s name, but it doesn’t matter. In the first section, we observe a measure of support o need or affection in the way he’ll hold her or she’ll climb around him or curl into his shoulder, but, in the main, he controls her, curbs her independent impulses, rushes her around. He guides her with his hand on her neck, hurries to her and lifts her so she’s carried seated on his arms. He’ll lift her up suddenly and shake her roughly at the peak of the lift. In the second part, they’re seated together on two chairs, facing us, not each other He looks dull, zonked, senile, drunk, paralyzed, something: all his life is in his arms and hands, whose activity consists of a sudden, gradually elaborated tic that develops, with her, into a patient joint accumulation of touching, pushing, re-placing, and reassuring. Their hands dart, flutter, drop instantly as motivation abruptly drains. It’s a kind of habitual conversation, full of shortcut signals of compulsions and demands, aid and rejection. In the last part, Goodrich is alone and the flood of movement so strongly governed in the first part, so shrunken in the second, pours out of her - though sprinkled with momentary pauses alert with suspicion or doubt - in twisting, open reaches, leaps, swings, rolls, throws. The chairs have been moved inconspicuously to the rear of the stage. But Mouton is missing, maybe dead: I see Goodrich’s freedom, and I know that Mouton’s absence is a huge part of the point. But what they had going was so strong that his absence looms over the dancing. Where is he? Where is he?
Jennifer Thienes’s 1984 starts with a single couple, Mouton and Lauren Dong, walking together in an angular, jerky way, maybe stuck or trapped together. When he puts his palm against the center of her back, she shoots her arms up. Four people in neutering, pale blue choirboy shifts, no, hospital tops, whirl in like sprites, line up and keel over in turn, resurrect and croak. Droll episodes mingle with couples hauling each other and falling into each other’s arms, copying each other, peeling off into plies, and parading around, all with sporadic urgency. Thienes kept things moving with an exciting kinetic drive, but I never did quite get a line on what I was watching.
Bill T. Jones put together an immensely clever,razzle-dazzle piece for a dozen dancers in multi-colored (mostly red) gloves, with something new going on every minute. Corporate Whimsy starts with a complex chorus of pattycake with chanting and occasional shrieks. Then, all kinds of fast, rhythmic jumping around and orderly hoop-de-doo accompanied by a melodic babble of gestures. Women running over men’s backs, somebody riding on somebody, a chorus f arching jumpers splashing across the back. Then the music, by Peter Wetzler and percussionist Mike Vargas, changes; no rhythm, instead there’s a buzz and newsy babble, and lots more manipulative partnering, brusque, humping, waggling stuff, sharp, jitterbuggy confrontations, gangs of leapers...It’s like a bottle of soda that never runs out of fizz, though, eventually, I began to fizzle in the face of all that.
Cansos de Trobairitz, by Douglas Varone, currently of Lar Lubovitch’s comapny, is set to Provencal love songs of the Condessa de Dia circa 1200. Seven women, divided initially into sturdy complements of three and four, move with percussive power and a quiet, wise ferocity, knit together, perhaps, by grief and firmness of intent. They walk together, turn sharply, duck down, cluster repeatedly, plain and strong in the decisiveness of their striding and in the sharp economy of their occasional clapping. There’s a pulled-up solo of little steps for a woman who stretches out, pulls back into herself. The others, who’ve drifted out, back in from the edges of the stage; but one of them rolls in, keeping a sorrowful undercurrent even in a moment of restored unity. Solos, duets, trios appear, but the women are never far from their communal reunions. We see the bend and ache and yet draw determination and pride out of it. They are a body of individuals acting together, never a chorus. If their confident steps stiffen, their fierce gestures become feeble, that temporary condition is overridden by a sense of independence and solidarity, of strength and groundedness. The image of them striding stays in front of your eyes.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (May 2 to 6).
Nancy Duncan, founder and artistic director of CoDanceCo (and a dancer with the company), has pulled off the surprisingly rare feat of building a modern dance repertory company - just two years old this month - with a vivid and flexible ensemble and an up-to-date repertory of consistently high caliber and liveliness. It must be hard to do because it doesn’t happen much. Maybe part of this neat trick is not to be a choreographer yourself, not to seek to repeat your own history in your selection of choreographers. It seems that Duncan (and whatever little birdies whisper in her ear) casts her eye wide to chose, on the whole, works of wide range and intelligence by young choreographers. Of the five works on the program, running from intense to flip, only the first was a disappointment - Nora Guthrie Rotante’s cleverly costumed Mulligan Made Me Do It, to two recordings by jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Even-textured and monotone in its thick smoothness and slow sing, by the end it seemed, well, gluey.
Susan Marshall’s sharply etched duet, Ward, made and premiered last fall, and danced with fierce eloquence by Donald Mouton and Jackie Goodrich, powerfully summed up a transforming relationship. I did wonder if Ward was the place where the piece occurs, or the man’s name, but it doesn’t matter. In the first section, we observe a measure of support o need or affection in the way he’ll hold her or she’ll climb around him or curl into his shoulder, but, in the main, he controls her, curbs her independent impulses, rushes her around. He guides her with his hand on her neck, hurries to her and lifts her so she’s carried seated on his arms. He’ll lift her up suddenly and shake her roughly at the peak of the lift. In the second part, they’re seated together on two chairs, facing us, not each other He looks dull, zonked, senile, drunk, paralyzed, something: all his life is in his arms and hands, whose activity consists of a sudden, gradually elaborated tic that develops, with her, into a patient joint accumulation of touching, pushing, re-placing, and reassuring. Their hands dart, flutter, drop instantly as motivation abruptly drains. It’s a kind of habitual conversation, full of shortcut signals of compulsions and demands, aid and rejection. In the last part, Goodrich is alone and the flood of movement so strongly governed in the first part, so shrunken in the second, pours out of her - though sprinkled with momentary pauses alert with suspicion or doubt - in twisting, open reaches, leaps, swings, rolls, throws. The chairs have been moved inconspicuously to the rear of the stage. But Mouton is missing, maybe dead: I see Goodrich’s freedom, and I know that Mouton’s absence is a huge part of the point. But what they had going was so strong that his absence looms over the dancing. Where is he? Where is he?
Jennifer Thienes’s 1984 starts with a single couple, Mouton and Lauren Dong, walking together in an angular, jerky way, maybe stuck or trapped together. When he puts his palm against the center of her back, she shoots her arms up. Four people in neutering, pale blue choirboy shifts, no, hospital tops, whirl in like sprites, line up and keel over in turn, resurrect and croak. Droll episodes mingle with couples hauling each other and falling into each other’s arms, copying each other, peeling off into plies, and parading around, all with sporadic urgency. Thienes kept things moving with an exciting kinetic drive, but I never did quite get a line on what I was watching.
Bill T. Jones put together an immensely clever,razzle-dazzle piece for a dozen dancers in multi-colored (mostly red) gloves, with something new going on every minute. Corporate Whimsy starts with a complex chorus of pattycake with chanting and occasional shrieks. Then, all kinds of fast, rhythmic jumping around and orderly hoop-de-doo accompanied by a melodic babble of gestures. Women running over men’s backs, somebody riding on somebody, a chorus f arching jumpers splashing across the back. Then the music, by Peter Wetzler and percussionist Mike Vargas, changes; no rhythm, instead there’s a buzz and newsy babble, and lots more manipulative partnering, brusque, humping, waggling stuff, sharp, jitterbuggy confrontations, gangs of leapers...It’s like a bottle of soda that never runs out of fizz, though, eventually, I began to fizzle in the face of all that.
Cansos de Trobairitz, by Douglas Varone, currently of Lar Lubovitch’s comapny, is set to Provencal love songs of the Condessa de Dia circa 1200. Seven women, divided initially into sturdy complements of three and four, move with percussive power and a quiet, wise ferocity, knit together, perhaps, by grief and firmness of intent. They walk together, turn sharply, duck down, cluster repeatedly, plain and strong in the decisiveness of their striding and in the sharp economy of their occasional clapping. There’s a pulled-up solo of little steps for a woman who stretches out, pulls back into herself. The others, who’ve drifted out, back in from the edges of the stage; but one of them rolls in, keeping a sorrowful undercurrent even in a moment of restored unity. Solos, duets, trios appear, but the women are never far from their communal reunions. We see the bend and ache and yet draw determination and pride out of it. They are a body of individuals acting together, never a chorus. If their confident steps stiffen, their fierce gestures become feeble, that temporary condition is overridden by a sense of independence and solidarity, of strength and groundedness. The image of them striding stays in front of your eyes.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (May 2 to 6).
Sorrows of the Wolfman
March 20
I get antsy when faced head-on with a group of people who are as confident and forthright as presidential candidates, eager-faced as actors paid to promote soap or soda. I expect some accomplices to be stealing my underwear while my eyes are on the stage. If that’s not the case, then I fear I’m going to be taught a lesson, and that was what happened in ZeroMoving Dance Company’s Wolf Dances, conceived, directed and choreographed by ZeroMoving ‘s director Hellmut Gottschild, with assistance from Karen Bamonte. In this far cry from The Three Little Pigs, the pigs are greedy bourgeois consumer pigs, the wolves are precious wild spirits who the pigs set to dine on when all’s done. The piece is in 11 episodes for the group - a young, enthusiastic ensemble of performers who dance and speak and chant as pig or wolf ensembles - and for Gottschild, who does a series of five lone wolf solos. Trained at Mary Wigman’s studio and a teacher there until 1967 when it was closed, Gottschild was also a founder of Gruppe Motion Berlin and Group Motion Media Theater (Philadelphia) as well as ZeroMoving.
The lean, gray-haired Gottschild has a beautiful agility and sharply accented, controlled expressiveness. But some of the material that interests him - like chantings based on shifting vowel sounds increasing and decreasing in texture and volume and pitch, or slow, blurry chanting that gradually speeds and condenses into words - doesn’t feel timely. Once it was astonishing to be so basic, it was a big deal when people said Om. In his first solo, kneeling center stage, Gottschild utters a repeating, moaning singsong rraaaeeeooosnarl that with repetition becomes an alert, urgent, agonized “Don’t cry wolf.” He does it beautifully and then, after a quiet howl, runs, staggers and clamps his teeth down on his wrist.
What makes me adamant and resistant is that this eloquent exercise involves no risk. It dries up my sympathies. It’s an entirely known quantity, evidencing a sort of “experimental” pedantry that had conviction but seems lacking in any real passion or playfulness. Still, there are elements in the solos that sometimes make them strange and magical: a moment when Gottschild lets one quietly free-swinging leg drift to a stop in its own time; or where he smacks his chest softly, smacks up his neck and face till his hands flutter gently on top of his head like a crown of antlers. Another solo builds on the accumulation of a variety of sounds of the body and the floor as bouncing and jiggling movements give way to stamps, hand smacks, sharp directional diversions, and zany repetitions. The rhythmic vocal and movement work is the strength of the piece. A girl “wolf,” wearing a black leotard and a dangling scrap of fur, lopes in, to howling sounds by three seated women. Other wolves join in the running, singly, in pairs, in trios looping and circling at a steady pace. They tighten into a smaller cluster, snapping at each other with an occasional sharp “hah” and an abrupt twist of the head or body or a small sharp backward kick. Gradually, the snarling infighting peters out and the wolves pack into a compact group and smooth their sound into a lascivious, greedy, drawn out “haaaah.” Three cheerful and vigorous men/pigs, on yellow chairs, play words and movements together in sequential and polyphonic/polymorphic routines - lifting into a sexy arch for “It’s snack time,” leaning into “rooootabaga,” melting forward on “marshmallow” - then shifting their verbal attention to air-conditioned shopping malls. Monday night ball games, clean streets, policemen, and “for honor for freedom for peace for mankind.” In a later episode, members of a happy pig work gang clank trowels and pass and toss bricks with a clatter and the rhythmic regularity of a fre-bucket line. Some of the workers eventually freeze like sculpture into the structure of the “house,” and it’s quite lovely when a wolf blows at it from a distance. Each breath pushes it sideways; each cessation settles it back in place.
But the trouble generally with the rhythms of the piece - and rhythm is the keystone of Wolf Dances - is that everything’s pretty much on a count of four, however variously accented. It’s reliable but monotonous, and, in the long run, sort of appalling. There’s a good measure of power in ZeroMoving’s delivery. But there’s an argumentative choppiness in Wolf Dance’s structure that undermines it. Since the wolf-and-pig-related verbal material comes across emphatically, you expect it to have importance beyond its sound and annoyance value, but it doesn’t do much except cue us in to the proper attitude. The wolves are finally drained of any power by three figures like archaic judges standing on chairs, who answer their enfeebled whines and howls sharply. I guess it’s sad, meant to be worrying and taken to heart as a tragic loss. But when at the final, ultimate, very end, the cast repeats a warning the piece begins with - “we’re in trouble. You’re in trouble” - I resent their admonishment all over again.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (March 8 to 11).
I get antsy when faced head-on with a group of people who are as confident and forthright as presidential candidates, eager-faced as actors paid to promote soap or soda. I expect some accomplices to be stealing my underwear while my eyes are on the stage. If that’s not the case, then I fear I’m going to be taught a lesson, and that was what happened in ZeroMoving Dance Company’s Wolf Dances, conceived, directed and choreographed by ZeroMoving ‘s director Hellmut Gottschild, with assistance from Karen Bamonte. In this far cry from The Three Little Pigs, the pigs are greedy bourgeois consumer pigs, the wolves are precious wild spirits who the pigs set to dine on when all’s done. The piece is in 11 episodes for the group - a young, enthusiastic ensemble of performers who dance and speak and chant as pig or wolf ensembles - and for Gottschild, who does a series of five lone wolf solos. Trained at Mary Wigman’s studio and a teacher there until 1967 when it was closed, Gottschild was also a founder of Gruppe Motion Berlin and Group Motion Media Theater (Philadelphia) as well as ZeroMoving.
The lean, gray-haired Gottschild has a beautiful agility and sharply accented, controlled expressiveness. But some of the material that interests him - like chantings based on shifting vowel sounds increasing and decreasing in texture and volume and pitch, or slow, blurry chanting that gradually speeds and condenses into words - doesn’t feel timely. Once it was astonishing to be so basic, it was a big deal when people said Om. In his first solo, kneeling center stage, Gottschild utters a repeating, moaning singsong rraaaeeeooosnarl that with repetition becomes an alert, urgent, agonized “Don’t cry wolf.” He does it beautifully and then, after a quiet howl, runs, staggers and clamps his teeth down on his wrist.
What makes me adamant and resistant is that this eloquent exercise involves no risk. It dries up my sympathies. It’s an entirely known quantity, evidencing a sort of “experimental” pedantry that had conviction but seems lacking in any real passion or playfulness. Still, there are elements in the solos that sometimes make them strange and magical: a moment when Gottschild lets one quietly free-swinging leg drift to a stop in its own time; or where he smacks his chest softly, smacks up his neck and face till his hands flutter gently on top of his head like a crown of antlers. Another solo builds on the accumulation of a variety of sounds of the body and the floor as bouncing and jiggling movements give way to stamps, hand smacks, sharp directional diversions, and zany repetitions. The rhythmic vocal and movement work is the strength of the piece. A girl “wolf,” wearing a black leotard and a dangling scrap of fur, lopes in, to howling sounds by three seated women. Other wolves join in the running, singly, in pairs, in trios looping and circling at a steady pace. They tighten into a smaller cluster, snapping at each other with an occasional sharp “hah” and an abrupt twist of the head or body or a small sharp backward kick. Gradually, the snarling infighting peters out and the wolves pack into a compact group and smooth their sound into a lascivious, greedy, drawn out “haaaah.” Three cheerful and vigorous men/pigs, on yellow chairs, play words and movements together in sequential and polyphonic/polymorphic routines - lifting into a sexy arch for “It’s snack time,” leaning into “rooootabaga,” melting forward on “marshmallow” - then shifting their verbal attention to air-conditioned shopping malls. Monday night ball games, clean streets, policemen, and “for honor for freedom for peace for mankind.” In a later episode, members of a happy pig work gang clank trowels and pass and toss bricks with a clatter and the rhythmic regularity of a fre-bucket line. Some of the workers eventually freeze like sculpture into the structure of the “house,” and it’s quite lovely when a wolf blows at it from a distance. Each breath pushes it sideways; each cessation settles it back in place.
But the trouble generally with the rhythms of the piece - and rhythm is the keystone of Wolf Dances - is that everything’s pretty much on a count of four, however variously accented. It’s reliable but monotonous, and, in the long run, sort of appalling. There’s a good measure of power in ZeroMoving’s delivery. But there’s an argumentative choppiness in Wolf Dance’s structure that undermines it. Since the wolf-and-pig-related verbal material comes across emphatically, you expect it to have importance beyond its sound and annoyance value, but it doesn’t do much except cue us in to the proper attitude. The wolves are finally drained of any power by three figures like archaic judges standing on chairs, who answer their enfeebled whines and howls sharply. I guess it’s sad, meant to be worrying and taken to heart as a tragic loss. But when at the final, ultimate, very end, the cast repeats a warning the piece begins with - “we’re in trouble. You’re in trouble” - I resent their admonishment all over again.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (March 8 to 11).
The Impossible Dream
November 5
A kid who planned to be president and grew up two blocks from Richard Nixon’s house, performance artist
Tim Miller tries to grapple with an America that hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to. How come? he wants to know. A gargantuan project, his Democracy in America is a vigorous feat of coordination - but like anything that tries to leap and slide every which way at once, it can hardly help but go splat.
With a cast of 25, plus slides, video, music, speaking, Democracy is a three-ring circus. It combines a semi-historical parade, comments on the puzzling issues of today, the disasters and stereotypical images of the past with an occasional, stumbling and inarticulate personal reminiscence. Miller buries us in images. He has approached his sprawling subject in a humorless, all-encompassing way that has prevented him from getting any useful purchase on it. Bloated with misdirected energy, in the end it’s not only scattered, but sappy and sad. One wall of the LePercq is plastered with an arc of giant dollars; a car cutout in fluorescent colors floats just beyond. Nothing in the performance has such flamboyance. A huge, rabbit-eared TV set onstage offers vertical roll and snow, and later regales us with fragments of dancing, of Miller touring the country and doing interviews with “people in all walks of life.” A large movie screen shows us a mammoth dollar sign so big it bleeds off the screen, and then blown-up currency details like George Washington’s forehead, D.C.’s Olympian architecture, iconic statuary of idealized America nobility, the Statue of Liberty wrapped in scaffolding, the Jefferson Memorial building, family snapshots, patch-quilt designs, a gallery of vintage portraits, photos of the JFK assassination.
Miller appears in a rumpled suit, hat, like an immigrant just off the boat, recites phrases and maxims from a little black book: “I am an American. I can think as I please...” till voices around the room overwhelm him. People rush in from all over, carrying USA Today. They freeze, drop their papers helter-skelter. The group’s movements are both mechanical and angry, intense and diagrammatic. People stalk, pace, hurry. They’re caricatures working and playing: typing, rowing, machine-gunning, taking pictures. A guy in a yarmulke loses his pants. A lady in white sings the National Anthem. Miller runs in, twisting and shaking, perches momentarily on tiptoe before crashing to the floor. On the TV we see Jimmy Stewart glowingly soaking up inspiration from a marble Thomas Jefferson in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Three mature women advance slightly from the back of the stage in a little, smoothing-things-out dance as Miller gabbles about America. And there he is on the TV, walking in front of the White House fence, and again, I think, a gleaming blue figure dancing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. People slump on, stand, lurch. The three ladies sit at a table playing cards and spouting anecdotes. Forming two groups, the others walk in circles like zombies. As a couple plays awkward notes on electronic piano and plucked fiddle, the people stagger together, like near-dead marathoners, in a crude attempt at a square dance.
Important dates - 1492, 1776, 1848 - parade across the back in big red numbers, As the music thumps hysterically, the performers flee the stage, some of them climbing a ladder to a catwalk, from which they soon drop blots of color on a plastic drop cloth while Miller delivers an incoherent explanation - something about a motor, something about his grandfather - of how come, maybe things are as they are. I like the few occasions that remind me of the elementary school patriotism of Ballad for Americans or The House I Live In. I’m interested in the episodes that are schematic, clear-cut, academic, even military. Like when a dozen people shuffle in with wooden posts, drop them one at a time, and Miller and Carol McDowell run, jump, tap, and pick their way over them as if they’re rock-hopping a brook. The squad of 12 marches forward, thumping their posts till Miller and McDowell are trapped against the footlights.
Later, the three older women, one with a bullhorn and all in trench coats, hats and sunglasses, order everybody into line for an interrogation. Name? Social security number? Sex? Who were your heroes? What are your hopes? While responding, the interviewees/prisoners take off their clothes, down to their underwear. A final question - How do you feel about your country? - gives everybody shutmouth. The ladies hand out properly folded flags, which the victims lie down with, using them as pillows. On screen, we see the wall of names that is the Vietnam Wall. On the video screen, people answer Miller’s questions about Democracy, and their answers are profoundly depressing to me. Nobody seems to have any idea what democracy is, let alone any understanding of how difficult it is to make it work. Their general ignorance makes it seem miraculous that we have a government that’s even remotely tolerable. As expressed here, the freedom we imagine we prize seems to be merely the freedom to be stupid and lazy and self-righteous. Here, too, we revel in our right to have opinions about every damn thing without having any experience or knowledge, without knowing how to think. After cartoon reenactments of presidential murders, a land rush to divide the stage with strips of tape into a map of 48 states and unroll on it runners of macadam highways, Miller feebly offers platitudes and nicey-nicey sentiments as his hope for the future. Truth. Choice. Research. Fairness. Money. Justice.
I believe it’s important to find a way to keep going, to do something that makes sense,”” he says. Okay by me. I think life is worthwhile, and doesn’t particularly require excuses even when it’s lousy. But I despise the crybaby way this wraps up. Miler announces the values and goals that survive his stewpot without any imaginative force, without much heart. A little girl comes out. Our innocent hope for the future? A little child shall lead us? There appears to be no irony here. With a whimper, Miller returns us to the realm of self-delusion where we’re always the good guys. Isn’t that one of the ways we got in trouble in the first place?
At Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Lepercq Space (October 24 to 30).
A kid who planned to be president and grew up two blocks from Richard Nixon’s house, performance artist
Tim Miller tries to grapple with an America that hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to. How come? he wants to know. A gargantuan project, his Democracy in America is a vigorous feat of coordination - but like anything that tries to leap and slide every which way at once, it can hardly help but go splat.
With a cast of 25, plus slides, video, music, speaking, Democracy is a three-ring circus. It combines a semi-historical parade, comments on the puzzling issues of today, the disasters and stereotypical images of the past with an occasional, stumbling and inarticulate personal reminiscence. Miller buries us in images. He has approached his sprawling subject in a humorless, all-encompassing way that has prevented him from getting any useful purchase on it. Bloated with misdirected energy, in the end it’s not only scattered, but sappy and sad. One wall of the LePercq is plastered with an arc of giant dollars; a car cutout in fluorescent colors floats just beyond. Nothing in the performance has such flamboyance. A huge, rabbit-eared TV set onstage offers vertical roll and snow, and later regales us with fragments of dancing, of Miller touring the country and doing interviews with “people in all walks of life.” A large movie screen shows us a mammoth dollar sign so big it bleeds off the screen, and then blown-up currency details like George Washington’s forehead, D.C.’s Olympian architecture, iconic statuary of idealized America nobility, the Statue of Liberty wrapped in scaffolding, the Jefferson Memorial building, family snapshots, patch-quilt designs, a gallery of vintage portraits, photos of the JFK assassination.
Miller appears in a rumpled suit, hat, like an immigrant just off the boat, recites phrases and maxims from a little black book: “I am an American. I can think as I please...” till voices around the room overwhelm him. People rush in from all over, carrying USA Today. They freeze, drop their papers helter-skelter. The group’s movements are both mechanical and angry, intense and diagrammatic. People stalk, pace, hurry. They’re caricatures working and playing: typing, rowing, machine-gunning, taking pictures. A guy in a yarmulke loses his pants. A lady in white sings the National Anthem. Miller runs in, twisting and shaking, perches momentarily on tiptoe before crashing to the floor. On the TV we see Jimmy Stewart glowingly soaking up inspiration from a marble Thomas Jefferson in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Three mature women advance slightly from the back of the stage in a little, smoothing-things-out dance as Miller gabbles about America. And there he is on the TV, walking in front of the White House fence, and again, I think, a gleaming blue figure dancing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. People slump on, stand, lurch. The three ladies sit at a table playing cards and spouting anecdotes. Forming two groups, the others walk in circles like zombies. As a couple plays awkward notes on electronic piano and plucked fiddle, the people stagger together, like near-dead marathoners, in a crude attempt at a square dance.
Important dates - 1492, 1776, 1848 - parade across the back in big red numbers, As the music thumps hysterically, the performers flee the stage, some of them climbing a ladder to a catwalk, from which they soon drop blots of color on a plastic drop cloth while Miller delivers an incoherent explanation - something about a motor, something about his grandfather - of how come, maybe things are as they are. I like the few occasions that remind me of the elementary school patriotism of Ballad for Americans or The House I Live In. I’m interested in the episodes that are schematic, clear-cut, academic, even military. Like when a dozen people shuffle in with wooden posts, drop them one at a time, and Miller and Carol McDowell run, jump, tap, and pick their way over them as if they’re rock-hopping a brook. The squad of 12 marches forward, thumping their posts till Miller and McDowell are trapped against the footlights.
Later, the three older women, one with a bullhorn and all in trench coats, hats and sunglasses, order everybody into line for an interrogation. Name? Social security number? Sex? Who were your heroes? What are your hopes? While responding, the interviewees/prisoners take off their clothes, down to their underwear. A final question - How do you feel about your country? - gives everybody shutmouth. The ladies hand out properly folded flags, which the victims lie down with, using them as pillows. On screen, we see the wall of names that is the Vietnam Wall. On the video screen, people answer Miller’s questions about Democracy, and their answers are profoundly depressing to me. Nobody seems to have any idea what democracy is, let alone any understanding of how difficult it is to make it work. Their general ignorance makes it seem miraculous that we have a government that’s even remotely tolerable. As expressed here, the freedom we imagine we prize seems to be merely the freedom to be stupid and lazy and self-righteous. Here, too, we revel in our right to have opinions about every damn thing without having any experience or knowledge, without knowing how to think. After cartoon reenactments of presidential murders, a land rush to divide the stage with strips of tape into a map of 48 states and unroll on it runners of macadam highways, Miller feebly offers platitudes and nicey-nicey sentiments as his hope for the future. Truth. Choice. Research. Fairness. Money. Justice.
I believe it’s important to find a way to keep going, to do something that makes sense,”” he says. Okay by me. I think life is worthwhile, and doesn’t particularly require excuses even when it’s lousy. But I despise the crybaby way this wraps up. Miler announces the values and goals that survive his stewpot without any imaginative force, without much heart. A little girl comes out. Our innocent hope for the future? A little child shall lead us? There appears to be no irony here. With a whimper, Miller returns us to the realm of self-delusion where we’re always the good guys. Isn’t that one of the ways we got in trouble in the first place?
At Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Lepercq Space (October 24 to 30).
The Tenderfoot Gang
March 13
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland’s Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders at the Kitchen had that amiable roominess that allows viewers to hook into what they like and let whatever doesn’t especially grab them slide by. It’s so easy, especially when the performers have such affability and charm. Collage is perhaps too formal a description for a conversational and apparently casual piece like Cowboys, which mingles child and grown-up imaginings (not so dissimilar) of cowboys and the frontier, with cozy, incidental humor of the everyday sort, with film of Urban Western Rodeo founder Carlos Foster speaking on a hard-to-hear tape, and with jumping and crawling, sliding and scrambling, grabbing and hanging-on movement for Houston-Jones and Holland, who set up one tangle after another with each other. And Yvonne Meier who slices into the pieces in a diagonal beam of light somewhere past the middle of it, then settles in to complain about the deprivations of a cowgirl - she’s got to wear a skirt, she doesn’t get to wear cowboy boots, she doesn’t get a rifle...
Holland has arranged the physical, visual setup at the Kitchen to be rather elegant and spacious. Its areas seems to expand in sections going into the distance. The two pillars in the space divide the fore and middle-ground. A screen of clear plastic sheets - upon which projections of bleary clouds, for instance, or a red crescent moon appear - shields the back of the space. But through the plastic we can see two cowboys drinking and playing cards during much of the piece, and through doors in the wall behind the screen, we see a cowboy, no, a cowperson, hanging. Throughout the room various objects are arranged or scattered: cutout cacti, ladders, a child’s phonograph (maybe it’s not a child’s, but it’s small and the sound is lousy), something that looks like a tumbleweed made of barbed wire, but which I later think is made of grapevine, a chest, a wooden stepladder, a detour sawhorse topped with a yellow blinker, a refrigerator carton lying on its side. A cowboy sits sleeping with his hat tipped over his eyes. The phonograph plays “Turkey in the Straw,” “Streets of Laredo,” Lone Ranger music.... The refrigerator box crashes over. A man with rattling spurs and a rifle walks out, saunters over, and changes the record. Is it Glenn Ford? No, it’s Holland. He pulls a tied-up body out of the carton, drags it across the floor, turns down the volume on the phonograph. He starts telling us about going to the toy store to buy a little wind up cowboy and Indian on horseback: the cowboy scratches along in a semi-straight line, the Indian drifts into a circle. Holland keeps winding them up and setting them on the floor, gabbing about returning them to the toy store. The Indian can’t ride straight. “Maybe it’s my attitude,” says Holland. Houston-Jones, meantime, is the tied-up fellow squirming and struggling around on the floor. “At this point, I’m supposed to untie Ishmael,” confides Holland, but he;s more interested in trying the toys one more time. “I’m supposed to do it now,” he repeats in a bit, “but I’m going to play a record.” When he finally does release Houston-Jones, he doesn’t make it easy. He throws a knife into the floor. Houston-Jones, facing back, works his way to the upright blade. But just as he gets close, Holland says, “This is where he earns it,” and pulls him back to where he started.
Eventually, H-J inches back to the knife, and cuts his bonds to the beat of the music. We’ve seen ourselves in all the cowboy roles, molded them to suit our own imaginations. But it’s a cinch to feel affection for other people’s versions, particularly when they favor antic grace over stiffness or brutality. There are no secrets. Everything’s laid out. “Up a hair with the crickets,” says H-J and the sound is augmented. We’re all friends here and we’re all capable of going along with a fantasy. Next, there’s gunfight practice with a pointed finger, then with a gun. H-J sticks it through his belt loop. On Main Street he’d be dead 63 times before he’d get it out. H-J gets shot, and falls quivering in semi-endless death throes with a coda for one foot vibrating hard against the floor. Then they dive to the floor for their guns in beautiful, eloquent, ridiculous slow-motion. Once is not enough. Holland is always fastest. He keep shooting H-J but H-J doesn’t die and keeps n coming. Holland whacks him with the rifle. H-J chokes Holland against the rifle barrel. Then Holland dives over Houston-Jones to start a jumping, falling, crashing, skittering-all-over fight. While Holland runs around with his lariat, Houston-Jones chats about the research for the piece. Going to the Dance Collection at the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts and looking at a video of Oklahoma, along with “a leather freak watching anything by Nureyev and a bunch of college kids watching Pilobolus.” They were looking for videotapes of a black rodeo in Boley, Oklahoma. Instead, they learned that most Western movement for dance has to be done in second position plie to suggest riding a horse. We hear about H-J’s experience trying to ride Foster’s horse, Santiago, while Holland fusses nervously, doing little side-to-side stepping shuffling moves. Seems the horse wasn’t in any mood to take on amateurs. Then Meier enters - coiling, snapping, dipping to banjo music, within her narrowly defined path of light. She speeds up, twisting and falling and kicking and whipping ever which way. The beam fades, and H-J and Holland and Meier tune themselves together and apart in slow, swiveling moves. The music of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” punches them into stronger and more dynamic movement - jumping, kicking, free-form crashing, with lots of rolling over and pretend dying.
“Where’s my spurs?” complains Meier, afterwards. “Where’s my hat?” “How come I got no gun?” she grumbles in her German-accented English “This is a sexist number,” she decides. Then, lying on her back in the dark, she slowly sings “Red River Valley” in German. Even I can understand it. A little girl walks around lighting candles at tiny creche-like stable-altars. A boy further away runs a small electric train around the usual oval track. H-J and Holland are making softly curling, dying movements. The lights in the altars gleam. Carlos Foster, on tape, is saying something very important about authority. Authority? It’s a word from another world. Lulled and tickled, I hardly know what it means. The warm personalities of the performers, their comfort within the loose structure of the dance, the merging of amusing, occasional details with the fancies of fictional history, the agreeable absence of anything rally personal or touchy combined with the very potent intimacy of performers who’ve worked a lot together - all these gives Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders the translucent depth of a world you’re not in a hurry to leave. And, like diving to see the creatures of the reef, you’ve got to come up slowly when the air runs out.
At the Kitchen (February 23 to 26).
Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland’s Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders at the Kitchen had that amiable roominess that allows viewers to hook into what they like and let whatever doesn’t especially grab them slide by. It’s so easy, especially when the performers have such affability and charm. Collage is perhaps too formal a description for a conversational and apparently casual piece like Cowboys, which mingles child and grown-up imaginings (not so dissimilar) of cowboys and the frontier, with cozy, incidental humor of the everyday sort, with film of Urban Western Rodeo founder Carlos Foster speaking on a hard-to-hear tape, and with jumping and crawling, sliding and scrambling, grabbing and hanging-on movement for Houston-Jones and Holland, who set up one tangle after another with each other. And Yvonne Meier who slices into the pieces in a diagonal beam of light somewhere past the middle of it, then settles in to complain about the deprivations of a cowgirl - she’s got to wear a skirt, she doesn’t get to wear cowboy boots, she doesn’t get a rifle...
Holland has arranged the physical, visual setup at the Kitchen to be rather elegant and spacious. Its areas seems to expand in sections going into the distance. The two pillars in the space divide the fore and middle-ground. A screen of clear plastic sheets - upon which projections of bleary clouds, for instance, or a red crescent moon appear - shields the back of the space. But through the plastic we can see two cowboys drinking and playing cards during much of the piece, and through doors in the wall behind the screen, we see a cowboy, no, a cowperson, hanging. Throughout the room various objects are arranged or scattered: cutout cacti, ladders, a child’s phonograph (maybe it’s not a child’s, but it’s small and the sound is lousy), something that looks like a tumbleweed made of barbed wire, but which I later think is made of grapevine, a chest, a wooden stepladder, a detour sawhorse topped with a yellow blinker, a refrigerator carton lying on its side. A cowboy sits sleeping with his hat tipped over his eyes. The phonograph plays “Turkey in the Straw,” “Streets of Laredo,” Lone Ranger music.... The refrigerator box crashes over. A man with rattling spurs and a rifle walks out, saunters over, and changes the record. Is it Glenn Ford? No, it’s Holland. He pulls a tied-up body out of the carton, drags it across the floor, turns down the volume on the phonograph. He starts telling us about going to the toy store to buy a little wind up cowboy and Indian on horseback: the cowboy scratches along in a semi-straight line, the Indian drifts into a circle. Holland keeps winding them up and setting them on the floor, gabbing about returning them to the toy store. The Indian can’t ride straight. “Maybe it’s my attitude,” says Holland. Houston-Jones, meantime, is the tied-up fellow squirming and struggling around on the floor. “At this point, I’m supposed to untie Ishmael,” confides Holland, but he;s more interested in trying the toys one more time. “I’m supposed to do it now,” he repeats in a bit, “but I’m going to play a record.” When he finally does release Houston-Jones, he doesn’t make it easy. He throws a knife into the floor. Houston-Jones, facing back, works his way to the upright blade. But just as he gets close, Holland says, “This is where he earns it,” and pulls him back to where he started.
Eventually, H-J inches back to the knife, and cuts his bonds to the beat of the music. We’ve seen ourselves in all the cowboy roles, molded them to suit our own imaginations. But it’s a cinch to feel affection for other people’s versions, particularly when they favor antic grace over stiffness or brutality. There are no secrets. Everything’s laid out. “Up a hair with the crickets,” says H-J and the sound is augmented. We’re all friends here and we’re all capable of going along with a fantasy. Next, there’s gunfight practice with a pointed finger, then with a gun. H-J sticks it through his belt loop. On Main Street he’d be dead 63 times before he’d get it out. H-J gets shot, and falls quivering in semi-endless death throes with a coda for one foot vibrating hard against the floor. Then they dive to the floor for their guns in beautiful, eloquent, ridiculous slow-motion. Once is not enough. Holland is always fastest. He keep shooting H-J but H-J doesn’t die and keeps n coming. Holland whacks him with the rifle. H-J chokes Holland against the rifle barrel. Then Holland dives over Houston-Jones to start a jumping, falling, crashing, skittering-all-over fight. While Holland runs around with his lariat, Houston-Jones chats about the research for the piece. Going to the Dance Collection at the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts and looking at a video of Oklahoma, along with “a leather freak watching anything by Nureyev and a bunch of college kids watching Pilobolus.” They were looking for videotapes of a black rodeo in Boley, Oklahoma. Instead, they learned that most Western movement for dance has to be done in second position plie to suggest riding a horse. We hear about H-J’s experience trying to ride Foster’s horse, Santiago, while Holland fusses nervously, doing little side-to-side stepping shuffling moves. Seems the horse wasn’t in any mood to take on amateurs. Then Meier enters - coiling, snapping, dipping to banjo music, within her narrowly defined path of light. She speeds up, twisting and falling and kicking and whipping ever which way. The beam fades, and H-J and Holland and Meier tune themselves together and apart in slow, swiveling moves. The music of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” punches them into stronger and more dynamic movement - jumping, kicking, free-form crashing, with lots of rolling over and pretend dying.
“Where’s my spurs?” complains Meier, afterwards. “Where’s my hat?” “How come I got no gun?” she grumbles in her German-accented English “This is a sexist number,” she decides. Then, lying on her back in the dark, she slowly sings “Red River Valley” in German. Even I can understand it. A little girl walks around lighting candles at tiny creche-like stable-altars. A boy further away runs a small electric train around the usual oval track. H-J and Holland are making softly curling, dying movements. The lights in the altars gleam. Carlos Foster, on tape, is saying something very important about authority. Authority? It’s a word from another world. Lulled and tickled, I hardly know what it means. The warm personalities of the performers, their comfort within the loose structure of the dance, the merging of amusing, occasional details with the fancies of fictional history, the agreeable absence of anything rally personal or touchy combined with the very potent intimacy of performers who’ve worked a lot together - all these gives Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders the translucent depth of a world you’re not in a hurry to leave. And, like diving to see the creatures of the reef, you’ve got to come up slowly when the air runs out.
At the Kitchen (February 23 to 26).
Ulysses Dove: Beginning Again, Again
Ulysses Dove came back from Europe to teach his Night Shade to the Ailey company, which premieres it July 16. Now he’s hoping to stick around. When we meet, he’s on a bike, with a big smile and his hair dripping in Michael Jackson ringlets, looking like one of those sporty people in soft drink commercials who just bops through life and never works. For the past three years, he was assistant director of the Groupe de Recherche Choreographique de L’Opera de Paris (GRCOP) under Jacques Garnier. His administrative responsibilities were growing, taking time from choreography, at the same time that new directions at the Opera were making the status of the GRCOP unclear. There was a move, or anyway a thought, to integrate the modern company into the grand ballet, the big company. Which sounds like one of those ideas that might work on paper but nowhere else. Anyway, Dove felt like it was time to make a clean break. And start all over again.
Dove first danced with Merce Cunningham, for about three years, but left in 1973. “I stopped dancing altogether,” he says. “I couldn’t see any horizons. I thought I should move into another whole area. It had been such a thorough working experience with Merce. Essentially he formed me, trained me. It was a very difficult separation.” Dove just assumed that doing something else meant no more dancing, so he went home to his family in South Carolina. Then, still uncertain, he returned to New York. “I had no real idea of dancing again. But I met Anna Sokolow when I did her Rooms with Mary Anthony’s company. That was a new awakening! I saw that there were other paths in dance than those I’d known. And Pearl Lang saw me - I’d danced with her years ago - and said she’d had a catastrophe, someone was deported or something, and she said please please please come and fill in.” And Ivy Clarke, who was administrator of the Ailey company, saw him in rehearsal and asked him to come up. I recall Dove’s bright energy and clarity in Cunningham’s dances, and the dramatic force of his dancing with the Ailey company. Dove had an emotional intensity that came out purely through the movement. And that harmonious expressiveness - without any kind of overlay or attitude - is a quality he has always admired in other dancers.
In going from Cunningham to Ailey, Dove did a complete turnaround to a more lush and passionate dance vocabulary. “No,” he says, “I went from Merce to Anna. That was the big change. I remember the first rehearsal. I couldn’t believe the power in this small woman. The force. The drive.” “Well,” I say, “you wouldn’t have to spend two years trying to figure out what her piece was about.” “With Anna? Noooo. And at that point, emotionally, I couldn’t have been left on my own. She was very clear about what she wanted, and she was very strong about getting it from you. She knew what she wanted and she wouldn’t adept anything less. If you had it - and I did - it was very easy to give it to her.”
When the Ailey company wanted him, Dove wasn’t sure he wanted to be in another company under contract for a whole year, and he still wasn’t certain that he even wanted to dance. But things snowballed. “There I was. And there I stayed for seven years.” Then, in 1980, when he was thinking of taking a leave, Jacques Garnier asked him to come to the Paris Opera where he was starting a modern dance company drawn from younger members of the Paris Opera Ballet. “It sounded attractive. I wouldn’t have to fit into somebody else’s shoes. I went for one year - and stayed for three. “I got to do so many things. My whole dance experience had been overbalanced with performing. I’d been performing for ten years. And I’d never really taught before. I’d never rehearsed anybody’s piece other than my own. I’d never choreographed on a group that I’d also trained. The first year was nothing but challenges.” Dove started making dances in college - at the University of Wisconsin, and then Bennington. “So they made you make dances?” I ask. “Whether you wanted to or not. But the first piece I made after that was with Merce in California. One evening - it was the last performance - he did a huge event where the space was divided into parts and we could do our own work or learn parts from other people. I made a short piece for myself and Meg Harper and learned some things from other people and had a great old time.” The second time was when the Ailey company was going to South America. He’d hurt his back and couldn’t go, and Ailey suggested he do a piece for the second company. And when it turned out well, Dove did a solo for Judith Jamison. He made his next three pieces in Europe.
“I’ve been going at a pace of one piece a year since 1979. Now I want to step up that pace, What I’m gonna do,” he drawls, “is make lots of ballets everywhere. Do it and do it and do it. I want to arrive at that point where I’ve done 25 ballets. I saw people work, as they passed through the Opera, and you can see 25 years of experience in how quickly some people make decisions because they know. “I’ve always liked to do pieces, but I was made to do them for so long. At Bennington the composition classes opened up your way of thinking. But they were geared toward a certain kind of product. Those who performed to that kind of product - very non-dance in terms of movement - were praised and those who didn’t, weren’t. The two things were kind of antipathetic. Is that an English word, antipathique? “Every piece I do is part of a bigger piece in my mind. In the first piece I did in Paris, Pieces of Dreams, I wanted to evoke a sense of everyday dreaming while you’re awake. It was very open and spacious and everything was white. We used lots of color in the lights so that people never seemed to be in a stage space. Because everything was white, we could change the color of the costumes, we could keep the costumes one color, the floor another and the background another. We could make everything blue. It was very ethereal. In the next piece I wanted the opposite. I wanted to enclose the dance. I wanted everything as dark as possible, everything black.”
Night Shade, made for members of the GRCOP, was important for Dove because it was his first time working with the same group twice. This time, he wanted to do the piece in conjunction with the dancers. “I knew what I wanted to do, and I’d decided on the working process, but I didn’t figure it all out. Of the four girls, one got pregnant. Another girl broke her foot just before rehearsals started. And another girl broke her toe the first day. The new dancers didn’t know me from the man in the moon. I couldn’t do anything I’d planned. It was a very difficult experience, but it made me grip grip grip onto my ideas.” At this stage in his career, Dove sets out quite consciously to learn something from every piece. “For the most part, when I go to do something, the line of the ballet, and sometimes almost all the movement, is set.” He can’t stand to come in and work with people and see what happens. “It’s just too boring for me. I like speed,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I like for it to move, I like for it to go. You know, if you try something, and you try something, and you have absolutely no idea, I just go crazy. So I always have something planned.”
“But then things change. For example, when I did my first piece at the Opera, I showed this girl this solo. I was so excited - I wanted her to do it. I’d had her in mind, She was perfect. And we got about halfway through and she sat down on the floor and started crying. Of course, she could do a lot more than she thought, but there were things she absolutely couldn’t do. So what we did turned out to be a merger between what I wanted in this ideal state, and what she could handle. And still feel good. People should feel good about being on stage. Not like they’re going to the mines. Anyway, suddenly the dance is somewhere between she and I. I won’t accept her doing something that, in the end, has nothing to do with what I started out to do."
“If no one inspires me above and beyond my basic plan, then we go ahead with that. But if they turn me on, then we follow the energy that’s happening. I’m sure if some of the dancers I’ve worked with read this, they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah? I don’t remember that! I remember you forcing me 98 times to do the same thing.’ “When I go into work, I try to keep my eyes glued on the choreography, because sometimes dancers can take you to another realm. Some person’s qualities just hypnotize you and suddenly you’ve forgotten completely what you set out to do. You wind up thinking, ‘What’s that about?’ Take Chris Jensen, who used to be with the Netherlands Dance Theater and the Basel Ballet. His quality of movement completely fascinated me. Day after day, for five, 10 minutes, we would just go! Then I’d look at it and realize that it had nothing to do with what I wanted. Throw it out! Actually, it drove him crazy. He absorbed what I wanted to do so completely, and everything that I gave him just looked so wonderful, that I thought, ‘Oh, great! I’ll just keep it in.’” “You think,” I suggest, “If he’s so wonderful, I must be a genius?”
“You have to be hard on yourself. Dancers can really inspire you. And they can really lead you astray.” When Dove left the Opera, he made pieces for the Basel Ballet, and the Cullberg Ballet, and has been asked back for both. For Basel he did his first piece for lots of people, 18 people. (“Eighteen possibilities, 18 personalities, 18 temperaments.”) He’s going on to the Dutch National Ballet and Batsheva. “Every place I’ve been thus far I’ve been asked back., Everything in that direction is positive. It’s life’s blood. Keeps you going.”
“Working in Europe,” says Dove, “has been a huge influence on my own vision. A lot of people in Europe - whether you like what they do or not - are completely dedicated to what they want to do. And what they want to do is a real and true expression of what they feel about life. About anything, about everything. It’s not just making dances: you express yourself as a human being through your art. “But home is home. I’m not an expatriate. This is where I grew up in terms of dance. This is where my values were formulated. If I’m going to do something, somehow I feel that this is the place to do it. And there’s an energy here I needed to come back to. A drive in the dancers themselves. I wanted to work again with dancers who have that long-term experience in modern dance, so we can have more of the same mindset, where I can tell them what I want and not teach."
“This is the beginning for me, and I want to enjoy being at the beginning. I want to enjoy having the whole experience open to me. I want to enjoy being influenced by people. I make no pretension to being an old pro. But I do have a certain experience and a certain vision and I’ve come back to make it happen. I guess it’s time to go beyond. I feel like there should be no limits in terms of movement - no physical limits, no emotional limits, no spiritual limits. I think there’s got to be a way of training people to use their bodies where they can do the impossible. Daily. I really do.”
Dove first danced with Merce Cunningham, for about three years, but left in 1973. “I stopped dancing altogether,” he says. “I couldn’t see any horizons. I thought I should move into another whole area. It had been such a thorough working experience with Merce. Essentially he formed me, trained me. It was a very difficult separation.” Dove just assumed that doing something else meant no more dancing, so he went home to his family in South Carolina. Then, still uncertain, he returned to New York. “I had no real idea of dancing again. But I met Anna Sokolow when I did her Rooms with Mary Anthony’s company. That was a new awakening! I saw that there were other paths in dance than those I’d known. And Pearl Lang saw me - I’d danced with her years ago - and said she’d had a catastrophe, someone was deported or something, and she said please please please come and fill in.” And Ivy Clarke, who was administrator of the Ailey company, saw him in rehearsal and asked him to come up. I recall Dove’s bright energy and clarity in Cunningham’s dances, and the dramatic force of his dancing with the Ailey company. Dove had an emotional intensity that came out purely through the movement. And that harmonious expressiveness - without any kind of overlay or attitude - is a quality he has always admired in other dancers.
In going from Cunningham to Ailey, Dove did a complete turnaround to a more lush and passionate dance vocabulary. “No,” he says, “I went from Merce to Anna. That was the big change. I remember the first rehearsal. I couldn’t believe the power in this small woman. The force. The drive.” “Well,” I say, “you wouldn’t have to spend two years trying to figure out what her piece was about.” “With Anna? Noooo. And at that point, emotionally, I couldn’t have been left on my own. She was very clear about what she wanted, and she was very strong about getting it from you. She knew what she wanted and she wouldn’t adept anything less. If you had it - and I did - it was very easy to give it to her.”
When the Ailey company wanted him, Dove wasn’t sure he wanted to be in another company under contract for a whole year, and he still wasn’t certain that he even wanted to dance. But things snowballed. “There I was. And there I stayed for seven years.” Then, in 1980, when he was thinking of taking a leave, Jacques Garnier asked him to come to the Paris Opera where he was starting a modern dance company drawn from younger members of the Paris Opera Ballet. “It sounded attractive. I wouldn’t have to fit into somebody else’s shoes. I went for one year - and stayed for three. “I got to do so many things. My whole dance experience had been overbalanced with performing. I’d been performing for ten years. And I’d never really taught before. I’d never rehearsed anybody’s piece other than my own. I’d never choreographed on a group that I’d also trained. The first year was nothing but challenges.” Dove started making dances in college - at the University of Wisconsin, and then Bennington. “So they made you make dances?” I ask. “Whether you wanted to or not. But the first piece I made after that was with Merce in California. One evening - it was the last performance - he did a huge event where the space was divided into parts and we could do our own work or learn parts from other people. I made a short piece for myself and Meg Harper and learned some things from other people and had a great old time.” The second time was when the Ailey company was going to South America. He’d hurt his back and couldn’t go, and Ailey suggested he do a piece for the second company. And when it turned out well, Dove did a solo for Judith Jamison. He made his next three pieces in Europe.
“I’ve been going at a pace of one piece a year since 1979. Now I want to step up that pace, What I’m gonna do,” he drawls, “is make lots of ballets everywhere. Do it and do it and do it. I want to arrive at that point where I’ve done 25 ballets. I saw people work, as they passed through the Opera, and you can see 25 years of experience in how quickly some people make decisions because they know. “I’ve always liked to do pieces, but I was made to do them for so long. At Bennington the composition classes opened up your way of thinking. But they were geared toward a certain kind of product. Those who performed to that kind of product - very non-dance in terms of movement - were praised and those who didn’t, weren’t. The two things were kind of antipathetic. Is that an English word, antipathique? “Every piece I do is part of a bigger piece in my mind. In the first piece I did in Paris, Pieces of Dreams, I wanted to evoke a sense of everyday dreaming while you’re awake. It was very open and spacious and everything was white. We used lots of color in the lights so that people never seemed to be in a stage space. Because everything was white, we could change the color of the costumes, we could keep the costumes one color, the floor another and the background another. We could make everything blue. It was very ethereal. In the next piece I wanted the opposite. I wanted to enclose the dance. I wanted everything as dark as possible, everything black.”
Night Shade, made for members of the GRCOP, was important for Dove because it was his first time working with the same group twice. This time, he wanted to do the piece in conjunction with the dancers. “I knew what I wanted to do, and I’d decided on the working process, but I didn’t figure it all out. Of the four girls, one got pregnant. Another girl broke her foot just before rehearsals started. And another girl broke her toe the first day. The new dancers didn’t know me from the man in the moon. I couldn’t do anything I’d planned. It was a very difficult experience, but it made me grip grip grip onto my ideas.” At this stage in his career, Dove sets out quite consciously to learn something from every piece. “For the most part, when I go to do something, the line of the ballet, and sometimes almost all the movement, is set.” He can’t stand to come in and work with people and see what happens. “It’s just too boring for me. I like speed,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I like for it to move, I like for it to go. You know, if you try something, and you try something, and you have absolutely no idea, I just go crazy. So I always have something planned.”
“But then things change. For example, when I did my first piece at the Opera, I showed this girl this solo. I was so excited - I wanted her to do it. I’d had her in mind, She was perfect. And we got about halfway through and she sat down on the floor and started crying. Of course, she could do a lot more than she thought, but there were things she absolutely couldn’t do. So what we did turned out to be a merger between what I wanted in this ideal state, and what she could handle. And still feel good. People should feel good about being on stage. Not like they’re going to the mines. Anyway, suddenly the dance is somewhere between she and I. I won’t accept her doing something that, in the end, has nothing to do with what I started out to do."
“If no one inspires me above and beyond my basic plan, then we go ahead with that. But if they turn me on, then we follow the energy that’s happening. I’m sure if some of the dancers I’ve worked with read this, they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah? I don’t remember that! I remember you forcing me 98 times to do the same thing.’ “When I go into work, I try to keep my eyes glued on the choreography, because sometimes dancers can take you to another realm. Some person’s qualities just hypnotize you and suddenly you’ve forgotten completely what you set out to do. You wind up thinking, ‘What’s that about?’ Take Chris Jensen, who used to be with the Netherlands Dance Theater and the Basel Ballet. His quality of movement completely fascinated me. Day after day, for five, 10 minutes, we would just go! Then I’d look at it and realize that it had nothing to do with what I wanted. Throw it out! Actually, it drove him crazy. He absorbed what I wanted to do so completely, and everything that I gave him just looked so wonderful, that I thought, ‘Oh, great! I’ll just keep it in.’” “You think,” I suggest, “If he’s so wonderful, I must be a genius?”
“You have to be hard on yourself. Dancers can really inspire you. And they can really lead you astray.” When Dove left the Opera, he made pieces for the Basel Ballet, and the Cullberg Ballet, and has been asked back for both. For Basel he did his first piece for lots of people, 18 people. (“Eighteen possibilities, 18 personalities, 18 temperaments.”) He’s going on to the Dutch National Ballet and Batsheva. “Every place I’ve been thus far I’ve been asked back., Everything in that direction is positive. It’s life’s blood. Keeps you going.”
“Working in Europe,” says Dove, “has been a huge influence on my own vision. A lot of people in Europe - whether you like what they do or not - are completely dedicated to what they want to do. And what they want to do is a real and true expression of what they feel about life. About anything, about everything. It’s not just making dances: you express yourself as a human being through your art. “But home is home. I’m not an expatriate. This is where I grew up in terms of dance. This is where my values were formulated. If I’m going to do something, somehow I feel that this is the place to do it. And there’s an energy here I needed to come back to. A drive in the dancers themselves. I wanted to work again with dancers who have that long-term experience in modern dance, so we can have more of the same mindset, where I can tell them what I want and not teach."
“This is the beginning for me, and I want to enjoy being at the beginning. I want to enjoy having the whole experience open to me. I want to enjoy being influenced by people. I make no pretension to being an old pro. But I do have a certain experience and a certain vision and I’ve come back to make it happen. I guess it’s time to go beyond. I feel like there should be no limits in terms of movement - no physical limits, no emotional limits, no spiritual limits. I think there’s got to be a way of training people to use their bodies where they can do the impossible. Daily. I really do.”