Reviews 1984
Naturally, in the wealth of performances covered in more than 500 reviews, there are some which readers might not know to search for in the Index of Artists. Here’s a taste:
The flexible combination of movement and singing and percussion, with the focus swinging among them, with dancers and musicians doubling and switching roles with the smoothest and most sympathetic teamwork, made for the kind of evening that lifts the spirits. It seemed obvious, then, that dancing is praise, and watching it praise as well. |
Coming Home
May 15
Dan Wagoner celebrated the 15th anniversary of his company with an informal retrospective program at Judson Church where he gave his first concert. Judson looked handsome, with a black Marley dance floor and curtain blacks defining the space with formal elegance. Wagoner’s comments and introductions to some of the pieces made the atmosphere particularly homey and amiable, but in other respects, with the superb lighting by Hal Binkley and the dancers beautifully outfitted in unitards in subtle colors from the G. Biv end of the spectrum, the concert could hardly have been more polished. Wagoner talked about his background (a West Virginia farm boy, youngest of 10 children), admiringly introduced his longtime collaborators lighting designer Jennifer Tipton (who also spoke briefly) and poet George Montgomery, and his dancers, particularly JoAnn Fregalette-Jansen, who’s been dancing with him since 1976.
Comradeliness and tenderness have often been basic to Wagoner’s dances, even the abstract pieces which don’t share the playful, familial, homespun atmosphere of the large portion of his work that evokes a rural American ideal. Most of the works he showed, in fact, were pure movement pieces of strong individual character. It was interesting to see, in such a span of work, how playful his ensemble works are, even when they’re not at all amusing. The dances have a straightforward sculptural vividness and a clean force no matter how abrupt and contrary and full of non sequiturs the movement frequently may be, or how changeable and giddy. The dances’ contradictions are solidly welded, they flow together directly and broadly without submerging each other.
No matter how rough or off-the-wall the movement seems, or how suddenly, even irrationally people sometimes come together or part, there is a strong sense of assurance like within a large loving family whose members can count on each others’ support. There’s a lack of surprise or showiness in sudden drastic attachments, a sense that the most impulsive events can be taken in stride, that you can count on me no matter what - and if you leave, I won’t be lost either.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way the big open movements Wagoner designs, the upper body contractions, the bold, busy thrusts of the arms, are wed to the dramatic or quizzical gestural elements and hard, rhythmic accents that give his dances high color. Often eccentric in context, spiking the movement like exclamatory utterances or urgent communications, those gestures usually seem both mysterious and apt, like Fregalette-Jansen patting her way up Wagoner’s slanting body in Duet, or little, juicy Kristen Borg touching two fingers to her lips while she circles her head with the other arm, indicating, maybe, a shared secret, in Amara I.
Three of the pieces on the program were among Wagoner’s first works. Fregalette-Jansen danced one section of Dan’s Run Penny Supper (named for a popular country church fund-raiser Wagoner was taken to as a child), which Wagoner made for himself and a horde of Adelphi students, all girls, in 1968. Set to a hammer dulcimer version of “Amazing Grace” that sounds almost Indian in its tones and rhythmic activity, the solo is stiff and formal, angular and sharp in its strange, ritual intensity, almost forcibly awkward. Somewhere just short of possessed, Fregalette-Jansen moves straight up and down out of bends and half-crouches, with a twisting torso, punctuating the movement with sputters of stamps and thigh slaps. She does it with powerful single-mindedness, tightly containing and directing her force. Montgomery, whom Wagoner introduces as a “Puritan,” wearing the same red shirt, brown corduroys and Tibetan boots he wore 15 years ago, did a section from the 1969 collaboration Brambles, in which he “gives away” three imaginary paintings. And with Fregalette-Jansen, Wagoner danced Duet, also from that year, to Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament.” She begins alone, poised and pulled up. Then she backs across the stage to Wagoner, who lifts her against his chest. His arms wrap her waist, her arm is loose around his neck, and he holds her and walks with her very quietly. Wagoner always gives time to such moments of strong but modest inner feeling, time for the audience to feel their significance and weight. The dance is amplified with leans and bends, contrasting stiffness and curling in, with much close movement belly to back and occasional hard, urgent flutters or scrawls of a hand or foot. Fregalette-Jansen curls against his chest of rests on his knees or suddenly clamps herself against his back. If he lifts her, she may drape herself over his arms, or suddenly fold over from the waist, giving a sense of immense susceptibility, of the weakness that can come with a flood of overwhelming feeling. But for all its tender companionability, the dance is almost stately, and, like many of Wagoner’s dances, extremely modest and simple in the way loving feelings are expressed. It’s strange and frightening, Wagoner remarks by the way, to return to old dances. “You’ve changed so...”
Stop Stars sometimes seems almost like an underwater dance, not because of the deep oofs and poignant cooings of the whale songs that wash over it. Three of the dancers hover like tentative or possessive creatures at the edges of the piece, with the central trio of Fregalette-Jansen, Ed Henry and Dennis Flemming clustering together and flinging themselves loose, locking together, hugging and piling up, latching onto each other every which way like a clown act where everyone is in everyone else’s way.
Wagoner also showed part of a work in progress to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s A Night in the Tropics, with a fine duet for Fregalette-Jansen and Henry where she seems to dangle upside-down a lot, and stays glued to him as he lunges to the floor. There’s an arm-waving, vaulting, jumping-all-over duet for Flemming and Wagoner. In a duet of fast little skitterings for Fregalette-Jansen and Kristen Draudt, they, typically, contrast the lightness with quick assertions of weight and force - they press their arms down through flexed hands, stamp their feet, just stop dead. Wagoner has a grand old time in a solo of slithery, dithery poses.
I was excited by the hectic strangeness of Amara I (1982), with the flustery gestures, fitful changes, swaggering, rocking, flapping alarms as of some shattered tribe. I loved the last section of ‘Round The World, Baby Mine (1983), to Willie Nelson singing “Whispering Hope.” with its comfortable overall sense of variety within community, its sense of sufficiency. The dancers run on, then sort of smooth out their movements, begin, some of them, to come together as couples. But the small individual images stand out indelibly, like the way Rachel Brummer throws back her head and upper chest with cool abandon; or the way Fregalette-Jansen, clasped to Flemming, snakes her legs around him in a split second. But it is the unfussy communal feeling that is so astonishingly satisfying, with ample space for individuality, and the sense of mutuality that so often prevails in Wagoner’s dances. From a slow, waltzing line, the group turns to snake in and out and to circle, then compresses into a paddling, hugging line out of which, moments later, arms begin to unwrap, to stretch and reach out. In this congenial, multi-faceted world, there seems to be a tacit awareness that one person’s sudden claims on another will be acknowledged, not denied, and that reasons and explanations will not be required. It must be heaven.
At Judson Memorial Church (April 26 to 29).
Dan Wagoner celebrated the 15th anniversary of his company with an informal retrospective program at Judson Church where he gave his first concert. Judson looked handsome, with a black Marley dance floor and curtain blacks defining the space with formal elegance. Wagoner’s comments and introductions to some of the pieces made the atmosphere particularly homey and amiable, but in other respects, with the superb lighting by Hal Binkley and the dancers beautifully outfitted in unitards in subtle colors from the G. Biv end of the spectrum, the concert could hardly have been more polished. Wagoner talked about his background (a West Virginia farm boy, youngest of 10 children), admiringly introduced his longtime collaborators lighting designer Jennifer Tipton (who also spoke briefly) and poet George Montgomery, and his dancers, particularly JoAnn Fregalette-Jansen, who’s been dancing with him since 1976.
Comradeliness and tenderness have often been basic to Wagoner’s dances, even the abstract pieces which don’t share the playful, familial, homespun atmosphere of the large portion of his work that evokes a rural American ideal. Most of the works he showed, in fact, were pure movement pieces of strong individual character. It was interesting to see, in such a span of work, how playful his ensemble works are, even when they’re not at all amusing. The dances have a straightforward sculptural vividness and a clean force no matter how abrupt and contrary and full of non sequiturs the movement frequently may be, or how changeable and giddy. The dances’ contradictions are solidly welded, they flow together directly and broadly without submerging each other.
No matter how rough or off-the-wall the movement seems, or how suddenly, even irrationally people sometimes come together or part, there is a strong sense of assurance like within a large loving family whose members can count on each others’ support. There’s a lack of surprise or showiness in sudden drastic attachments, a sense that the most impulsive events can be taken in stride, that you can count on me no matter what - and if you leave, I won’t be lost either.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way the big open movements Wagoner designs, the upper body contractions, the bold, busy thrusts of the arms, are wed to the dramatic or quizzical gestural elements and hard, rhythmic accents that give his dances high color. Often eccentric in context, spiking the movement like exclamatory utterances or urgent communications, those gestures usually seem both mysterious and apt, like Fregalette-Jansen patting her way up Wagoner’s slanting body in Duet, or little, juicy Kristen Borg touching two fingers to her lips while she circles her head with the other arm, indicating, maybe, a shared secret, in Amara I.
Three of the pieces on the program were among Wagoner’s first works. Fregalette-Jansen danced one section of Dan’s Run Penny Supper (named for a popular country church fund-raiser Wagoner was taken to as a child), which Wagoner made for himself and a horde of Adelphi students, all girls, in 1968. Set to a hammer dulcimer version of “Amazing Grace” that sounds almost Indian in its tones and rhythmic activity, the solo is stiff and formal, angular and sharp in its strange, ritual intensity, almost forcibly awkward. Somewhere just short of possessed, Fregalette-Jansen moves straight up and down out of bends and half-crouches, with a twisting torso, punctuating the movement with sputters of stamps and thigh slaps. She does it with powerful single-mindedness, tightly containing and directing her force. Montgomery, whom Wagoner introduces as a “Puritan,” wearing the same red shirt, brown corduroys and Tibetan boots he wore 15 years ago, did a section from the 1969 collaboration Brambles, in which he “gives away” three imaginary paintings. And with Fregalette-Jansen, Wagoner danced Duet, also from that year, to Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament.” She begins alone, poised and pulled up. Then she backs across the stage to Wagoner, who lifts her against his chest. His arms wrap her waist, her arm is loose around his neck, and he holds her and walks with her very quietly. Wagoner always gives time to such moments of strong but modest inner feeling, time for the audience to feel their significance and weight. The dance is amplified with leans and bends, contrasting stiffness and curling in, with much close movement belly to back and occasional hard, urgent flutters or scrawls of a hand or foot. Fregalette-Jansen curls against his chest of rests on his knees or suddenly clamps herself against his back. If he lifts her, she may drape herself over his arms, or suddenly fold over from the waist, giving a sense of immense susceptibility, of the weakness that can come with a flood of overwhelming feeling. But for all its tender companionability, the dance is almost stately, and, like many of Wagoner’s dances, extremely modest and simple in the way loving feelings are expressed. It’s strange and frightening, Wagoner remarks by the way, to return to old dances. “You’ve changed so...”
Stop Stars sometimes seems almost like an underwater dance, not because of the deep oofs and poignant cooings of the whale songs that wash over it. Three of the dancers hover like tentative or possessive creatures at the edges of the piece, with the central trio of Fregalette-Jansen, Ed Henry and Dennis Flemming clustering together and flinging themselves loose, locking together, hugging and piling up, latching onto each other every which way like a clown act where everyone is in everyone else’s way.
Wagoner also showed part of a work in progress to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s A Night in the Tropics, with a fine duet for Fregalette-Jansen and Henry where she seems to dangle upside-down a lot, and stays glued to him as he lunges to the floor. There’s an arm-waving, vaulting, jumping-all-over duet for Flemming and Wagoner. In a duet of fast little skitterings for Fregalette-Jansen and Kristen Draudt, they, typically, contrast the lightness with quick assertions of weight and force - they press their arms down through flexed hands, stamp their feet, just stop dead. Wagoner has a grand old time in a solo of slithery, dithery poses.
I was excited by the hectic strangeness of Amara I (1982), with the flustery gestures, fitful changes, swaggering, rocking, flapping alarms as of some shattered tribe. I loved the last section of ‘Round The World, Baby Mine (1983), to Willie Nelson singing “Whispering Hope.” with its comfortable overall sense of variety within community, its sense of sufficiency. The dancers run on, then sort of smooth out their movements, begin, some of them, to come together as couples. But the small individual images stand out indelibly, like the way Rachel Brummer throws back her head and upper chest with cool abandon; or the way Fregalette-Jansen, clasped to Flemming, snakes her legs around him in a split second. But it is the unfussy communal feeling that is so astonishingly satisfying, with ample space for individuality, and the sense of mutuality that so often prevails in Wagoner’s dances. From a slow, waltzing line, the group turns to snake in and out and to circle, then compresses into a paddling, hugging line out of which, moments later, arms begin to unwrap, to stretch and reach out. In this congenial, multi-faceted world, there seems to be a tacit awareness that one person’s sudden claims on another will be acknowledged, not denied, and that reasons and explanations will not be required. It must be heaven.
At Judson Memorial Church (April 26 to 29).
Three-Part Harmony
December 25
Perry Como singing “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” created just the right psychic transportation back in time for the beginning of Gail Teton’s three-part collaboration, Multiple Associations. I hadn’t heard those songs for years - maybe decades - and hadn’t missed them, but their dumb, mellow warmth hit the spot. Dark-haired, petite Teton, wearing a short, cute, pleated green-and-white skirt, follows John Proto, both taking giant, reaching steps, in “In His Footsteps.” When he ducks out the studio doors, she stays close, and when he nips back in, she’s right there.
But she can’t catch him: he’s longer-legged and faster; she just skids as he dodges. When she jumps on his back, he tries to throw her off, but she sticks. He tries to lie down, and she eyes him closely as she leans across his chest. Then she’s abruptly up, showing off, doing cartwheels, somersaults, split leaps, trying to win a smile. But he won’t respond; she retaliates with funny little acrobatics, and he merely looks exasperated. She leans on him, folds her arms across his collarbones. He half crawls, half swims away, but she hangs on, trying to hold him back, then pushes against his shoulders from the front. But there’s no restraining him, and his persistence takes him to the corner of the studio, face to the wall.
This big brother, little sister relationship has a lot of tender feelings at its roots, but the brother is withdrawing, escaping and the girl can’t hold or distract him. A sense of inevitable separation permeates the piece, only the girl in her sweet determination doesn’t yet fully recognize it. They come back together in what feels like a flashback: he resets the angles of her arms, and mechanically guides her through the armstrokes of the Australian crawl, then carries her in his arms as she swims in perfect security. Changing places, she tries to arrange him in a dancerly pose, but he drifts from her. Bouncing gently back, putting his hands on her neck, he firmly guides her down to the floor - there’s a kind of reassurance in this final, parting gesture - and disappears.
According to Teton, Multiple Associations was conceived as three separate pieces which grew together. The first section hinges on Teton’s relationship with her brother, who joined the Hare Krishna movement, and left for India 15 years ago. The complexity of that loss is all in the piece, and examined without accusation, but with touching simplicity.
In the second section, “Mirror Mirror,” collaborator Alix Keast rolls out of sleep, gets up and falls back, very slowly and sumptuously rises to her knees. She falls forward with a thud, her torso stiff. Again and again she throws her whole body exhaustingly forward. When Teton joins her, they lean together, and fold over each other. It’s all folding and lifting and climbing with Keast supporting Teton around the waist, one lifting the other in an underarm embrace, each hauling the other on her back, both sliding and crawling over each other. Then, to gentle guitar accompaniment, they lighten their duet with side-by-side walks. They slip into mild pulls and swings, reel slightly out of orbit but somehow stay in phase. Tugging and letting go more vigorously, they loop around each other, running circles and chasing in rocking rhythms till they drag each other down, leaping and rolling.
In the final part, “Bob and Me,” Bob Beswick stands perched on bird-claw feet, curling his hands and arms, making himself sinuous and gawky, like some impossible, composite animal. Teton matches his quirky, squiggling style with darting, whiplash moves. Then they pause, and hug, like an intimate couple who don’t know how they’ve stopped moving because they’re still dancing in their heads. Unseen, Sima Wolf has begun to sing sparse, wavery cries. Her voice, interweaving and vanishing, makes the emotional quality of the piece spacious and flexible.
Teton and Beswick get wilder - he swings her by the waist, flips her, and swings her more loosely than before, in a wide spiral low to the floor. They chase each other briefly with a tight, bouncing gait, then she jumps right into his chest. He drags her by one leg, swings her away by an arm and a leg. They fling themselves on and off each other; he’s always picking her up or putting her down. It’s as if the reticent emotional ambivalences of the first section, “In His Footsteps,” have returned, but with blunt aggressive impatience.
Their urgency modulates and resolves, with mutual circling moves that wind them together. He holds her against him; they walk front to back, with heads lolling. He cradles her in his lap to rest. When he picks her up again, and carries her hanging upside-down along his back, I think of St. Christopher carrying that burdensome child. I think of that old Boys’ Town slogan, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s my brother.”
In a way, there’s too much sidetracking, too many formal irrelevancies in Teton’s collaborations. But I’d balk at calling them flaws. It’s partly those impurities that give her work its flavor, conviction and the imperfection of truth.
At the Cunningham Studio (November 26 and 27).
Perry Como singing “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” created just the right psychic transportation back in time for the beginning of Gail Teton’s three-part collaboration, Multiple Associations. I hadn’t heard those songs for years - maybe decades - and hadn’t missed them, but their dumb, mellow warmth hit the spot. Dark-haired, petite Teton, wearing a short, cute, pleated green-and-white skirt, follows John Proto, both taking giant, reaching steps, in “In His Footsteps.” When he ducks out the studio doors, she stays close, and when he nips back in, she’s right there.
But she can’t catch him: he’s longer-legged and faster; she just skids as he dodges. When she jumps on his back, he tries to throw her off, but she sticks. He tries to lie down, and she eyes him closely as she leans across his chest. Then she’s abruptly up, showing off, doing cartwheels, somersaults, split leaps, trying to win a smile. But he won’t respond; she retaliates with funny little acrobatics, and he merely looks exasperated. She leans on him, folds her arms across his collarbones. He half crawls, half swims away, but she hangs on, trying to hold him back, then pushes against his shoulders from the front. But there’s no restraining him, and his persistence takes him to the corner of the studio, face to the wall.
This big brother, little sister relationship has a lot of tender feelings at its roots, but the brother is withdrawing, escaping and the girl can’t hold or distract him. A sense of inevitable separation permeates the piece, only the girl in her sweet determination doesn’t yet fully recognize it. They come back together in what feels like a flashback: he resets the angles of her arms, and mechanically guides her through the armstrokes of the Australian crawl, then carries her in his arms as she swims in perfect security. Changing places, she tries to arrange him in a dancerly pose, but he drifts from her. Bouncing gently back, putting his hands on her neck, he firmly guides her down to the floor - there’s a kind of reassurance in this final, parting gesture - and disappears.
According to Teton, Multiple Associations was conceived as three separate pieces which grew together. The first section hinges on Teton’s relationship with her brother, who joined the Hare Krishna movement, and left for India 15 years ago. The complexity of that loss is all in the piece, and examined without accusation, but with touching simplicity.
In the second section, “Mirror Mirror,” collaborator Alix Keast rolls out of sleep, gets up and falls back, very slowly and sumptuously rises to her knees. She falls forward with a thud, her torso stiff. Again and again she throws her whole body exhaustingly forward. When Teton joins her, they lean together, and fold over each other. It’s all folding and lifting and climbing with Keast supporting Teton around the waist, one lifting the other in an underarm embrace, each hauling the other on her back, both sliding and crawling over each other. Then, to gentle guitar accompaniment, they lighten their duet with side-by-side walks. They slip into mild pulls and swings, reel slightly out of orbit but somehow stay in phase. Tugging and letting go more vigorously, they loop around each other, running circles and chasing in rocking rhythms till they drag each other down, leaping and rolling.
In the final part, “Bob and Me,” Bob Beswick stands perched on bird-claw feet, curling his hands and arms, making himself sinuous and gawky, like some impossible, composite animal. Teton matches his quirky, squiggling style with darting, whiplash moves. Then they pause, and hug, like an intimate couple who don’t know how they’ve stopped moving because they’re still dancing in their heads. Unseen, Sima Wolf has begun to sing sparse, wavery cries. Her voice, interweaving and vanishing, makes the emotional quality of the piece spacious and flexible.
Teton and Beswick get wilder - he swings her by the waist, flips her, and swings her more loosely than before, in a wide spiral low to the floor. They chase each other briefly with a tight, bouncing gait, then she jumps right into his chest. He drags her by one leg, swings her away by an arm and a leg. They fling themselves on and off each other; he’s always picking her up or putting her down. It’s as if the reticent emotional ambivalences of the first section, “In His Footsteps,” have returned, but with blunt aggressive impatience.
Their urgency modulates and resolves, with mutual circling moves that wind them together. He holds her against him; they walk front to back, with heads lolling. He cradles her in his lap to rest. When he picks her up again, and carries her hanging upside-down along his back, I think of St. Christopher carrying that burdensome child. I think of that old Boys’ Town slogan, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s my brother.”
In a way, there’s too much sidetracking, too many formal irrelevancies in Teton’s collaborations. But I’d balk at calling them flaws. It’s partly those impurities that give her work its flavor, conviction and the imperfection of truth.
At the Cunningham Studio (November 26 and 27).
Keep Movin’ On
December 18
Movement Research, a loose organization of downtown dance people, started up about six years ago. Initially called the School for Movement Research, it took off as a project by a group of friends - Mary Overlie, Cynthia Hedstrom, Danny Lepkoff, Christina Svane, Wendell Beavers, Beth Goren, Terry O’Reilly - who were involved in new forms of dance (not excluding traditional techniques) and interested in incorporating new body skills and ways of thinking about movement into their work. They wanted to teach and develop pieces through a workshop process in which there would be an active interchange between teachers and students, and figured it made sense to build a curriculum and gather a body of students so that these techniques could be made more generally accessible.
Even without School in its name, Movement Research has been the very model of a school, committed to inquiry about an astonishing range of dance and performance-related concerns and activities - from examining the primitive bases of human movement to investigating the choreographic uses of video, from sponsoring regular Contact Improvisation jams to providing forums for contemporary dance ideas. Uncentralized, unbound by a major commitment to real estate - though the usual dream of having one’s own space persists - the group’s programs took place in participants’ studios and other lofts, churches and cheaply available spaces.
About six months ago, however, the Ethnic Folk Arts Center on Varick Street worked out a trade: Movement Research got free office space in exchange for arranging the rentals of EFAC’s studio. Though most of Movement Research’s activities still happen elsewhere, it gives the organization an address where people can actually come and get information. That’s particularly important for European dancers, for example, who come here to study the postmodern dance that has had such an impact there, and can’t find it. Maybe the prospective students aren’t on the grapevine. Maybe the choreographer they wanted to study with is touring, or in Oregon, or doesn’t teach. Foreign dancers, from Brazil and Japan as well as Europe, now make up about a third of workshop participants.
Movement Research doesn’t exist to purvey a point of view. It’s not the kind of jealous institution where students come for the one true word. It exists to keep channels of information open; to keep questions and answers flowing; to make connections between basic facts of anatomy and aesthetic theory and technology. It is a laboratory; it is concerned with the processes of dancing and making dances and other performance work, although “process” has now become passe among the people for whom art is not the major commitment of their lives.
“The workshop process,” says Simone Forti, a current board member and a pioneer of postmodern dance, “is a basic element in this kind of dance in this era. People take each other’s workshops. Young students come into the field through a combination of taking workshops and looking at performances. If an artist’s work interests them, they’ll go and take a workshop with that artist. Maybe just one workshop, like eight sessions. It’s not like taking technique classes and a composition class and going to a school. Nor is it like finding one dancer-choreographer to really, really study with for four years in an apprenticeship.
“People teaching workshops tend to work pretty independently. They tend to be people who also travel and perform, and so, when they’re in town, they set up a workshop. When Movement Research started the founders decided to put our { } together instead of everyone going through that cumbersome and expensive procedure. “Right away, you sensed that these workshops, given by these different people, somehow complemented each other You might decide to choose from their menu.
“They were also using the workshops they were teaching as a format in which to develop their own work together with their students,” continues Forti. “I work differently. When I’m working on a piece of my own that could use some group things, I find that there’s a conflict of interest if I evolve a piece in the workshop. But Movement Research maybe leans more in the other direction. Maybe I’m an exception.” She’s also something of an exception in that Movement Research is, in her words, “very much a manifestation of the generation that’s in their mid-thirties now. I think my role is kind of as an elder.”
Nowadays, when the board of Movement Research puts a brochure together, they have many workshop proposals to choose from, but altogether they only sponsor about a dozen. What they do, in fact, is assemble a curriculum. And one factor they consider is not always having the same people teach. “This last time I was thrown out on my own again, says Forti. “I taught my own workshop because I always teach my workshop, but I had my own little mailing list, and I had to put in my own little ad, and I got many fewer students.”
“We try to balance things out,” says current board member Renee Rockoff, “so there’s always somebody who’s a big draw and people in the middle with maybe their own following, and some
people who are possibly teaching for the first time and maybe will barely get by financially.” No stigma is attached to having a small enrollment. The organization also tries to keep the workshop fee low because it’s appealing to a community with no money. It takes a small percentage of the fees to pay for the space and administrative costs, including the brochure, the mailing and any advertising. All the rest goes to the instructor. “We’ve reversed the usual pattern,” says Rockoff. “Whether it’s release work like Joan Skinner’s work or Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen or Elaine Summers, there’s always somebody that does a kind of anatomical study from a healing orientation,” says Forti. “There’s always some Contact Improvisation. An important thing that marks postmodern dance now is that the technical understanding of movement comes from the East - like from the martial arts and yoga - but also from the healing arts, like from the Alexander technique or Bonnie Cohen, who works with people who have real problems.”
What do you mean, real problems?
“She works with brain-damaged children and is very involved in how the evolving of movement patterns is related to the evolving of sensory awareness and which nerve circuits are being completed at which stage and which awarenesses are developing. And somehow, her work has become of tremendous interest to dancers, I think, partly because it has to do with patterns of movement and not just where you place this or how you stand or how you place that.
“You know how some people walk around looking they’ve got a brick on top of their head? They stay very compressed down into themselves. It used to be that I’d say, well, “Stretch, feel that you’re stretching. Now I would approach that by going right back to the infant’s very first lifting of the head, being able to see just a little bit past your immediate personal space, and the balance of lifting up and back and pulling forward that starts at that moment. If you can be physically reminded of that balance, then you can get a sense of how your whole structure can compress on itself and then you can come stretching out of it.”
“All right. You can say ‘stretch’ to me till doomsday, and I can imagine myself pushing against my limits, tensing instead of stretching, yet convinced that I’m stretching very strongly, and not really moving. Unless I have the example alive within myself in a kinesthetic or imaginative way.
“All of this anatomy we’re doing is always experiential anatomy and it’s what constitutes technique for us. We might look at anatomy books, but whatever reflex we’re going back to, it’s really a question of having that “Aha!” recognition. And once you’ve felt it, it starts to affect how you move as a dancer, and how you’re going to choreograph.
“We keep bringing Bob Dunn - who was very influential to the Judson group - back to teach composition. When I was in his class in 1960 at the Cunningham studio, he started having us work with some of John Cage’s scores and to interpret them in movement. He was saying to us that you could start with any idea. You could be very conscious of both ends of the process, and the way you begin would set up what kinds of decisions you would make, and how you would make them.
“I decided to take as a score the sink in my bathroom. There was the stillness of the cast iron, my hand turning the handle, the water coming down very fast. Each of these elements had its own movement quality. There was the turning of the handle, the falling of the water, the containing of the sink and accumulating of the water, and the escaping of the water through the hole. Then I made something that had those qualities. And I got carried away - there was that state of enchantment, real dancing. I wouldn’t have done anything like that if it hadn’t been for him.
“Well, today people would do different things, but there’s still the importance of facing what’s on your mind, and coming up with a plan so you can address it. Bob Dunn makes you very conscious of how you’re proceeding.”
Movement Research relies on personal support, since there is no big financial base. It operates through a 10-person board of directors, a salaried administrator (Carol Swann) who makes the on-the-spot decisions, and volunteers. “It’s all about giving time, and the energy to make things happen,” says Rockoff. “And it’s working. So that says something about the community too.”
Part of the board’s functions are to decide on the curriculum, to figure out how the organization will keep functioning. Part is more visionary, to ascertain the needs of the community and to conceive the kinds of projects that will serve those needs. “When we get together,” says Rockoff, who has been on the board about two years, “we’ll talk about what’s important to us individually, as artists, about the area where we feel we’re weak or need more work, and about things we’re personally interested in and want to offer to others in the community.
“Because the board is made up almost exclusively of artists,” she continues, “we generally have a low budget, because artists aren’t that good at raising money. But what we do have is a connection to the community that’s very direct.
“One of our dreams - we’ve been talking about it for years - is that of having our own home base, which would have within it a kind of coffeehouse, like European artists would go to or like the old Cedar Tavern where the Abstract Expressionists would go and fight. A place where artists could come anytime and talk with each other about their work.” Video has been another continuing focus. The organization would like to help choreographers document their work and also provide hands-on experience with video equipment for them at low cost. But, since they don’t have, and can’t afford, their own equipment, Movement Research addresses that via video workshops with Lisa Nelson or Cathy Weis.
Besides the workshop “menu,” the group’s most visible activity is the Studies Project (which Rockoff coordinated this year), a series of four programs featuring two choreographers or performance artists who present work, talk about it, and engage in a moderated discussion with an informed and committed audience There’s also the more informal Open Performance series, in which performers show work-in-progress and invite feedback from an audience of peers.
Other projects can get their thrust from the new blood on the board, like the organization’s Presenting Series. This year, Johanna Boyce, “said she’ll do it and she’s making it happen without any funds from the outside,” says Rockoff. Six weekends of performances have been scheduled. So Movement Research begins to produce regularly, which it had previously done only in a scattershot way.
“There seems to be a lot of concern now for political things,” Rockoff says. “In a lot of ways, the dance community has been ingrained in itself, and now we’re finding ways of branching out. We’ve created a network and a support system within ourselves. Now we want to connect...so that the scope of our lives can be more deeply rooted in other things in the world.”
“We blew open a whole new field as far as what our vocabulary could be,” says Forti, “and we evolved a new vocabulary which we feel is based more in nature and in our nature. And now, what do we say? How do you evolve into a complex socialized intelligent adult, doing your art in an intelligent social context with the basis of those natural primal patterns? I think that forays we’re making in the direction of theater - with Anne Bogart or Yoshiko Chuma, for example - are very natural in those terms.
“The work that’s going on related to healing,” Forti continues, “involves a lot of interesting research, but in performance there’s something intellectual lacking in terms of our being mature artists...I look at myself, I’ve worked a lot with animal movement, with crawling, with a lot of baby movement. I look at people like Johanna Boyce and she worked a lot with 13-year-olds’ games. When people deal with autobiographical material, it’s early childhood or the years of summer camp. I look at Anne Bogart’s work. The political piece she did at St. Mark’s touched on political issues, but in a naive way. It’s only as advanced as the whole community is, even if it’s on the cutting edge.
“As a community, we haven’t read the discourses. Maybe our brochure should always offer basic readings. Maybe we should do readings in democracy. We haven’t seen enough of what’s happened in film in the past 30 or 40 years - I certainly haven’t. Maybe we need some bootstraps operation in becoming literate.”
“I’m beginning to understand more what’s possible,” says Rockoff, “based on funds or just on people power, to get things done. When I came on the board, I was so gung ho! I was determined we would.
Movement Research, a loose organization of downtown dance people, started up about six years ago. Initially called the School for Movement Research, it took off as a project by a group of friends - Mary Overlie, Cynthia Hedstrom, Danny Lepkoff, Christina Svane, Wendell Beavers, Beth Goren, Terry O’Reilly - who were involved in new forms of dance (not excluding traditional techniques) and interested in incorporating new body skills and ways of thinking about movement into their work. They wanted to teach and develop pieces through a workshop process in which there would be an active interchange between teachers and students, and figured it made sense to build a curriculum and gather a body of students so that these techniques could be made more generally accessible.
Even without School in its name, Movement Research has been the very model of a school, committed to inquiry about an astonishing range of dance and performance-related concerns and activities - from examining the primitive bases of human movement to investigating the choreographic uses of video, from sponsoring regular Contact Improvisation jams to providing forums for contemporary dance ideas. Uncentralized, unbound by a major commitment to real estate - though the usual dream of having one’s own space persists - the group’s programs took place in participants’ studios and other lofts, churches and cheaply available spaces.
About six months ago, however, the Ethnic Folk Arts Center on Varick Street worked out a trade: Movement Research got free office space in exchange for arranging the rentals of EFAC’s studio. Though most of Movement Research’s activities still happen elsewhere, it gives the organization an address where people can actually come and get information. That’s particularly important for European dancers, for example, who come here to study the postmodern dance that has had such an impact there, and can’t find it. Maybe the prospective students aren’t on the grapevine. Maybe the choreographer they wanted to study with is touring, or in Oregon, or doesn’t teach. Foreign dancers, from Brazil and Japan as well as Europe, now make up about a third of workshop participants.
Movement Research doesn’t exist to purvey a point of view. It’s not the kind of jealous institution where students come for the one true word. It exists to keep channels of information open; to keep questions and answers flowing; to make connections between basic facts of anatomy and aesthetic theory and technology. It is a laboratory; it is concerned with the processes of dancing and making dances and other performance work, although “process” has now become passe among the people for whom art is not the major commitment of their lives.
“The workshop process,” says Simone Forti, a current board member and a pioneer of postmodern dance, “is a basic element in this kind of dance in this era. People take each other’s workshops. Young students come into the field through a combination of taking workshops and looking at performances. If an artist’s work interests them, they’ll go and take a workshop with that artist. Maybe just one workshop, like eight sessions. It’s not like taking technique classes and a composition class and going to a school. Nor is it like finding one dancer-choreographer to really, really study with for four years in an apprenticeship.
“People teaching workshops tend to work pretty independently. They tend to be people who also travel and perform, and so, when they’re in town, they set up a workshop. When Movement Research started the founders decided to put our { } together instead of everyone going through that cumbersome and expensive procedure. “Right away, you sensed that these workshops, given by these different people, somehow complemented each other You might decide to choose from their menu.
“They were also using the workshops they were teaching as a format in which to develop their own work together with their students,” continues Forti. “I work differently. When I’m working on a piece of my own that could use some group things, I find that there’s a conflict of interest if I evolve a piece in the workshop. But Movement Research maybe leans more in the other direction. Maybe I’m an exception.” She’s also something of an exception in that Movement Research is, in her words, “very much a manifestation of the generation that’s in their mid-thirties now. I think my role is kind of as an elder.”
Nowadays, when the board of Movement Research puts a brochure together, they have many workshop proposals to choose from, but altogether they only sponsor about a dozen. What they do, in fact, is assemble a curriculum. And one factor they consider is not always having the same people teach. “This last time I was thrown out on my own again, says Forti. “I taught my own workshop because I always teach my workshop, but I had my own little mailing list, and I had to put in my own little ad, and I got many fewer students.”
“We try to balance things out,” says current board member Renee Rockoff, “so there’s always somebody who’s a big draw and people in the middle with maybe their own following, and some
people who are possibly teaching for the first time and maybe will barely get by financially.” No stigma is attached to having a small enrollment. The organization also tries to keep the workshop fee low because it’s appealing to a community with no money. It takes a small percentage of the fees to pay for the space and administrative costs, including the brochure, the mailing and any advertising. All the rest goes to the instructor. “We’ve reversed the usual pattern,” says Rockoff. “Whether it’s release work like Joan Skinner’s work or Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen or Elaine Summers, there’s always somebody that does a kind of anatomical study from a healing orientation,” says Forti. “There’s always some Contact Improvisation. An important thing that marks postmodern dance now is that the technical understanding of movement comes from the East - like from the martial arts and yoga - but also from the healing arts, like from the Alexander technique or Bonnie Cohen, who works with people who have real problems.”
What do you mean, real problems?
“She works with brain-damaged children and is very involved in how the evolving of movement patterns is related to the evolving of sensory awareness and which nerve circuits are being completed at which stage and which awarenesses are developing. And somehow, her work has become of tremendous interest to dancers, I think, partly because it has to do with patterns of movement and not just where you place this or how you stand or how you place that.
“You know how some people walk around looking they’ve got a brick on top of their head? They stay very compressed down into themselves. It used to be that I’d say, well, “Stretch, feel that you’re stretching. Now I would approach that by going right back to the infant’s very first lifting of the head, being able to see just a little bit past your immediate personal space, and the balance of lifting up and back and pulling forward that starts at that moment. If you can be physically reminded of that balance, then you can get a sense of how your whole structure can compress on itself and then you can come stretching out of it.”
“All right. You can say ‘stretch’ to me till doomsday, and I can imagine myself pushing against my limits, tensing instead of stretching, yet convinced that I’m stretching very strongly, and not really moving. Unless I have the example alive within myself in a kinesthetic or imaginative way.
“All of this anatomy we’re doing is always experiential anatomy and it’s what constitutes technique for us. We might look at anatomy books, but whatever reflex we’re going back to, it’s really a question of having that “Aha!” recognition. And once you’ve felt it, it starts to affect how you move as a dancer, and how you’re going to choreograph.
“We keep bringing Bob Dunn - who was very influential to the Judson group - back to teach composition. When I was in his class in 1960 at the Cunningham studio, he started having us work with some of John Cage’s scores and to interpret them in movement. He was saying to us that you could start with any idea. You could be very conscious of both ends of the process, and the way you begin would set up what kinds of decisions you would make, and how you would make them.
“I decided to take as a score the sink in my bathroom. There was the stillness of the cast iron, my hand turning the handle, the water coming down very fast. Each of these elements had its own movement quality. There was the turning of the handle, the falling of the water, the containing of the sink and accumulating of the water, and the escaping of the water through the hole. Then I made something that had those qualities. And I got carried away - there was that state of enchantment, real dancing. I wouldn’t have done anything like that if it hadn’t been for him.
“Well, today people would do different things, but there’s still the importance of facing what’s on your mind, and coming up with a plan so you can address it. Bob Dunn makes you very conscious of how you’re proceeding.”
Movement Research relies on personal support, since there is no big financial base. It operates through a 10-person board of directors, a salaried administrator (Carol Swann) who makes the on-the-spot decisions, and volunteers. “It’s all about giving time, and the energy to make things happen,” says Rockoff. “And it’s working. So that says something about the community too.”
Part of the board’s functions are to decide on the curriculum, to figure out how the organization will keep functioning. Part is more visionary, to ascertain the needs of the community and to conceive the kinds of projects that will serve those needs. “When we get together,” says Rockoff, who has been on the board about two years, “we’ll talk about what’s important to us individually, as artists, about the area where we feel we’re weak or need more work, and about things we’re personally interested in and want to offer to others in the community.
“Because the board is made up almost exclusively of artists,” she continues, “we generally have a low budget, because artists aren’t that good at raising money. But what we do have is a connection to the community that’s very direct.
“One of our dreams - we’ve been talking about it for years - is that of having our own home base, which would have within it a kind of coffeehouse, like European artists would go to or like the old Cedar Tavern where the Abstract Expressionists would go and fight. A place where artists could come anytime and talk with each other about their work.” Video has been another continuing focus. The organization would like to help choreographers document their work and also provide hands-on experience with video equipment for them at low cost. But, since they don’t have, and can’t afford, their own equipment, Movement Research addresses that via video workshops with Lisa Nelson or Cathy Weis.
Besides the workshop “menu,” the group’s most visible activity is the Studies Project (which Rockoff coordinated this year), a series of four programs featuring two choreographers or performance artists who present work, talk about it, and engage in a moderated discussion with an informed and committed audience There’s also the more informal Open Performance series, in which performers show work-in-progress and invite feedback from an audience of peers.
Other projects can get their thrust from the new blood on the board, like the organization’s Presenting Series. This year, Johanna Boyce, “said she’ll do it and she’s making it happen without any funds from the outside,” says Rockoff. Six weekends of performances have been scheduled. So Movement Research begins to produce regularly, which it had previously done only in a scattershot way.
“There seems to be a lot of concern now for political things,” Rockoff says. “In a lot of ways, the dance community has been ingrained in itself, and now we’re finding ways of branching out. We’ve created a network and a support system within ourselves. Now we want to connect...so that the scope of our lives can be more deeply rooted in other things in the world.”
“We blew open a whole new field as far as what our vocabulary could be,” says Forti, “and we evolved a new vocabulary which we feel is based more in nature and in our nature. And now, what do we say? How do you evolve into a complex socialized intelligent adult, doing your art in an intelligent social context with the basis of those natural primal patterns? I think that forays we’re making in the direction of theater - with Anne Bogart or Yoshiko Chuma, for example - are very natural in those terms.
“The work that’s going on related to healing,” Forti continues, “involves a lot of interesting research, but in performance there’s something intellectual lacking in terms of our being mature artists...I look at myself, I’ve worked a lot with animal movement, with crawling, with a lot of baby movement. I look at people like Johanna Boyce and she worked a lot with 13-year-olds’ games. When people deal with autobiographical material, it’s early childhood or the years of summer camp. I look at Anne Bogart’s work. The political piece she did at St. Mark’s touched on political issues, but in a naive way. It’s only as advanced as the whole community is, even if it’s on the cutting edge.
“As a community, we haven’t read the discourses. Maybe our brochure should always offer basic readings. Maybe we should do readings in democracy. We haven’t seen enough of what’s happened in film in the past 30 or 40 years - I certainly haven’t. Maybe we need some bootstraps operation in becoming literate.”
“I’m beginning to understand more what’s possible,” says Rockoff, “based on funds or just on people power, to get things done. When I came on the board, I was so gung ho! I was determined we would.
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
December 1
Mobs of people queued for tickets at the “Gershwin!” program at Riverside. George Daugherty, artistic director of the company, happily conducted a nice, tight, jumping chamber ensemble for pretty much everything but Rhapsody in Blue, which I was quietly hoping they’d do live, too, in a two-piano version. But they didn’t. The evening was afflicted with several very affected, and rather metallic song renderings by soprano Kathryne Jennings, who tried to conjure a bygone style of sophistication. If you, have to strive for it, best forget it.
The opening dance was a concert version of Balanchine’s Who Cares?, a ballet I haven’t seen in many years. And now I remember why I decided to give it a miss whenever possible. The Gershwin’s got spring and snap, but the Balanchine’s sharp and brittle. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and Who Cares? don’t swing.
In spit of its occasionally sly wit, the archness of Who Cares? bugs me too, especially if I’m not pretty far away. Maybe that’s why I really like only the upbeat parts which the dancers can sell honestly, like when “The Man I Love” turns sprightly at the reprise of the line, “Maybe I will meet him someday,” or Lynn Aaron’s sassy strut through “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,”or the perky way Petra Adelfang skips and teases and invites admiration in “Fascinating Rhythm.” I like the way John Meehan and Charla Genn sort-of-soft-shoe a section of “Who Cares?” Meehan was brash and bouncy in “Liza,” too, a definite contender in the high kicks sweepstakes.
Charla Genn, associate artistic director, offered two pieces. Three Piano Preludes (Nancy McGill on the ivories), for six dancers, was terribly cute and clever. Saucy, flirtatious, and, well, adolescent. The past that sticks best in my mind is a trio for Glenn and two guys (Jadyr Picanso and Erez Dror). She jumps into the arms of both at once, opts for one and kicks the loser away. But then she vamps him good, and the poor boy shleps her around in a bunch of lifts. He’s the smaller guy, and she’s by no means petite, and the effort leaves him dazed. Justice triumphs by the end, though, when the men refuse to be pried away from the other women, and she’s left alone. Sob. Music of such finesse, served with a dash of frivolity, seems doomed to inspire trivia. Glenn’s other piece, Summertime, starts as a longing, reaching, ecstatic solo but turns in to a duet. She spreads her wings a lot.
The littlest, least ambitious piece, James Sewell’s solo Raisin Cane (to “Rialto Rippling Rag,” written by Gershwin with Will Donaldson), had the innocent, show-off charm of the variations in Ruthanna Boris’s Cakewalk. With great good humor and not a whiff of pretension, Sewell deftly manipulates a silver-tipped cane. He hooks his leg over the cane, tumbles head-over-heels, and rolls upright. Most of what he does, though, slipping and sliding that stick around, looks like magic, except we can see the string that lets it happen and he knows it.
Rhapsody in Blue, by Francis Patrelle, resident choreographer of the Berkshire Ballet, was the evening’s piece de resistance, but it didn’t make a lot of musical sense. It was glamorous, though, with the guys in elegant waistcoats, and then it tuxes (or was it tails?), and the women first in gowns of medium blue, spangled to flash pinpoints of light, and later in white satin. Made you think of big beds on platforms and silk sheets in the vast hotel suites of ‘30s movies. But then, Rhapsody seemed to want to be a movie ballet, maybe a Gene Kelly movie. I expected the background at least to scroll and show me New York at night.
On the whole, the material of the piece was standard, semi-genteel ballet drill, ably assembled by Patrelle. And the big, neat yet splashy effects - line ‘em up, lift ‘em up - worked just fine whenever the orchestra whipped into a banging climax. But elsewhere, Patrelle’s style seemed too conventional and epicene for the genuine playfulness and sensuous wails of the Gershwin classic.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (November 20 to 25).
Mobs of people queued for tickets at the “Gershwin!” program at Riverside. George Daugherty, artistic director of the company, happily conducted a nice, tight, jumping chamber ensemble for pretty much everything but Rhapsody in Blue, which I was quietly hoping they’d do live, too, in a two-piano version. But they didn’t. The evening was afflicted with several very affected, and rather metallic song renderings by soprano Kathryne Jennings, who tried to conjure a bygone style of sophistication. If you, have to strive for it, best forget it.
The opening dance was a concert version of Balanchine’s Who Cares?, a ballet I haven’t seen in many years. And now I remember why I decided to give it a miss whenever possible. The Gershwin’s got spring and snap, but the Balanchine’s sharp and brittle. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and Who Cares? don’t swing.
In spit of its occasionally sly wit, the archness of Who Cares? bugs me too, especially if I’m not pretty far away. Maybe that’s why I really like only the upbeat parts which the dancers can sell honestly, like when “The Man I Love” turns sprightly at the reprise of the line, “Maybe I will meet him someday,” or Lynn Aaron’s sassy strut through “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,”or the perky way Petra Adelfang skips and teases and invites admiration in “Fascinating Rhythm.” I like the way John Meehan and Charla Genn sort-of-soft-shoe a section of “Who Cares?” Meehan was brash and bouncy in “Liza,” too, a definite contender in the high kicks sweepstakes.
Charla Genn, associate artistic director, offered two pieces. Three Piano Preludes (Nancy McGill on the ivories), for six dancers, was terribly cute and clever. Saucy, flirtatious, and, well, adolescent. The past that sticks best in my mind is a trio for Glenn and two guys (Jadyr Picanso and Erez Dror). She jumps into the arms of both at once, opts for one and kicks the loser away. But then she vamps him good, and the poor boy shleps her around in a bunch of lifts. He’s the smaller guy, and she’s by no means petite, and the effort leaves him dazed. Justice triumphs by the end, though, when the men refuse to be pried away from the other women, and she’s left alone. Sob. Music of such finesse, served with a dash of frivolity, seems doomed to inspire trivia. Glenn’s other piece, Summertime, starts as a longing, reaching, ecstatic solo but turns in to a duet. She spreads her wings a lot.
The littlest, least ambitious piece, James Sewell’s solo Raisin Cane (to “Rialto Rippling Rag,” written by Gershwin with Will Donaldson), had the innocent, show-off charm of the variations in Ruthanna Boris’s Cakewalk. With great good humor and not a whiff of pretension, Sewell deftly manipulates a silver-tipped cane. He hooks his leg over the cane, tumbles head-over-heels, and rolls upright. Most of what he does, though, slipping and sliding that stick around, looks like magic, except we can see the string that lets it happen and he knows it.
Rhapsody in Blue, by Francis Patrelle, resident choreographer of the Berkshire Ballet, was the evening’s piece de resistance, but it didn’t make a lot of musical sense. It was glamorous, though, with the guys in elegant waistcoats, and then it tuxes (or was it tails?), and the women first in gowns of medium blue, spangled to flash pinpoints of light, and later in white satin. Made you think of big beds on platforms and silk sheets in the vast hotel suites of ‘30s movies. But then, Rhapsody seemed to want to be a movie ballet, maybe a Gene Kelly movie. I expected the background at least to scroll and show me New York at night.
On the whole, the material of the piece was standard, semi-genteel ballet drill, ably assembled by Patrelle. And the big, neat yet splashy effects - line ‘em up, lift ‘em up - worked just fine whenever the orchestra whipped into a banging climax. But elsewhere, Patrelle’s style seemed too conventional and epicene for the genuine playfulness and sensuous wails of the Gershwin classic.
At Theater of the Riverside Church (November 20 to 25).
The Inkbrush Workout
December 4
The flow and thrust of the brushstroke in Chinese calligraphy would be a natural invitation to the dancer/choreographer in search of a score. The disposition of the figures on the paper, the flair and complexity of the individual ideograms, the zigzags and curls and blots, the varying calligraphic styles could be translated into the arrangements of dancers in the space and the shapes their bodies might take, and suggest the qualities of energy that might spur their movement. Also, there’s the poetic content of the source - in the case of Dancing Ink II, the evocative nature-poetry of the eighth century poet Wang Wei - to further inspire the live event.
For all those reasons, Dancing Ink II is one of those ideas that sounds sensible, almost inevitable, yet the elements somehow resist incorporation. In Ohad Naharin and Wang Fang-Yu’s collaboration (with rather trivial travelogue music by Robert Ruggieri) the choreographic and visual elements are displayed together, but they don’t fuse or give each other a lift. It’s pleasing when you see the connection, say, in a dancer’s folding body and the whiplash of a brushstroke character, but it’s muddling, then, when you don’t. This makes the program ticklish - a little like some kind of aptitude test.
The vivid calligraphy of Wang’s high-contrast slides fades into silvery reverse, changes size, gets variously, and sometimes humorously, juxtaposed, but the projections are always removed from the dancing, always a reference, something to compare with the dancing. Perhaps if the screen on which they are rear-projected were the full size of the rear wall instead of hanging above them it all might read differently. But, meanwhile, either the dancing reads like subtitles for the calligraphy, or vice versa. And both are diminished by the comparison.
Naharin comments in the program on Wang’s “quick, effortless brushstrokes,” and how they made him want to dance that way. But, on the whole. the dancing is muted and studied. Maybe it’s excess of respect that makes the program logy. Like the way a bespectacled chanter in a long coat (Parker Po-fei Hyang) is twice integrated into the choreography in a dutiful, pro forma way. On the other hand, repetitions, duplications, and formal arrangements are among the pleasures of the evening.
The dancers are reticent too. Mari Karijawa sometimes conveys a languorous opulence; the others - Kenneth Bowman, Irene Ouzounoglou, and the eloquent Iris Hoffman - are sharper, resolute, more nearly abstract. Except Naharin himself: as alert as a cougar, if he looks anywhere, it’s for a reason. Without seeking to dramatize, he is dramatic. Unusually supple, articulate, sensual, he has the knack of shaping every phrase in a suspenseful way.
I was intrigued by the pushy, weighted quality of some of the partnering, like a duet between Naharin and Ouzounoglou where they keep shoving away and irresistibly falling and resting on each other. I liked the rare, one-shot contrasts, like Hoffman and Ouzounoglou racing circles around Karijawa as she slowly promenades, or Naharin breaking out of a duet with Bowman by diving away and sliding halfway across the stage on his belly.
A sharp wit sometimes informs Naharin’s calligraphic parallels. My favorite was one surprise, punchline finish when Naharin threw Karijawa into Bowman’s arms and the moment of the catch - with Bowman bowed over his human bundle - matched the left-side figure of the calligraphy. Another was satisfying partly because you could watch it brewing. Two dancers, and a third holding a red scarf, appear. You know they’ll match the calligraphy because the scarf has got to be the equivalent of the artist’s red stamp. Two bend slightly, but remain reasonably erect, the third slides out along the floor, like the lazily curling black stroke on the screen, and drops the scarf like a small puddle of red paint.
At Asia Society (November 15 and 16).
The flow and thrust of the brushstroke in Chinese calligraphy would be a natural invitation to the dancer/choreographer in search of a score. The disposition of the figures on the paper, the flair and complexity of the individual ideograms, the zigzags and curls and blots, the varying calligraphic styles could be translated into the arrangements of dancers in the space and the shapes their bodies might take, and suggest the qualities of energy that might spur their movement. Also, there’s the poetic content of the source - in the case of Dancing Ink II, the evocative nature-poetry of the eighth century poet Wang Wei - to further inspire the live event.
For all those reasons, Dancing Ink II is one of those ideas that sounds sensible, almost inevitable, yet the elements somehow resist incorporation. In Ohad Naharin and Wang Fang-Yu’s collaboration (with rather trivial travelogue music by Robert Ruggieri) the choreographic and visual elements are displayed together, but they don’t fuse or give each other a lift. It’s pleasing when you see the connection, say, in a dancer’s folding body and the whiplash of a brushstroke character, but it’s muddling, then, when you don’t. This makes the program ticklish - a little like some kind of aptitude test.
The vivid calligraphy of Wang’s high-contrast slides fades into silvery reverse, changes size, gets variously, and sometimes humorously, juxtaposed, but the projections are always removed from the dancing, always a reference, something to compare with the dancing. Perhaps if the screen on which they are rear-projected were the full size of the rear wall instead of hanging above them it all might read differently. But, meanwhile, either the dancing reads like subtitles for the calligraphy, or vice versa. And both are diminished by the comparison.
Naharin comments in the program on Wang’s “quick, effortless brushstrokes,” and how they made him want to dance that way. But, on the whole. the dancing is muted and studied. Maybe it’s excess of respect that makes the program logy. Like the way a bespectacled chanter in a long coat (Parker Po-fei Hyang) is twice integrated into the choreography in a dutiful, pro forma way. On the other hand, repetitions, duplications, and formal arrangements are among the pleasures of the evening.
The dancers are reticent too. Mari Karijawa sometimes conveys a languorous opulence; the others - Kenneth Bowman, Irene Ouzounoglou, and the eloquent Iris Hoffman - are sharper, resolute, more nearly abstract. Except Naharin himself: as alert as a cougar, if he looks anywhere, it’s for a reason. Without seeking to dramatize, he is dramatic. Unusually supple, articulate, sensual, he has the knack of shaping every phrase in a suspenseful way.
I was intrigued by the pushy, weighted quality of some of the partnering, like a duet between Naharin and Ouzounoglou where they keep shoving away and irresistibly falling and resting on each other. I liked the rare, one-shot contrasts, like Hoffman and Ouzounoglou racing circles around Karijawa as she slowly promenades, or Naharin breaking out of a duet with Bowman by diving away and sliding halfway across the stage on his belly.
A sharp wit sometimes informs Naharin’s calligraphic parallels. My favorite was one surprise, punchline finish when Naharin threw Karijawa into Bowman’s arms and the moment of the catch - with Bowman bowed over his human bundle - matched the left-side figure of the calligraphy. Another was satisfying partly because you could watch it brewing. Two dancers, and a third holding a red scarf, appear. You know they’ll match the calligraphy because the scarf has got to be the equivalent of the artist’s red stamp. Two bend slightly, but remain reasonably erect, the third slides out along the floor, like the lazily curling black stroke on the screen, and drops the scarf like a small puddle of red paint.
At Asia Society (November 15 and 16).
At Home in the Universe
November 27
At the La Mama Annex, two Brazilians, dancer Ismael Ivo and percussionist Dudu Tucci, presented a systematic but passionate ritual in which man throws off the shackles of oppression and delusion; Korean Cho Kyoo-Hyun elaborated a visually impeccable, quietly harmonious, and thoroughly hermetic “ceremonial journey.” La Mama’s Third World Institute of Theater Arts Studies offered these long pieces as a double bill that lasted nearly three hours. It would have made a lot more sense to chop the ticket price in half or so and schedule separate performances at 7:30 and 9:30.
Tucci opens Ritual of a Body in Moon with wonderfully light, rapid-fore drumming, introducing a battery of instruments that includes congas and several other drum sets, vibraphone, whistles, bells, flute, gongs, cymbals that he makes shriek, some drum that looks like a huge oil can and combines the rattle of a snare with the sumptuousness of a kettledrum, another kind of membranous instrument that utters squeals and squawks. Echoes off the wall behind him double the sound density.
A ceiling-high ladder, legs spread wide, fills the rear stage, while incense seethes behind it. Ivo, carrying a torch - a metal candelabra on a pole, ablaze with slanting candles - and shrouded in a kind of irregularly faded, red cloak, edges into the space scrunching his toes or balancing on their knuckles, tipping back on h his heels, hobbling on warped feet, sometimes stamping rhythmically. He uses his hands with sharp articulation; thy seem as filigreed and artificial as Balinese shadow puppets. Sometimes he lets his fingers and toes talk to each other.
Ivo moves in a strange amalgam of styles that incorporates lonesome battements and rough pirouettes with smaller movements that he forces out through his own resistance, and more dramatic episodes of struggle. Only rarely does he break into dancing that bounces and bobs, bumps and grinds and convulses with the bubbling, surging energy of most familiar Afro-Brazilian dance; and there’s surprisingly little of that ground-loving rhythmic footwork. But,m then, this is not a pure dance piece. It is a ritual enactment of a spiritual drama, a kind of lesson.
What it seems closest to, and, I would guess, is influenced by, is Butoh. Ivo’s bare, caramel skin is unpowdered; his head is not shaved, but his hair is close-cropped. For most of the piece, he wears only a narrow, ratty red loincloth. He hangs upside-down, swivelling his torso, like Sankai Juku’s trademark act; at one point, the robe which he has wrapped around his hips slides over his buttocks, exactly as in their Kinkan Shonen. But Ivo isn’t seeking to bury himself in Butoh’s primordial transformations, he's driving out of the much toward an inspirational vision of emancipation.
The message of is metaphorical and somewhat opaque scenario - as written in the program - was perfectly clear. But its actual progress was often obscure. And, for me, Ivo’s intensity failed to be compelling, partly because of the piece’s didactic formality and partly because Ivo fluctuated between immersing himself in his ritual and begging the audience’s sympathy.
“Bayyaba ba-ooba...” Tucci yowls, as Ivo slowly climbs the enormous ladder, pausing sometimes to rise and sink in place. At the peak, Ivo’s arms open into eagle wings and for a moment he’s a god bestowing blessings. Then down the other side he slides, curls under the bottom rung, and climbs back up the underside to hang from a coil of rope.
Later, the dancing becomes full-blooded, and the music - beautifully, interlocked, but with its own abandon - a great clangor. As he bobs and flaps, Ivo’s feet remain oddly still, until his dancing grows more violent and swinging, snakier and more strongly thrusting. Ivo disappears. Tucci gives the audience a look on the last beat of his final barrage of drumming. That calculated split second was the moment that grabbed me.
I was content to be mystified by Cho Kyoo-Hyun’s beautifully performed Aga (Child), a pristine ritual, patiently paced, that, in movement terms, seemed grounded in specific breath rhythms and rode a quiet, sinking bounce. The Annex space is transformed by a huge, snarled loom-like bridge overhead. Paper sculptures alongside it (costumes and set are by Liliana Villegas). On a small platform close to the audience, a woman (Sokhi Wagner trickles tiny amounts of rice around herself and performs small formal routines with water and food-related utensils; at the opposite end of the space is a ramp which six dancers in white ascend, rhythmically bending and rising, shifting slightly from side to side to an individual pulse.
There’s a whistle and the powerful sound of a strangely unresonant horn (the music is by Pauline Oliveros). Then, alone, Cho appears, levitating from behind the ramp to its top. Everyone who enters seems to rise out of a dream in this same way, though I suppose they’re just mounting steps on the back of the ramp. Bare-chested, Cho wears, as all the men do, puffed-up, white, diaper-like pants with long panels floating in the rear that suggest the formal encumbrances of Japanese court garments without actually getting in the way. He holds one arm up, and swings one leg to scrape his foot three times along the floor with each forward step as he makes his measured descent. Then he flings himself backwards. Another figure (Alvaro Restrepo Hernandez) appears behind him.
Cho bends and puffs out his chest, grabs his jutting lower ribs, and stalks the space. Then, pairing with Hernandez, and joined by Marika Blossfeldt, they pulse lightly together. Many moments bring the participants into confluence to smooth them into rhythmic accord. Blossfeldt drifts away, soon to be juggling invisible weightless objects while Wagner, on the front platform, lets small bits of paper burn and the ashy remnants fly into the air. There’s a reverence in all these actions that gives them distinction. Even the way Wagner rubs her finger on the rim of a bowl seems important.
Joel Luecht and Ana Maria Velez enter down the ramp, holding long transparent tubes, surmounted by leafy fronds. They abandon the tubes - but keep the leaves - in the hands of Cho and Hernandez who sprawl across the ramp, and continue to advance with small, soft steps. Their faces are covered with dark blots, small leaves, which,later, they systematically remove. Cho and Hernandez begin to blow into the tubes, making a sharp, dry, spitting sound, and follow Luecht and Velez, tooting rhythmically. Luecht whips his arms, moving like sleeper trying to wake. A fourth man (Federico Restrepo) rolls and convulses down the ramp, somersaults, and falls flat. He moves across the floor with great difficulty, like an inchworm, bunching his body then pushing the front part forward.
There’s a kind of priestly obedience and solemnity in these activities, a sense of containment without constraint. The performers are always individuals - even in larger cooperative groups, like when the men sit at the corners of a square to tap their knees and initiate a kind of gestural pattycake or line up and shield each other’s eyes with their hands. They seemed to be novices who had never actually performed this elegant “ceremony” and who are never submerged in it, though it absorbs their attention fully. But, almost entranced, they follow their instinctual knowledge like birds building a nest for the first time. And if they slip correctly into the hidden natural pattern, their mysterious actions may prove to be a kind of key.
La Mama Annex (November 6 to 11).
At the La Mama Annex, two Brazilians, dancer Ismael Ivo and percussionist Dudu Tucci, presented a systematic but passionate ritual in which man throws off the shackles of oppression and delusion; Korean Cho Kyoo-Hyun elaborated a visually impeccable, quietly harmonious, and thoroughly hermetic “ceremonial journey.” La Mama’s Third World Institute of Theater Arts Studies offered these long pieces as a double bill that lasted nearly three hours. It would have made a lot more sense to chop the ticket price in half or so and schedule separate performances at 7:30 and 9:30.
Tucci opens Ritual of a Body in Moon with wonderfully light, rapid-fore drumming, introducing a battery of instruments that includes congas and several other drum sets, vibraphone, whistles, bells, flute, gongs, cymbals that he makes shriek, some drum that looks like a huge oil can and combines the rattle of a snare with the sumptuousness of a kettledrum, another kind of membranous instrument that utters squeals and squawks. Echoes off the wall behind him double the sound density.
A ceiling-high ladder, legs spread wide, fills the rear stage, while incense seethes behind it. Ivo, carrying a torch - a metal candelabra on a pole, ablaze with slanting candles - and shrouded in a kind of irregularly faded, red cloak, edges into the space scrunching his toes or balancing on their knuckles, tipping back on h his heels, hobbling on warped feet, sometimes stamping rhythmically. He uses his hands with sharp articulation; thy seem as filigreed and artificial as Balinese shadow puppets. Sometimes he lets his fingers and toes talk to each other.
Ivo moves in a strange amalgam of styles that incorporates lonesome battements and rough pirouettes with smaller movements that he forces out through his own resistance, and more dramatic episodes of struggle. Only rarely does he break into dancing that bounces and bobs, bumps and grinds and convulses with the bubbling, surging energy of most familiar Afro-Brazilian dance; and there’s surprisingly little of that ground-loving rhythmic footwork. But,m then, this is not a pure dance piece. It is a ritual enactment of a spiritual drama, a kind of lesson.
What it seems closest to, and, I would guess, is influenced by, is Butoh. Ivo’s bare, caramel skin is unpowdered; his head is not shaved, but his hair is close-cropped. For most of the piece, he wears only a narrow, ratty red loincloth. He hangs upside-down, swivelling his torso, like Sankai Juku’s trademark act; at one point, the robe which he has wrapped around his hips slides over his buttocks, exactly as in their Kinkan Shonen. But Ivo isn’t seeking to bury himself in Butoh’s primordial transformations, he's driving out of the much toward an inspirational vision of emancipation.
The message of is metaphorical and somewhat opaque scenario - as written in the program - was perfectly clear. But its actual progress was often obscure. And, for me, Ivo’s intensity failed to be compelling, partly because of the piece’s didactic formality and partly because Ivo fluctuated between immersing himself in his ritual and begging the audience’s sympathy.
“Bayyaba ba-ooba...” Tucci yowls, as Ivo slowly climbs the enormous ladder, pausing sometimes to rise and sink in place. At the peak, Ivo’s arms open into eagle wings and for a moment he’s a god bestowing blessings. Then down the other side he slides, curls under the bottom rung, and climbs back up the underside to hang from a coil of rope.
Later, the dancing becomes full-blooded, and the music - beautifully, interlocked, but with its own abandon - a great clangor. As he bobs and flaps, Ivo’s feet remain oddly still, until his dancing grows more violent and swinging, snakier and more strongly thrusting. Ivo disappears. Tucci gives the audience a look on the last beat of his final barrage of drumming. That calculated split second was the moment that grabbed me.
I was content to be mystified by Cho Kyoo-Hyun’s beautifully performed Aga (Child), a pristine ritual, patiently paced, that, in movement terms, seemed grounded in specific breath rhythms and rode a quiet, sinking bounce. The Annex space is transformed by a huge, snarled loom-like bridge overhead. Paper sculptures alongside it (costumes and set are by Liliana Villegas). On a small platform close to the audience, a woman (Sokhi Wagner trickles tiny amounts of rice around herself and performs small formal routines with water and food-related utensils; at the opposite end of the space is a ramp which six dancers in white ascend, rhythmically bending and rising, shifting slightly from side to side to an individual pulse.
There’s a whistle and the powerful sound of a strangely unresonant horn (the music is by Pauline Oliveros). Then, alone, Cho appears, levitating from behind the ramp to its top. Everyone who enters seems to rise out of a dream in this same way, though I suppose they’re just mounting steps on the back of the ramp. Bare-chested, Cho wears, as all the men do, puffed-up, white, diaper-like pants with long panels floating in the rear that suggest the formal encumbrances of Japanese court garments without actually getting in the way. He holds one arm up, and swings one leg to scrape his foot three times along the floor with each forward step as he makes his measured descent. Then he flings himself backwards. Another figure (Alvaro Restrepo Hernandez) appears behind him.
Cho bends and puffs out his chest, grabs his jutting lower ribs, and stalks the space. Then, pairing with Hernandez, and joined by Marika Blossfeldt, they pulse lightly together. Many moments bring the participants into confluence to smooth them into rhythmic accord. Blossfeldt drifts away, soon to be juggling invisible weightless objects while Wagner, on the front platform, lets small bits of paper burn and the ashy remnants fly into the air. There’s a reverence in all these actions that gives them distinction. Even the way Wagner rubs her finger on the rim of a bowl seems important.
Joel Luecht and Ana Maria Velez enter down the ramp, holding long transparent tubes, surmounted by leafy fronds. They abandon the tubes - but keep the leaves - in the hands of Cho and Hernandez who sprawl across the ramp, and continue to advance with small, soft steps. Their faces are covered with dark blots, small leaves, which,later, they systematically remove. Cho and Hernandez begin to blow into the tubes, making a sharp, dry, spitting sound, and follow Luecht and Velez, tooting rhythmically. Luecht whips his arms, moving like sleeper trying to wake. A fourth man (Federico Restrepo) rolls and convulses down the ramp, somersaults, and falls flat. He moves across the floor with great difficulty, like an inchworm, bunching his body then pushing the front part forward.
There’s a kind of priestly obedience and solemnity in these activities, a sense of containment without constraint. The performers are always individuals - even in larger cooperative groups, like when the men sit at the corners of a square to tap their knees and initiate a kind of gestural pattycake or line up and shield each other’s eyes with their hands. They seemed to be novices who had never actually performed this elegant “ceremony” and who are never submerged in it, though it absorbs their attention fully. But, almost entranced, they follow their instinctual knowledge like birds building a nest for the first time. And if they slip correctly into the hidden natural pattern, their mysterious actions may prove to be a kind of key.
La Mama Annex (November 6 to 11).
Mismatch
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 abuilding, 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 abuilding, 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).
Let’s Face No Music
October 30
Russell Dumas’s 1984 project, Circular Quay, commenced at home in Australia with sometimes 18 dancers, sometimes five. The American version, though, featured just Dumas, Lucy Guerin and Rebecca Hilton, all beautifully attuned. One women was in red, the other in grey. Some problems with the slippery soles of his white shoes forced Dumas to dump his white outfit and switch to black, which he hates, but that’s a pretty minor upset. He’s right, though - white would have been better.
Circular Quay was hardly old-fashioned dancing - indebted to ballet and Cunningham for its lightness and erect limber torso and to contact improvisation for its mutual responsiveness and sensitive use of weight - but it earns old-fashioned adjectives, like soignee. Highly controlled yet exceedingly gentle, Dumas’s technically intimate trios were performed in silence except for the rare squeak of a shoe and with uncomplicated but subtle lighting by Rohesia Hamilton-Metcalf. A sense of agreement and quiet, unwavering concentration created an atmosphere that was utterly unemotional, but tender. Circular Quay’s clean-lined understatement and modest lyricism reminded me sometimes of those great Astaire-Rogers adagios like “Let’s Face the Music and dance.” The swooniness, impetuousness and romance were absent, but the dancing eas elegant, impeccable.
The pice starts with the dancers lines up together, and they keep initiating variations and new sections that same way. They take short walks - sauntering, siding walks - with steps that begin to swoop slightly and to stretch wide and easy, even scraping the floor. The steps multiply into small skipping phrases and bubbling turns. The dancers spring off-handedly sideways, make interlocking loops of their loosely canonized moves. Sometimes a simple gesture ripples though them like a pennant in the wind.
From closely twining patterns, they jump, dive softly to the floor, float an arm up and sink beneath it, turning as it rises. They stretch arms open and allow that expansion to draw the body’s energy from its center so it can softly cave in. The lifts are almost an inevitable effect of clustering, or coming too close together. The dancers aren’t ready to diverge, so they pile up. Guerin is lifted quickly, up/down, then bounced up over Dumas’s back. In a duet that follows, Hilton stretches along Dumas’s slanted body, he swings her, and they line up neatly just before he bumps her away. The swings and casual carries happen comfortably, yet surprisingly, at waist level, with the woman usually floating horizontally or angle slightly downward. The lifts too are minimal and brief, almost touching in their evanescence. Dumas isn’t wasteful; he’ got the confidence not to slam us with virtuoso tricks. He knows that if everything’s a big deal, range and dimension shrivel up.
The skittering phrases that link the centripetal moments of contact ride close to the floor. An ephemeral arabesque barely lifts off it. Dumas’s astonishingly swivelly skipping, hopping solo - a breeze of soft, fast footwork, sharp kicks, crumpling slithers, and rests - owes a lot to ballet class but doesn’t have a hint of the academic in it.
There are lovely, easy lunges that seem to scoop upwards from the floor, turns that simply wilt, turns where his head wobbles crazily as the leg sweeps out and around the the body reels to the floor. But even the crash is incredibly sof, smooth and deliberate.
He walks just behind Guerin, a hand on her hip. She jumps up just a little, and his thigh comes up to extend her movement of suspension by a hair. also, after tipping her over his back, he slides up under her, guiding her as she appears to slide down. There’s a delicacy to these small moments that’s exquisite.
Usually, in this piece, the energy is most intense just before the dancers make contact; then it grows muted as they nestle together or as their bodies droop. Much of the beauty of Circular Quay is in these attenuated anticlimaxes and dissolves.
At the Cunningham Studio (October 16 and 17).
Russell Dumas’s 1984 project, Circular Quay, commenced at home in Australia with sometimes 18 dancers, sometimes five. The American version, though, featured just Dumas, Lucy Guerin and Rebecca Hilton, all beautifully attuned. One women was in red, the other in grey. Some problems with the slippery soles of his white shoes forced Dumas to dump his white outfit and switch to black, which he hates, but that’s a pretty minor upset. He’s right, though - white would have been better.
Circular Quay was hardly old-fashioned dancing - indebted to ballet and Cunningham for its lightness and erect limber torso and to contact improvisation for its mutual responsiveness and sensitive use of weight - but it earns old-fashioned adjectives, like soignee. Highly controlled yet exceedingly gentle, Dumas’s technically intimate trios were performed in silence except for the rare squeak of a shoe and with uncomplicated but subtle lighting by Rohesia Hamilton-Metcalf. A sense of agreement and quiet, unwavering concentration created an atmosphere that was utterly unemotional, but tender. Circular Quay’s clean-lined understatement and modest lyricism reminded me sometimes of those great Astaire-Rogers adagios like “Let’s Face the Music and dance.” The swooniness, impetuousness and romance were absent, but the dancing eas elegant, impeccable.
The pice starts with the dancers lines up together, and they keep initiating variations and new sections that same way. They take short walks - sauntering, siding walks - with steps that begin to swoop slightly and to stretch wide and easy, even scraping the floor. The steps multiply into small skipping phrases and bubbling turns. The dancers spring off-handedly sideways, make interlocking loops of their loosely canonized moves. Sometimes a simple gesture ripples though them like a pennant in the wind.
From closely twining patterns, they jump, dive softly to the floor, float an arm up and sink beneath it, turning as it rises. They stretch arms open and allow that expansion to draw the body’s energy from its center so it can softly cave in. The lifts are almost an inevitable effect of clustering, or coming too close together. The dancers aren’t ready to diverge, so they pile up. Guerin is lifted quickly, up/down, then bounced up over Dumas’s back. In a duet that follows, Hilton stretches along Dumas’s slanted body, he swings her, and they line up neatly just before he bumps her away. The swings and casual carries happen comfortably, yet surprisingly, at waist level, with the woman usually floating horizontally or angle slightly downward. The lifts too are minimal and brief, almost touching in their evanescence. Dumas isn’t wasteful; he’ got the confidence not to slam us with virtuoso tricks. He knows that if everything’s a big deal, range and dimension shrivel up.
The skittering phrases that link the centripetal moments of contact ride close to the floor. An ephemeral arabesque barely lifts off it. Dumas’s astonishingly swivelly skipping, hopping solo - a breeze of soft, fast footwork, sharp kicks, crumpling slithers, and rests - owes a lot to ballet class but doesn’t have a hint of the academic in it.
There are lovely, easy lunges that seem to scoop upwards from the floor, turns that simply wilt, turns where his head wobbles crazily as the leg sweeps out and around the the body reels to the floor. But even the crash is incredibly sof, smooth and deliberate.
He walks just behind Guerin, a hand on her hip. She jumps up just a little, and his thigh comes up to extend her movement of suspension by a hair. also, after tipping her over his back, he slides up under her, guiding her as she appears to slide down. There’s a delicacy to these small moments that’s exquisite.
Usually, in this piece, the energy is most intense just before the dancers make contact; then it grows muted as they nestle together or as their bodies droop. Much of the beauty of Circular Quay is in these attenuated anticlimaxes and dissolves.
At the Cunningham Studio (October 16 and 17).
Jeff’s Blend
October 23
The audience went wild for Kevin Jeff’s fine young black company and liked even better the fancy character bows for each piece. I was less keen for it, though Jeff’s got a good deal of skill at his command. His ambitious dances use an African-modern-ballet vocabulary, which is conveyed with the lush emphatic quality of the Ailey company. Jubilation! can do oooh, it feels so good! oooh, it hurts so bad! to a T, but some of the balletic complements - like biggish traveling steps and stiff balances - seem uncomfortable, interpolated. Though Jeff shoots his wa at the beginning of each piece, his enthusiastic dancers stay charged. More bothersome was the sense that Jeff’s three dances were unparticular, generic types. I suppose if NYCB’s Peter Martins can continue to dog Balanchine’s footsteps, then Jeff’s entitled to follow the examples of his chosen masters too. But I could hardly find Jeff’s own intentions in all this familiar stuff.
Once Upon a Music Box (1979), the opener, set to show tunes, was like a choreographic job resume. (I guess Jeff was only about 20 when he made it, which is reasonably impressive.) The dancing is sharp, punched out, in that showbiz “jazz” style, hitting every accent of the music. In a joyful early solo, Tammy Hurt is dazzling - gorgeous hands and fast as hell. Later, she’s powerful in a temperamental solo to Lena Horne’s gritty and acid “Stormy Weather.” Snappish and sassy, plunging into distress, the solo runs through routine emotions and never develops real character. Meanwhile, Horne chills your bones because she’s so absolutely specific. A trio of gamblers do exaggerated dice-game stuff to “Luck Be a Lady.” Denise DeSousa wears white satin in a ballroom adagio to “Dancing in the Dark,” but the duet’s not fluid enough. Two guys dressed in what might be formal pimpwear and their black-and-sparkle corseted girls kick and wiggle. Three steamy girls rotate their shoulders and shake their behinds; one minute they shove their guys away, the next they’re rubbing their butts against them. None of this is meant to be studied too closely.
Mama Rose, Keith Lee’s solo of celebration, strife and righteous anger - performed by Krystal Hall with unfaltering force - is set to Archie Shepp’s music and intoned poetry in homage to his grandmother, Hall’s body whirls, her walk convulses. She bends, sways, staggers, and gives the world the fist. Full of word painting and symmetry, this relentless, repetitious dance depicts a giant ancestress - monumental but flat.
Jeff’s Aisatnaf is a self-absorbed, preening, balletic solo for Aaron Dugger. Some woodland creature, maybe, he peers through his hands at visions of himself. In Gula Matari, (to music of Quincy Jones), critters hunch, stretch, flip, wriggle, and get so hot they have to accompany their dancing with crescendos of rumbles and groans. I liked this piece a lot when it whipped along - especially a quick, scampery trio for women, and a sharp, rhythmic sextet to vibraphone that almost etched more patterns on the ---.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (October 11 to 14).
The audience went wild for Kevin Jeff’s fine young black company and liked even better the fancy character bows for each piece. I was less keen for it, though Jeff’s got a good deal of skill at his command. His ambitious dances use an African-modern-ballet vocabulary, which is conveyed with the lush emphatic quality of the Ailey company. Jubilation! can do oooh, it feels so good! oooh, it hurts so bad! to a T, but some of the balletic complements - like biggish traveling steps and stiff balances - seem uncomfortable, interpolated. Though Jeff shoots his wa at the beginning of each piece, his enthusiastic dancers stay charged. More bothersome was the sense that Jeff’s three dances were unparticular, generic types. I suppose if NYCB’s Peter Martins can continue to dog Balanchine’s footsteps, then Jeff’s entitled to follow the examples of his chosen masters too. But I could hardly find Jeff’s own intentions in all this familiar stuff.
Once Upon a Music Box (1979), the opener, set to show tunes, was like a choreographic job resume. (I guess Jeff was only about 20 when he made it, which is reasonably impressive.) The dancing is sharp, punched out, in that showbiz “jazz” style, hitting every accent of the music. In a joyful early solo, Tammy Hurt is dazzling - gorgeous hands and fast as hell. Later, she’s powerful in a temperamental solo to Lena Horne’s gritty and acid “Stormy Weather.” Snappish and sassy, plunging into distress, the solo runs through routine emotions and never develops real character. Meanwhile, Horne chills your bones because she’s so absolutely specific. A trio of gamblers do exaggerated dice-game stuff to “Luck Be a Lady.” Denise DeSousa wears white satin in a ballroom adagio to “Dancing in the Dark,” but the duet’s not fluid enough. Two guys dressed in what might be formal pimpwear and their black-and-sparkle corseted girls kick and wiggle. Three steamy girls rotate their shoulders and shake their behinds; one minute they shove their guys away, the next they’re rubbing their butts against them. None of this is meant to be studied too closely.
Mama Rose, Keith Lee’s solo of celebration, strife and righteous anger - performed by Krystal Hall with unfaltering force - is set to Archie Shepp’s music and intoned poetry in homage to his grandmother, Hall’s body whirls, her walk convulses. She bends, sways, staggers, and gives the world the fist. Full of word painting and symmetry, this relentless, repetitious dance depicts a giant ancestress - monumental but flat.
Jeff’s Aisatnaf is a self-absorbed, preening, balletic solo for Aaron Dugger. Some woodland creature, maybe, he peers through his hands at visions of himself. In Gula Matari, (to music of Quincy Jones), critters hunch, stretch, flip, wriggle, and get so hot they have to accompany their dancing with crescendos of rumbles and groans. I liked this piece a lot when it whipped along - especially a quick, scampery trio for women, and a sharp, rhythmic sextet to vibraphone that almost etched more patterns on the ---.
At Theatre of the Riverside Church (October 11 to 14).
Fluid on the Brain
October 9
Some ravishing dancing occurred in Sarah Skagg’s two pieces at P.S. 122. They represent an intimate genre I’m happier thinking of as structural occasions for dancing than as “choreography” - partly because the interest of the dancing is so largely within each dancer’s body, and the space she embraces. I don’t care about spatial patterns or traveling or the overall dynamics of the piece: I’m entirely absorbed by the moment-to-moment how of the dancing - how one movement flows into another, bursts in new direction, peters out, how a new impulse takes charge, how several impulses interplay.
Cross-Cultural Studies was a long solo to a sequence of music from rap to Philip Glass to an Indian assortment to Gounod’s coloratura display, the “Jewel Song” from Faust - through all of which Skaggs’s dancing was inflected by the music beating or bubbling along with it. The second piece, called Solo Dancing, featured four women - Susan Braham, Lucy Hemmendinger, Susan Brown, and Skaggs - who danced alone (usually) one after another, sometimes overlapping, and then, partially behind two tall screens, with the movement that was masked displayed live on an overhead video screen (Hemmendinger did the camerawork.) In Solo Dancing, the dancers are credited with devising their own movement; Skaggs is credited with choreography. In crude terms, guess that means that she determined who, when, and where, and they decided what.
In Skaggs’s own elegant dancing, there’s a sense of inner spaciousness and a luxuriance of time. I’’m particularly struck by the way she seems to measure the limits of the instant’s possibilities as if her body were doing on-the-spot thinking in joints that are filled with air as well as well-lubed. Beautifully articulated, returning intermittently to a comfortable and fluid center, her movement ranges in temperament from tentative to abandoned. It may be soft and sinuous or snap open the way a mousetrap shuts. Never a straight line in any of it.
It didn’t bother me that the subtleties of her interaction with the musical selections in Cross-Cultural Studies mostly passed me by, though she sometimes seemed to punch up her dancing to meet the music’s accents, or to weasel around it. But the bluntly dazzling “Jewel Song” nearly steamrolled her. The flow of Skaggs’s dancing is an undercurrent. Though the Gounod is as fluid, in a way, as Skaggs, its decorated surface is as understated as a sales pitch.
Solo Dancing was handsomely presented, with the women appearing in a warmly lit space behind and between paired screens, or in front of them. And I liked the definition this arrangement gave. I also liked the contrasts in the dancers: sturdy Susan Braham’s droll and quizzical attitude, her penchant for fumbles and staggers, her sudden bursts of speed; Lucy Hemmendinger’s cool, pulled-up moves; Susan Brown’s incredible sensuality, the lushness of her floorwork, the astonishing breadth of her movement; Skaggs’s delicacy and looseness. I enjoyed the apparently casual way solos became duets by virtue of their proximity or rhythms that coincided. But I could have lived without the live rerun of early dance material. It seems an okay idea - to show us in close-up, from a different angle, dancing that’s blotted from our view. But, though it was smoothly handled, it added only complication.
Fashion note; It would be distracting if the Swan Queen in a real ballet company didn’t shave under her arms, even if she grew feathers. But many downtown dancers - like these women - have long since quit shaving their legs or under their arms. Since their dancing is as straightforward as they are, and revels in the facts of the body rather than the illusions it can project, it’s not odd in the slightest.
So why mention it? Only because it’s rather attractive, actually.
At P.S. 122 (September 21 to 23).
Some ravishing dancing occurred in Sarah Skagg’s two pieces at P.S. 122. They represent an intimate genre I’m happier thinking of as structural occasions for dancing than as “choreography” - partly because the interest of the dancing is so largely within each dancer’s body, and the space she embraces. I don’t care about spatial patterns or traveling or the overall dynamics of the piece: I’m entirely absorbed by the moment-to-moment how of the dancing - how one movement flows into another, bursts in new direction, peters out, how a new impulse takes charge, how several impulses interplay.
Cross-Cultural Studies was a long solo to a sequence of music from rap to Philip Glass to an Indian assortment to Gounod’s coloratura display, the “Jewel Song” from Faust - through all of which Skaggs’s dancing was inflected by the music beating or bubbling along with it. The second piece, called Solo Dancing, featured four women - Susan Braham, Lucy Hemmendinger, Susan Brown, and Skaggs - who danced alone (usually) one after another, sometimes overlapping, and then, partially behind two tall screens, with the movement that was masked displayed live on an overhead video screen (Hemmendinger did the camerawork.) In Solo Dancing, the dancers are credited with devising their own movement; Skaggs is credited with choreography. In crude terms, guess that means that she determined who, when, and where, and they decided what.
In Skaggs’s own elegant dancing, there’s a sense of inner spaciousness and a luxuriance of time. I’’m particularly struck by the way she seems to measure the limits of the instant’s possibilities as if her body were doing on-the-spot thinking in joints that are filled with air as well as well-lubed. Beautifully articulated, returning intermittently to a comfortable and fluid center, her movement ranges in temperament from tentative to abandoned. It may be soft and sinuous or snap open the way a mousetrap shuts. Never a straight line in any of it.
It didn’t bother me that the subtleties of her interaction with the musical selections in Cross-Cultural Studies mostly passed me by, though she sometimes seemed to punch up her dancing to meet the music’s accents, or to weasel around it. But the bluntly dazzling “Jewel Song” nearly steamrolled her. The flow of Skaggs’s dancing is an undercurrent. Though the Gounod is as fluid, in a way, as Skaggs, its decorated surface is as understated as a sales pitch.
Solo Dancing was handsomely presented, with the women appearing in a warmly lit space behind and between paired screens, or in front of them. And I liked the definition this arrangement gave. I also liked the contrasts in the dancers: sturdy Susan Braham’s droll and quizzical attitude, her penchant for fumbles and staggers, her sudden bursts of speed; Lucy Hemmendinger’s cool, pulled-up moves; Susan Brown’s incredible sensuality, the lushness of her floorwork, the astonishing breadth of her movement; Skaggs’s delicacy and looseness. I enjoyed the apparently casual way solos became duets by virtue of their proximity or rhythms that coincided. But I could have lived without the live rerun of early dance material. It seems an okay idea - to show us in close-up, from a different angle, dancing that’s blotted from our view. But, though it was smoothly handled, it added only complication.
Fashion note; It would be distracting if the Swan Queen in a real ballet company didn’t shave under her arms, even if she grew feathers. But many downtown dancers - like these women - have long since quit shaving their legs or under their arms. Since their dancing is as straightforward as they are, and revels in the facts of the body rather than the illusions it can project, it’s not odd in the slightest.
So why mention it? Only because it’s rather attractive, actually.
At P.S. 122 (September 21 to 23).
Reborn on the Bayou
September 25
Nine members of Dance Theater of Harlem - that’s four and a half couples - are in the early stages of learning a pas de deux from Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries. It’s in a polite climate of compliments and criticisms that they put together the sequences of steps and directions, but as soon as a phrase clicks you can see it begin to fill out. Tetley is focusing on the central couple, Yvonne Hall and Augustus Van Heerden, illuminating and correcting their style, while Scott Douglas, assisting, surveys everybody else with an eye on technical details and turns generalities into counts. Sometimes they sound like Radar and Colonel Potter with their verbal overlap.
My eye drifts to the T-shirts many of the company are wearing: Karen Brown, I think, in Phil Hubbard’s Basketball Camp, Joseph Cippola in Festival dei due Mondi Spoleto, Card Jonassaint in an overaize Pittsburgh Steelers, Keith Sanders in Can Dara Siamese Restaurant Unofficial Thai Restaurant of the 1984 Olympics. Sitting next to me, studying the proceedings, and leanring the ballet by sight, balletmistress Lorraine Graves wears a Jacksons Victory Tour shirt. Brown leg warmers cover her arms from wrists to shoulders - she’s cold and her sweater is downstairs.
Tetley mostly seems concerned that the gestures come from the whole body, that the whole body reaches, that no presumptuous emotional ideas overlay the feeling that comes through the movement As the girls bourree and their arms lift, he wants to see the breath rise through the body. Eddie J. Shellman, in white knitted tights, and Virginia Johnson, in brown, work together in their own world, but they omit the lifts because Shellman’s hurt his back slightly and is giving it a rest. He works with a quiet, almost impassive concentration, reticent and serious. Johnson’s face blossoms into a smile when something feels right or when she grasps a problem that’s eluded her. Stephanie Dabney and Joseph Cippola push into a lift and carry that’s part of a pas de trois in which she’s passed from one man’s shoulder to the other’s, the three of them enjoying, in Tetley’s words, a seraphic love. Dabney and Hall clarify with Tetley an entrance they viewed n tape of the Australian Ballet. From time to time, other dancers drift out to rerun part of that tape, to count out a section where the rhythms are complicated.
All in all, I’d rather be watching Giselle, which the company premiered in London in July and which opens the City Center season on September 25. But they’re not spending much time rehearsing that now; they just have to keep it simmering.
Arthur Mitchell’s high goals for the school and company he founded (with co-director Karel Shook) to make a permanent contribution to the Harlem community have always been clear. One early aim was to prove decisively that blacks could do ballet; but he had already demonstrated that splendidly at the New York City Ballet (and so had Janet Collins at the Metropolitan Opera) to anyone who cared to take the point. Now, with an impressive roster of alumni and DTH’s excellence acknowledged internationally, Mitchell would prefer that it be appreciated as a company of dance artists who happen to be black.
Necessarily committed to developing, and sometimes educating, an audience, - and faced with financial ups ad downs or downs and downs - DTH sometimes did some curious programmatic sidestepping. And they did their first major downtown season in 1974 at the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin): if DTH was to be a major force, it had to play where the big guys played. DTH was a community-based institution, but it was not intended to be merely local. Performing uptown was like performing in the Bronx or Akron: uptown was out-of-town.
Virginia Johnson, in the company from the beginning, remembers when there were “four other dancers, no rep, no costumes, and no building - nothing. It was just a dream. But a belief in Dance Theater made it a special place to work from the start. We knew we were a serious company.” But it is only in the past few years that DTH’s identity has come fully into focus. There’s a consistent proportion of different kinds of ballets in the repertory, which has been gradually diversified from the Balanchine classics (like Allegro Brillante, Serenade, Rhythmetron) - the foundation of the company’s early repertory. And some jazzy ballets (like Billy Wilson’s Mirage or Louis Johnson’s popular Forces of Rhythm), some contemporary and classical exotica like Geoffrey Holder’s thumping Dougla, or, in recent years, Fokine’s Scheherezade and Firebird), and a few classics (Swan Lake, Act II, Paquita, Pas de Dix). Stir things up with American melodramas of the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s (Frankie and Johnny, Fall River Legend, A Streetcar Named Desire), which had been rarely seen in recent years. The result is a company with a distinctive range f ballets from cool to steamy,from opulent to crystalline, and a commitment to preservation. A company wit a vital, straightforward way of digging into new material. A company that’s almost a family.
For the steadiness of technical performance standards and a uniformity of style that’s respectful of individuality, the dancers eagerly credit the classes of William Griffith, their regular teacher and coach during the past four years (“He gives people a feeling that they can do things they might not feel were possible,” says Eddie Shellman.) And because there has been little turnover in the company, the dancers’ names and faces and bodies have become familiar. You know not only what you’re getting but who.
Many of the original dancers, particularly the men, started very late. But in 1976, the company lost many of its dancers to Broadway. “We had to retrench,” says Johnson, because we didn’t have the people to do the old roles. So we got new ballets and new dancers from that point. Most of the people in the company now came then, or were here as apprentices. Now they’re the core. It’s their growth and their development as artists that people are beginning to see and recognize.” We’re not just young kids with a lot of energy,” says Lorraine Graves. “Everyone has had a chance to grow up into what they’re doing a little more.”
The repertory has grown, very roughly speaking, in a sort of chronologically backwards way: from neoclassical Balanchine to the American dramas and a selection of works of the Diaghilev era (Firebird, Scheherezade, Les Biches), to a sprinkling of classics, to DTH’s first full-length ballet, the Romantic classic Giselle, which premiered in 1841. Though instead of some vague once-upon-a-time medieval Silesia or Rhineland, Mitchell and set and costume designer Carl Michel have moved the scene to the historical society of free Louisiana blacks in the year of the ballet’s creation.
Balanchine is the base, but each addition to the repertory serves to challenge the dancers to stretch their skill and understanding. Extending into an unfamiliar style, like that of Romantic ballet, is always more subtle than it seems. “People have pictures of what they think they’re supposed to look like,” remarks Graves. “I mean, you think of Taglioni and Cerrito,” she ays, “wafting her arms sideways, “but that’s not it. That’s an idea of the softness.” The task is to find the truth behind the pictures.
Until DTH began to perform dramatic ballets, we didn’t see the dancers work on specific characterization. For Graves, Equus was the first time she had to do that. “And it was very good for me, because I’d always been asked to do technical things. Then when Fall River came in, I was the mother, the nice mother. I get to be mean in Giselle,” she says very mildly. I get to be Myrtha and kill everybody."
Stephanie Dabney, who dances Giselle in the second cast, and more often gets to dance birds (the Firebird) and demi-birds (Odette), appreciates the chance to dance a human. She recalls Mitchell talking about Giselle, and the company just beginning to learn it some years ago. Then the project fell through. And “about a year ago, Mr. Franklin started with it, and again we didn’t do it. We didn’t really have enough girls. Maybe he didn’t feel we were ready for it. Monetarily speaking, I guess we weren’t ready - it’s a big production and you need lots of capital.”
Originally, this production was going to premiere in New York, but the London booking moved everything up and took away two months of rehearsal. “We had to cram and learn everything in a few weeks,” says Shellman, who dances Albert. “The steps, thee mime. We had to build stamina.”
Dancers are sometimes very uncomfortable with the traditional mime if they can’t believe it. “It’s just a matter of practice,” argues Shellman. “The only reason to feel uncomfortable is if you don’t do it enough. You just practice and do it, look in the mirror and do it till it comes across as natural - and musical.
He’s been partnering Virginia Johnson since about 1977. “Even if we haven’t worked together for a while, it only takes a minute to get used to her body and her weight and her balance.” What makes her so wonderful to work with? “She does what she’s told,” he snaps. “No. We’re very democratic.”
Johnson, of course, never expected to find herself dancing Giselle. I’’m pretty tall. I thought Giselle was a little person. But, approaching it from a Romantic point of view gave me a kind of freedom. In a classical work, you’re concerned with the form, that it be formally perfect. But to capture the essence of a romantic ballet, the emotion is the important thing. My god, you always have to work on the steps! But the most important thing is what happens to this young girl, and, in the second act, what happens to Albert as a result of it. When I came to that realization, I though maybe I can do this ballet.”
“You want to be exquisite, like whoever,” says Johnson, “but it’s the lively personal creation of the role that’s important. I practice the entrechats-quatres every day, but the flow of action makes the ballet fun in stead of something you have to be afraid of all the time. You’re always going to be afraid of the things in it, but you have the emotional line to carry you along, and that makes the movement work. They always tell you that. They tell you that if you approach it the right way, it just happens.”
Technically, the role is a challenge. “Jumping is not my favorite thing,” she admits, “and it’s a very jumping ballet. Giselle jumps from the first act through the second at. So I’ve had to really re-think jumping so I can enjoy it. You’d better enjoy it, or it’s going o look like a ton of bricks. That was the hardest thing- to have that feeling of extreme lightness. To get all the effort out and have it come from no place. That’s an ongoing struggle.” So she has worked with the pianist to understand how the music can help her, and with the conductor to set tempo that are comfortable. “Your partner does the lifts, but the music does the lifts too. It physically lifts you in the air and keeps you there.”
A full-length ballet is a progression,” says Johnson. “and you have to progress through it. But in Giselle, the second act is so vastly different from the first that you feel like it’s another day when you go out. century has gone by. It could be Sleeping Beauty and you’re waking up after the kiss.
“It’s amazing how different you feel,” she says, in her sweetly expressive voice. “when you go out to do the second act. And all you did was change everything - your hair, your makeup, your shoes, your costume."
Nine members of Dance Theater of Harlem - that’s four and a half couples - are in the early stages of learning a pas de deux from Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries. It’s in a polite climate of compliments and criticisms that they put together the sequences of steps and directions, but as soon as a phrase clicks you can see it begin to fill out. Tetley is focusing on the central couple, Yvonne Hall and Augustus Van Heerden, illuminating and correcting their style, while Scott Douglas, assisting, surveys everybody else with an eye on technical details and turns generalities into counts. Sometimes they sound like Radar and Colonel Potter with their verbal overlap.
My eye drifts to the T-shirts many of the company are wearing: Karen Brown, I think, in Phil Hubbard’s Basketball Camp, Joseph Cippola in Festival dei due Mondi Spoleto, Card Jonassaint in an overaize Pittsburgh Steelers, Keith Sanders in Can Dara Siamese Restaurant Unofficial Thai Restaurant of the 1984 Olympics. Sitting next to me, studying the proceedings, and leanring the ballet by sight, balletmistress Lorraine Graves wears a Jacksons Victory Tour shirt. Brown leg warmers cover her arms from wrists to shoulders - she’s cold and her sweater is downstairs.
Tetley mostly seems concerned that the gestures come from the whole body, that the whole body reaches, that no presumptuous emotional ideas overlay the feeling that comes through the movement As the girls bourree and their arms lift, he wants to see the breath rise through the body. Eddie J. Shellman, in white knitted tights, and Virginia Johnson, in brown, work together in their own world, but they omit the lifts because Shellman’s hurt his back slightly and is giving it a rest. He works with a quiet, almost impassive concentration, reticent and serious. Johnson’s face blossoms into a smile when something feels right or when she grasps a problem that’s eluded her. Stephanie Dabney and Joseph Cippola push into a lift and carry that’s part of a pas de trois in which she’s passed from one man’s shoulder to the other’s, the three of them enjoying, in Tetley’s words, a seraphic love. Dabney and Hall clarify with Tetley an entrance they viewed n tape of the Australian Ballet. From time to time, other dancers drift out to rerun part of that tape, to count out a section where the rhythms are complicated.
All in all, I’d rather be watching Giselle, which the company premiered in London in July and which opens the City Center season on September 25. But they’re not spending much time rehearsing that now; they just have to keep it simmering.
Arthur Mitchell’s high goals for the school and company he founded (with co-director Karel Shook) to make a permanent contribution to the Harlem community have always been clear. One early aim was to prove decisively that blacks could do ballet; but he had already demonstrated that splendidly at the New York City Ballet (and so had Janet Collins at the Metropolitan Opera) to anyone who cared to take the point. Now, with an impressive roster of alumni and DTH’s excellence acknowledged internationally, Mitchell would prefer that it be appreciated as a company of dance artists who happen to be black.
Necessarily committed to developing, and sometimes educating, an audience, - and faced with financial ups ad downs or downs and downs - DTH sometimes did some curious programmatic sidestepping. And they did their first major downtown season in 1974 at the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin): if DTH was to be a major force, it had to play where the big guys played. DTH was a community-based institution, but it was not intended to be merely local. Performing uptown was like performing in the Bronx or Akron: uptown was out-of-town.
Virginia Johnson, in the company from the beginning, remembers when there were “four other dancers, no rep, no costumes, and no building - nothing. It was just a dream. But a belief in Dance Theater made it a special place to work from the start. We knew we were a serious company.” But it is only in the past few years that DTH’s identity has come fully into focus. There’s a consistent proportion of different kinds of ballets in the repertory, which has been gradually diversified from the Balanchine classics (like Allegro Brillante, Serenade, Rhythmetron) - the foundation of the company’s early repertory. And some jazzy ballets (like Billy Wilson’s Mirage or Louis Johnson’s popular Forces of Rhythm), some contemporary and classical exotica like Geoffrey Holder’s thumping Dougla, or, in recent years, Fokine’s Scheherezade and Firebird), and a few classics (Swan Lake, Act II, Paquita, Pas de Dix). Stir things up with American melodramas of the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s (Frankie and Johnny, Fall River Legend, A Streetcar Named Desire), which had been rarely seen in recent years. The result is a company with a distinctive range f ballets from cool to steamy,from opulent to crystalline, and a commitment to preservation. A company wit a vital, straightforward way of digging into new material. A company that’s almost a family.
For the steadiness of technical performance standards and a uniformity of style that’s respectful of individuality, the dancers eagerly credit the classes of William Griffith, their regular teacher and coach during the past four years (“He gives people a feeling that they can do things they might not feel were possible,” says Eddie Shellman.) And because there has been little turnover in the company, the dancers’ names and faces and bodies have become familiar. You know not only what you’re getting but who.
Many of the original dancers, particularly the men, started very late. But in 1976, the company lost many of its dancers to Broadway. “We had to retrench,” says Johnson, because we didn’t have the people to do the old roles. So we got new ballets and new dancers from that point. Most of the people in the company now came then, or were here as apprentices. Now they’re the core. It’s their growth and their development as artists that people are beginning to see and recognize.” We’re not just young kids with a lot of energy,” says Lorraine Graves. “Everyone has had a chance to grow up into what they’re doing a little more.”
The repertory has grown, very roughly speaking, in a sort of chronologically backwards way: from neoclassical Balanchine to the American dramas and a selection of works of the Diaghilev era (Firebird, Scheherezade, Les Biches), to a sprinkling of classics, to DTH’s first full-length ballet, the Romantic classic Giselle, which premiered in 1841. Though instead of some vague once-upon-a-time medieval Silesia or Rhineland, Mitchell and set and costume designer Carl Michel have moved the scene to the historical society of free Louisiana blacks in the year of the ballet’s creation.
Balanchine is the base, but each addition to the repertory serves to challenge the dancers to stretch their skill and understanding. Extending into an unfamiliar style, like that of Romantic ballet, is always more subtle than it seems. “People have pictures of what they think they’re supposed to look like,” remarks Graves. “I mean, you think of Taglioni and Cerrito,” she ays, “wafting her arms sideways, “but that’s not it. That’s an idea of the softness.” The task is to find the truth behind the pictures.
Until DTH began to perform dramatic ballets, we didn’t see the dancers work on specific characterization. For Graves, Equus was the first time she had to do that. “And it was very good for me, because I’d always been asked to do technical things. Then when Fall River came in, I was the mother, the nice mother. I get to be mean in Giselle,” she says very mildly. I get to be Myrtha and kill everybody."
Stephanie Dabney, who dances Giselle in the second cast, and more often gets to dance birds (the Firebird) and demi-birds (Odette), appreciates the chance to dance a human. She recalls Mitchell talking about Giselle, and the company just beginning to learn it some years ago. Then the project fell through. And “about a year ago, Mr. Franklin started with it, and again we didn’t do it. We didn’t really have enough girls. Maybe he didn’t feel we were ready for it. Monetarily speaking, I guess we weren’t ready - it’s a big production and you need lots of capital.”
Originally, this production was going to premiere in New York, but the London booking moved everything up and took away two months of rehearsal. “We had to cram and learn everything in a few weeks,” says Shellman, who dances Albert. “The steps, thee mime. We had to build stamina.”
Dancers are sometimes very uncomfortable with the traditional mime if they can’t believe it. “It’s just a matter of practice,” argues Shellman. “The only reason to feel uncomfortable is if you don’t do it enough. You just practice and do it, look in the mirror and do it till it comes across as natural - and musical.
He’s been partnering Virginia Johnson since about 1977. “Even if we haven’t worked together for a while, it only takes a minute to get used to her body and her weight and her balance.” What makes her so wonderful to work with? “She does what she’s told,” he snaps. “No. We’re very democratic.”
Johnson, of course, never expected to find herself dancing Giselle. I’’m pretty tall. I thought Giselle was a little person. But, approaching it from a Romantic point of view gave me a kind of freedom. In a classical work, you’re concerned with the form, that it be formally perfect. But to capture the essence of a romantic ballet, the emotion is the important thing. My god, you always have to work on the steps! But the most important thing is what happens to this young girl, and, in the second act, what happens to Albert as a result of it. When I came to that realization, I though maybe I can do this ballet.”
“You want to be exquisite, like whoever,” says Johnson, “but it’s the lively personal creation of the role that’s important. I practice the entrechats-quatres every day, but the flow of action makes the ballet fun in stead of something you have to be afraid of all the time. You’re always going to be afraid of the things in it, but you have the emotional line to carry you along, and that makes the movement work. They always tell you that. They tell you that if you approach it the right way, it just happens.”
Technically, the role is a challenge. “Jumping is not my favorite thing,” she admits, “and it’s a very jumping ballet. Giselle jumps from the first act through the second at. So I’ve had to really re-think jumping so I can enjoy it. You’d better enjoy it, or it’s going o look like a ton of bricks. That was the hardest thing- to have that feeling of extreme lightness. To get all the effort out and have it come from no place. That’s an ongoing struggle.” So she has worked with the pianist to understand how the music can help her, and with the conductor to set tempo that are comfortable. “Your partner does the lifts, but the music does the lifts too. It physically lifts you in the air and keeps you there.”
A full-length ballet is a progression,” says Johnson. “and you have to progress through it. But in Giselle, the second act is so vastly different from the first that you feel like it’s another day when you go out. century has gone by. It could be Sleeping Beauty and you’re waking up after the kiss.
“It’s amazing how different you feel,” she says, in her sweetly expressive voice. “when you go out to do the second act. And all you did was change everything - your hair, your makeup, your shoes, your costume."
Primary Day
September 18
If Cydney Wilkes turned up in a print dress and little white gloves, she could be the prototypical image of an army wife. But she’s not serving iced tea to the other officers’ wives. She’s in a sleeveless shirt and shorts, slithering coolly over DTW’s stage to the sometimes panting, sometimes ratchety grinding vocalizations of the Inuit Throat Singers and to an obliquely complementary tape explaining how human speech is produced. In her Girl Dances for Screaming Ladies, four white cloth oblongs - each of which seems to be assigned to one of four women - hang in the space, and Wilkes, who dances solo at first, disappears behind hers, rolls under it, rumples it, and finally rushes into it and snaps it free. Wilkes is an unusually perplexing, deceptively plain performer whose movement has an underplayed, slyly teasing quality. Without being at all elaborate or evasive, she often seems to move in a roundabout way. Perhaps it’s just the softening effect of the way energy spirals through her limbs. Combining elements that might seem antipathetic, she’s simultaneously sinuous and gawky, devious and blunt. She’ll often glide under where you expect her to move, or casually bump herself back or sideways. She can go very fast without appearing to speed up, that is, without changing the accent of what she’s doing. She’ll choose to hold an unclimactic pose, stare decisively at nothing in particular. Sometimes she looks as if she’s about to faint - as if her eyes’ll roll up, her body’ll sag, and she’ll keel into the floor. But there’s really only that momentary illusion of liquefaction before she turns the movement in a new direction.
In 16 Falls in Color, a performance much more about the resonance of being still than about moving, Wilkes subtly combines pristine behavior with a material. As set designer (and builder), she has constructed a minimal hose of metal pipe with transparent vinyl roof and walls. Sunbathing alongside it in nothing but panties and sunglasses, she is entirely painted yellow, including paint-clotted hair. She smears on more yellow paint, almost as thick as sour cream, and leans back to catch some more rays. Then she packs up - puts on funny black quilted boots, picks up her pink towel and her blue book, and goes into the house and sits on the gray chair.
She’s so bright! So yellow! She takes a sopping yellow shirt from a translucent white attach case (where you can see it next to lumps of something red and something blue), puts it on, pulls it off, and presses it against the transparent walls. She struggles into a poster-paint red skirt that smears her legs and accidentally spots her nipples. Then she takes it off and uses it to blot the walls. The tension between the delight o infantile mud play and the revulsion of the ugh! factor keeps us viscerally enthralled while her calm, ordinary demeanor and her restrained seriousness allow her activity to be funny and beautiful and - all our life experiences aside - persuasively commonplace.
Insufficiently red, she smears her arm, back and neck with more paint, and combs some thickly through her short hair. We don’t question her motivations; we can tell that her decisions are never whimsical. She puts on a blue tie, critically drips a line of yellow on it, fattens it with a smudge, puts the boots on again. She picks up the attache case and is off to work like any respectable citizen.
I admire the way Wilkes sustains the color incidents and keeps them lively and dry. But she’s not the whole story in this finger paint fantasy. Another yellow girl saunters across the stage on a path of pink paper. A couple - she’s red and he’s blue - meet, climb over each other and blot fronts. Red and blue lift yellow, who swings over red’s shoulder. It’s so important that all their colors are wet. There’s a temporary lowering of the tone, too, in this interlude, because though one painted person may be a kind of art object, a set of three primary-colored people acquires some of the tacky repressiveness of the dumb-bunny humanoids encountered by the crew of Starship Enterprise.
Wilkes comes back home with a small paper bag. She takes her tie off, remove a transparent container of pretzels from the bag, empties the pretzels into a glass bowl. She pours a bottle of blue glop into a goblet, eats the pretzels with chopsticks while she reads the paper. You dread that she’ll drink the blue stuff or dunk the pretzels in it. And when she unexpectedly pours it over her arm, it’s a relief. The blue gets dribbled on the pretzels eventually, poured on her back and legs as well, and blue stockings from her attache case make their blue imprints on the walls. Wiles sits back at the table, slumping slightly affectless. It’s been a day like any other.
At Dance Theater Workshop’s Bessie Schonberg Theater (August 29 and 30).
If Cydney Wilkes turned up in a print dress and little white gloves, she could be the prototypical image of an army wife. But she’s not serving iced tea to the other officers’ wives. She’s in a sleeveless shirt and shorts, slithering coolly over DTW’s stage to the sometimes panting, sometimes ratchety grinding vocalizations of the Inuit Throat Singers and to an obliquely complementary tape explaining how human speech is produced. In her Girl Dances for Screaming Ladies, four white cloth oblongs - each of which seems to be assigned to one of four women - hang in the space, and Wilkes, who dances solo at first, disappears behind hers, rolls under it, rumples it, and finally rushes into it and snaps it free. Wilkes is an unusually perplexing, deceptively plain performer whose movement has an underplayed, slyly teasing quality. Without being at all elaborate or evasive, she often seems to move in a roundabout way. Perhaps it’s just the softening effect of the way energy spirals through her limbs. Combining elements that might seem antipathetic, she’s simultaneously sinuous and gawky, devious and blunt. She’ll often glide under where you expect her to move, or casually bump herself back or sideways. She can go very fast without appearing to speed up, that is, without changing the accent of what she’s doing. She’ll choose to hold an unclimactic pose, stare decisively at nothing in particular. Sometimes she looks as if she’s about to faint - as if her eyes’ll roll up, her body’ll sag, and she’ll keel into the floor. But there’s really only that momentary illusion of liquefaction before she turns the movement in a new direction.
In 16 Falls in Color, a performance much more about the resonance of being still than about moving, Wilkes subtly combines pristine behavior with a material. As set designer (and builder), she has constructed a minimal hose of metal pipe with transparent vinyl roof and walls. Sunbathing alongside it in nothing but panties and sunglasses, she is entirely painted yellow, including paint-clotted hair. She smears on more yellow paint, almost as thick as sour cream, and leans back to catch some more rays. Then she packs up - puts on funny black quilted boots, picks up her pink towel and her blue book, and goes into the house and sits on the gray chair.
She’s so bright! So yellow! She takes a sopping yellow shirt from a translucent white attach case (where you can see it next to lumps of something red and something blue), puts it on, pulls it off, and presses it against the transparent walls. She struggles into a poster-paint red skirt that smears her legs and accidentally spots her nipples. Then she takes it off and uses it to blot the walls. The tension between the delight o infantile mud play and the revulsion of the ugh! factor keeps us viscerally enthralled while her calm, ordinary demeanor and her restrained seriousness allow her activity to be funny and beautiful and - all our life experiences aside - persuasively commonplace.
Insufficiently red, she smears her arm, back and neck with more paint, and combs some thickly through her short hair. We don’t question her motivations; we can tell that her decisions are never whimsical. She puts on a blue tie, critically drips a line of yellow on it, fattens it with a smudge, puts the boots on again. She picks up the attache case and is off to work like any respectable citizen.
I admire the way Wilkes sustains the color incidents and keeps them lively and dry. But she’s not the whole story in this finger paint fantasy. Another yellow girl saunters across the stage on a path of pink paper. A couple - she’s red and he’s blue - meet, climb over each other and blot fronts. Red and blue lift yellow, who swings over red’s shoulder. It’s so important that all their colors are wet. There’s a temporary lowering of the tone, too, in this interlude, because though one painted person may be a kind of art object, a set of three primary-colored people acquires some of the tacky repressiveness of the dumb-bunny humanoids encountered by the crew of Starship Enterprise.
Wilkes comes back home with a small paper bag. She takes her tie off, remove a transparent container of pretzels from the bag, empties the pretzels into a glass bowl. She pours a bottle of blue glop into a goblet, eats the pretzels with chopsticks while she reads the paper. You dread that she’ll drink the blue stuff or dunk the pretzels in it. And when she unexpectedly pours it over her arm, it’s a relief. The blue gets dribbled on the pretzels eventually, poured on her back and legs as well, and blue stockings from her attache case make their blue imprints on the walls. Wiles sits back at the table, slumping slightly affectless. It’s been a day like any other.
At Dance Theater Workshop’s Bessie Schonberg Theater (August 29 and 30).
Rememem Remembermember
September 4
Imported from San Francisco for DTW’s summer “Out-of-Towners” series, Deborah Slater’s trio of performance pieces on the theme of memory was strangely slack and amorphous, though a few of the visual ideas were as resonant as the gloved hands penetrating the watery surfaces of mirrors in Cocteau’s Orphee.
I’m thinking of one kind of image in particular - in the first section, “Pieces of the Frame” - of fingers and body parts pressed into a white elastic screen from behind; when the pressure’s off, history’s erased. The screen is set like a window in a blue wall; there’s also a white mat, a light box, an aluminum ladder that seems too narrow in perspective toward the ceiling. Three isolated women occupy this rather spare scene, which is accompanied aurally by whales mooing and the faraway cries of children. One woman, in a plastic clone mask, reads old letters. Another sits astride the light box, talking in signs about thinking and ideas coming to fruition. The third woman climbs the ladder without using her hands, slides down it, straddles it, hangs off it, bounces on it till she loses her footing. Meantime hands scratch along the top and bottom of the screen, fingertips push at it, hands together make a jumbly, pushy, tumorous cluster. Just beginning to suggest something human. Slater’s back and arms pushed against the elastic, or her upper arm and the side of her face in relief, read like precious fossils. What are the women up to? It hardly seems to matter.
The second part, “Present Past,” set to ‘50s and early ‘60s rock and roll, with golden oldie dances nicely choreographed by Priscilla Regalado, is a high school reunion in Anywhere, U.s.A., or maybe Smallville. Intermittent voice-overs and narration are intended to complicate our perspective but seem, instead, rather wimpy and pretentious. All he usual suspects have ben rounded up, familiar stereotypes with fixed smiles and exaggerated mannerisms: the guy with the Elvis hairdo, the wallflower learning dance steps from a book, Cookie Rodriguez with her own diaphragm, a couple of extra cutout men. There’s lots of action in the ladies’ room: primping and fussing and someone dropping tampons on the floor. A dazed photographer ties to match up the cast with their yearbook pictures. Everybody, all together now, does the Cool Jerk, and together they sing, “The Great Pre-tender. OoOooo OoOoooOo.” Early in the festivities, on girl says to another, “They got a lot of dorks at this school.” You betcha!
Already I don’t see how or why the vague, dreamlike piece goes with the little kitsch excursion down memory lane. And the third part, “Future Memories,” though it seem similar in mood to the first part, is equally tenuously connected. Is there, buried somewhere, a key that will cause the three pieces to resonate through each other? I don’t think so. They’re too thin.
But, again, the visual element can be striking. The dancers, six women, roll under rows of slit and painted transparent plastic curtain, just brushing the bottom edge. They thrust themselves upward, rumpling that plastic, and slide decisively away. Some swing close to the floor hanging on narrow trapezes that dangle strands of clear tubing. Something ocean-like, wavelike, womblike in this future.
Straining to project a kind of vague fantasy, the women wear leotards and tights stained like inkblots in rich single colors that fade around the belly and breasts - where the body might press most strongly against something or someone. They pull down window shades drawn with railroad tracks, a window, a blank apartment house front, with rows of dead windows, a similar negative transparency of windows alone, another of just red bricks. Behind these shades they stretch and cradle themselves, or crouch like frogs while we listen to a train chug by. They snap the shades up fast, run side-to-side, back-and-forth, then spout insistent, simultaneous recitations of adolescent psychobabble. Slater, in purple-black, balances upside-down on the edge of a slant board, hanging her head off the edge. She scrabbles around on it, flattens herself against it when the other women suddenly charge through. Two women swing on those springy trapezes and are replaced by two more, twirling around as the loosely fluttering strands of tubing below the crossbar twist and gleam.
So? I wonder. Slater has a coherent and flexible set (by Regina Jepsen) that can break up the space. But it’s neutral, except for the way it posts images of loneliness. How do you inhabit it? Slater’s choices seem either vague or trivial, without much perceptiveness or clear perspective. I think she’s taken commonplace material, obscured it in artistic trappings, and reflected back the superficialities a little fuzzier, a little more fragmented. Underneath is merely the daily meat of daytime drama.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 9 to 18).
Imported from San Francisco for DTW’s summer “Out-of-Towners” series, Deborah Slater’s trio of performance pieces on the theme of memory was strangely slack and amorphous, though a few of the visual ideas were as resonant as the gloved hands penetrating the watery surfaces of mirrors in Cocteau’s Orphee.
I’m thinking of one kind of image in particular - in the first section, “Pieces of the Frame” - of fingers and body parts pressed into a white elastic screen from behind; when the pressure’s off, history’s erased. The screen is set like a window in a blue wall; there’s also a white mat, a light box, an aluminum ladder that seems too narrow in perspective toward the ceiling. Three isolated women occupy this rather spare scene, which is accompanied aurally by whales mooing and the faraway cries of children. One woman, in a plastic clone mask, reads old letters. Another sits astride the light box, talking in signs about thinking and ideas coming to fruition. The third woman climbs the ladder without using her hands, slides down it, straddles it, hangs off it, bounces on it till she loses her footing. Meantime hands scratch along the top and bottom of the screen, fingertips push at it, hands together make a jumbly, pushy, tumorous cluster. Just beginning to suggest something human. Slater’s back and arms pushed against the elastic, or her upper arm and the side of her face in relief, read like precious fossils. What are the women up to? It hardly seems to matter.
The second part, “Present Past,” set to ‘50s and early ‘60s rock and roll, with golden oldie dances nicely choreographed by Priscilla Regalado, is a high school reunion in Anywhere, U.s.A., or maybe Smallville. Intermittent voice-overs and narration are intended to complicate our perspective but seem, instead, rather wimpy and pretentious. All he usual suspects have ben rounded up, familiar stereotypes with fixed smiles and exaggerated mannerisms: the guy with the Elvis hairdo, the wallflower learning dance steps from a book, Cookie Rodriguez with her own diaphragm, a couple of extra cutout men. There’s lots of action in the ladies’ room: primping and fussing and someone dropping tampons on the floor. A dazed photographer ties to match up the cast with their yearbook pictures. Everybody, all together now, does the Cool Jerk, and together they sing, “The Great Pre-tender. OoOooo OoOoooOo.” Early in the festivities, on girl says to another, “They got a lot of dorks at this school.” You betcha!
Already I don’t see how or why the vague, dreamlike piece goes with the little kitsch excursion down memory lane. And the third part, “Future Memories,” though it seem similar in mood to the first part, is equally tenuously connected. Is there, buried somewhere, a key that will cause the three pieces to resonate through each other? I don’t think so. They’re too thin.
But, again, the visual element can be striking. The dancers, six women, roll under rows of slit and painted transparent plastic curtain, just brushing the bottom edge. They thrust themselves upward, rumpling that plastic, and slide decisively away. Some swing close to the floor hanging on narrow trapezes that dangle strands of clear tubing. Something ocean-like, wavelike, womblike in this future.
Straining to project a kind of vague fantasy, the women wear leotards and tights stained like inkblots in rich single colors that fade around the belly and breasts - where the body might press most strongly against something or someone. They pull down window shades drawn with railroad tracks, a window, a blank apartment house front, with rows of dead windows, a similar negative transparency of windows alone, another of just red bricks. Behind these shades they stretch and cradle themselves, or crouch like frogs while we listen to a train chug by. They snap the shades up fast, run side-to-side, back-and-forth, then spout insistent, simultaneous recitations of adolescent psychobabble. Slater, in purple-black, balances upside-down on the edge of a slant board, hanging her head off the edge. She scrabbles around on it, flattens herself against it when the other women suddenly charge through. Two women swing on those springy trapezes and are replaced by two more, twirling around as the loosely fluttering strands of tubing below the crossbar twist and gleam.
So? I wonder. Slater has a coherent and flexible set (by Regina Jepsen) that can break up the space. But it’s neutral, except for the way it posts images of loneliness. How do you inhabit it? Slater’s choices seem either vague or trivial, without much perceptiveness or clear perspective. I think she’s taken commonplace material, obscured it in artistic trappings, and reflected back the superficialities a little fuzzier, a little more fragmented. Underneath is merely the daily meat of daytime drama.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 9 to 18).
French Foot Forward
August 21
Lyon is the mercantile city your train passes through in the middle of the night on the way to the south of France It straddles the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone rivers, but a third river is said to pour into it the Beaujolais. (Actually, Cote du Rhone is generally cheaper.) And though it may not be hard to have a bad meal - McDonald’s is there - it’s awfully easy to have an excellent one. Lyon is where gluttons go instead of heaven. There for over a week as a guest of the first Biennale Internationale de la Danse, I figured on lots of spare time. But, in the end, I missed the marionette museum, the Gallo-Roman museum, the textile museum, and even the museum of dental surgery.
Faintly Italian in the pale ochers and pastels of buildings which stand as staunchly bourgeois in their uniformity as the routinely pollarded trees, the city seems surprisingly southern. The Rhone, wide and grayish, divides the center from more modern sections sprawling on the plain to the east: the Saone, narrower and green, borders the 14th and 15th century section, against the hill of Fourviere. topped by a crushingly opulent turn-of-the-century basilica and a pair of Roman amphitheaters where you can spend the afternoon baking in the sun.
Antiques glut the narrow streets and tiny squares of the old town, and along the quays of the Saone spring up daily markets for food or stalls of geegaws and cheesy clothing of synthetic fabrics for the laboring people who can’t afford to shop the main pedestrian drag.
This summer, for five weeks starting in early June, Lyon initiated a major biennial dance festival. Big guns from America were imported for the beginning, middle and end (Cunningham, Taylor Graham) to establish its international credentials, but most of the companies involved were French. The city had been looking to revitalize its annual festival, which had seen its best days in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It would have been silly to try to compete with Avignon’s theatrical circus. And music was out - there’s the Festival Berlioz in September. Dance was a logical and timely choice.
In 1980, spurred by the needs of five local dance companies, the Maison de la Danse was organized, under the direction of Guy Darmet, in a former civic auditorium/movie house dating from 1932 in the weavers’ quarter on the heights at the north end of the city. It was clear that there was substantial interest in dance. In the course of a year about 20 companies pass through, performing and giving workshops; from about 800 subscribers in 1980, Darmet can now count on 3000. And because festival money was already in the budget, it merely had to be appropriated to the new project.
The festival (with Darmet as artistic director) started out unpropitiously in early June with a costly bout of unusually cold, wet weather that rained out several outdoor events, including the opener. Merce Cunningham was a smash with his new piece Pictures. After 20 years of Cunningham injections by was of performances and teaching, which have influenced young French choreographers immensely, it’s not surprising that his work should be accessible to the public. His influence has been spread directly and indirectly through choreographers and teachers like Viola Farber, as well as via the many French and other European dancers who’ve studied at the Cunningham studio. The influence of Alwin Nikolais has also been consistently felt, partly by way of two expatriates, Susan Buirge a liberating teacher, and Carolyn Carlson, once based at the Paris Opera but now a free agent whose glamour, and popularity in unabated. The complex dreamlike world forged of emotional extremity within the German tradition we now associate with Pina Bausch, and the ghastly extravagance of the occasional Butoh performers who have been visiting Europe since 1978 is also showing in current work. Time was when French modern dance was mostly glossy surface effects and imitation But what’s new is that, at last, these influences are being transformed by distinctive and penetrating French choreographic imaginations and obsessions.
In all, the festival sponsored 16 companies plus an off-festival featuring an equal number given space and technical assistance and no money. There were eight photographic exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations, a retrospective of 21 dance films of Fred Astaire, a month-long program of about 50 dance films - from Loie Fuller imitators and the earliest reconstructed shorts of the Royal Danish Ballet to a just-made video of Jean Babilee at age 61 dancing Le Jeune Homme et La Mort during Roland Petit’s Paris season. These were sponsored by the Cinematheque de la Danse or the Cinemateque Francaise in locations varying from a tiny basement cinema to the hospitable and exquisite Lumiere mansion.
Huge photo-portraits by Delahaye filled the big lobby of the Ravel Auditorium. An exhibition of large, high-contrast blowups of 40 years of work by the late Serge Lifar opened at the Mairie de Sixieme Arrondissement: Judith Jamison, a 1947 portrait of Nijinsky, with a sweet mien and a remote gaze; Denis Ganio and Elisabetta Terabust, the fine hair shining on her arms; Yvette Chauvire, Cocteau and Tumanova, preparing for Lifar’s Phedre, like twins, all piercing eyes and cheekbones. (The opening was a serio-comic occasion- the officials made short speeches of appreciation and got their photographs taken for the papers, but there were no regular people present.) Michael Luquet, Guy Darmet’s lively assistant, assembled a superb display of photographs at the Maison de la Danse covering the entire career of Mary Wigman. Photos by Patrick Bensard (of the Cinemateque de la Danse) of New York were displayed in a multiplex hairdressing salon, Espace Barriere, with a teacup-sized backyard garden and mirrored walls like a dance studio. Next door was a shop with memorable chocolates, which melted into a grotesque but far from inedible lump in the care the next day.
Out in the streets, there was a day-long Provencal promenade in traditional Arlesian costume, augmented by hordes of boozing Danish soccer fans whose team had just won, then, that night, a folk performance by the Capouleir de Martigues in the blissfully cool Roman theater.
Being cool was a treat, because the weather had been warm and heavy and the French are not keen on air conditioning. The newspapers frequently ran articles on AC’s menace to health, detailing its pernicious effects, all of which I’ve happily forgotten. Even in my fancy hotel, the air conditioning turned up to high produced only the wispiest exhalation of cool air.
Lured to my hotel window one afternoon by bullfight music and the Andrews Sisters singing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,” I caught an exhibition of danse sportif, ballroom dancing, including a couple of children jitterbugging to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Late that evening hordes of young men stomped and jumped up and down on the same wooden dance platform to celebrate a French soccer victory.
Paul Taylor’s company danced in the Ravel Auditorium, a 2000-seat symphony hall, which was luxuriously comfortable but not well-suited to dance and a bitch for the dancers because there is no real crossover and only makeshift wings. But Taylor’s is not an inexpensive company to produce, and the alternative would have been an 800-seat house. Taylor’s Aureole suffered without a proscenium because it needs that frame to beat against, but Three Epitaphs and Esplanade were spectacular. I was struck mainly by the quality of the audience’s attention - its respectfulness, its seriousness, its unstinting enthusiasm. Mostly young and middle-aged, the audience liked “culture” and seemed inclined, as a matter of course, to trust the intention of the artist. At no performance did I encounter a suspicious audience or one that thought it was the star.
I missed Josette Baiz’s Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard) with a cast of 17 children and teenagers, but I did see her formal and perverse Prudence, ou les emotions subtiles, which also featured a surprisingly young cast of excellent dancers, her Compagnie la Place Blanche, from Aix-en-Provence. Sex and violence are the meat of the work, but Balz authentically creates a social delirium in which anything goes. Balz has been based in Aix since 1977, but she worked with Jean-Claude Gallotta in 1980, and it’s curious to see how both are currently producing work in which gritty sexual intimacy and obsession have such importance. There’s something both philosophical and low-down in their pieces, nourished, in part, by an avid fascination with the processes of spiritual debasement and exaltation.
Beautifully integrated with a musical collage engineered by three young gentlemen in tailcoats among stacks of electrical and computer equipment and keyboard playing works of Rameau and Pergolesi as well as thuds and computer blibble, Prudence also involves recitations from Sade, Laclos, Restif de la Bretonne , Diderot, Barthes... In the program, Baiz desrcibes the 18th century penchant to be moved, agitated, to weep, to live as many extreme emotions as possible. And she has stirred her chosen characters into an existential frenzy of violent and concentrated desire. Four men surround a slyly smiling, barely pubescent girl. A man bites a woman on the thigh; she shoves him back, knocks him down, hauls his upright, bites his neck, and jumps on him so both fall to the floor, rolling in a sexual fit. Four long-haired young girls move with sharp, quirky urgency, gasping and stabbing as they utter nightmare shrieks and croaks. Filled with a kind of dazed expectancy, men and women are equally desperate and savage. Two women take turns sexually handling a third, and throwing her down. Again and again they trade roles. A man curls up, pressing his head between the legs of his limp or dead partner. A line of women, clasping their men tightly, jiggle and rub their buttocks. In her orderly, relentless sequence of vignettes, Baiz builds a pent-up feeling, as if out of the dancers’ ferocious, pointless, wriggling intimacies some transcendent satisfaction must emerge. What does come out is a psychology where the characters are driven to force their feelings to the utmost in order to feel that they exist at all.
A high point of the festival, for me, was whizzing down the autoroute at 100 miles an hour, hanging on the tails of 90-mile-per-hour slowpokes, to see a rehearsal of Jean-Claude Gallotta (who wouldn’t be in Lyon till I’d gone)in his enviably spacious studio in the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble, where his company, Groupe Emile Dubois, is based. (Emile Dubois is nobody, just a made-up name.)
The company wears multi-colored torn-up clothing - fringed shirts, bras and breastplates, decorated jockstraps - suggesting an exotic and flamboyant society for Les Aventures d’Ivan Vaffan. The men, unshaven, look particularly disreputable, caressing the women’s thighs, rubbing their own chests. The music (by Henri Torque), which is a variable but powerful force in the piece, moans and pulses. The men smack their groins, snuggle their chins into the women’s necks. The movement’s full of tight, snatching gestures; when the group swarms and rushes, it’s leggy, aggressive, darting, very fast. Often, it’s like the threat display behavior of a tribe of apes.
The men clamber on and off of a sagging, ratty, nearly broken gold sofa. They sit, sunk into it, and a woman dives over the back into their laps. They stand, lower her to balance on the tops of their feet, and swing her gently. When they flip her away, she leaps back into their arms.
The atmosphere is sensual and crude, sexy and sweaty; actions are impelled, without forethought or reflection, by blunt desires and common rituals. There is no notion of privacy. Like children, the dancers are extremely interested in their own and each other’s bodies. Like animals, they inhale each other’s aroma. They whisper sharp, birdlike sounds, point and slap, scatter across the stage in short bursts of leaps, drop to the floor, stamp hard. They touch each other constantly in strange, significant ways, like when the women clasp the men and rub them head to head.
A girl perches in low attitude, quite formal. The men, on their knees, carefully take her fingers in their mouths and promenade her halfway around to romantic piano music with lots of pedal. Afterward, everyone puts their fingers in their mouths, slowly tasting, revealing that the group’s unity comes from the fact that every sensual experience is transmitted to all the group members. Much later, one man vibrates his foot against another’s crotch. When that foot touches the floor, the other dances, who are lyving down, are struck as if by an electric shock.
I loved the richness of the unusual sexual and tribal consciousness of Ivan Vaffan, and the blend of dramatically shaped segments, semi-sullen quiet times, formal rituals, public intimacies and percussive, rushing-around crowd scenes. I liked the bullheaded seriousness of Gallotta’s appalling and ambiguous comedy. In a pas de deux to some of Chopin’s Sylphides music, the couple wears rumpled,, off-white versions of ballet outfits. Initially, the man pays his partner the appropriate tender attentions, but he starts feeling her ass in the waltz. He grabs her, kissing her neck; she pulls away into arabesque, trying to maintain her composure. He grabs her by the neck, and she recoils, then he wrestles her back against him fiercely. Relentless, headstrong, utterly serious, he gets her on the couch,m still thrashing, pulls her skirt up, loosens his knickers, tries to screw her and, I guess, succeeds, because they're pooped and numb, unwilling to be close when they sit up. Such a nastily realistic ballet satire is wickedly funny, yet it’s disturbing and embarrassing to be laughing at, and even conspiring in, a rape. What starts as a giggle becomes an appallingly serious joke. But Gallota’s not catering to finicky tastes; he gets you to swallow the whole stew.
“Off” the festival, I saw Ris et Danseries’ Baroque performance in an opulent miniature opera house, Theatre des Celestins, and postmodernist Pierre Deloche in a thoughtful, muted solo using sticks, in a handsome loftish space in a building that had been closed for half a dozen years in a neighborhood that seemed to have no people in it. Deloche also offered a fragmented, somewhat mechanical trio of sharp rhythmic changes with two brightly mismatched, punkish girls. I especially liked it when one of them systematically trampled a line of pebbly snappers she’d dribbled onto the floor, retreading her path several times, and the other two echoed her stomping on areas of the floor where there was nothing to pop. In a quiet section, while they were gently wafting their hands, a little girl in the audience stood up and imitated them with an unobtrusive confidence and perfect aplomb.
Dancegoers in France are suddenly curious about dance history. A vogue for Baroque dance has accompanied a surge in the quality of work, and a more serious general appreciation of dance as an at There was a tiny but enthusiastic audience for Ris et Danseries two-act production of Francine Lancelot’s Rameau L’Enchanteur on the Sunday of the elections for the European parliament. (The populace widely abstained from voting to express dissatisfaction with the Mitterand government, Everybody went to the country.) But the audience applauded madly, unabashed by their small numbers, and demanded curtain call after curtain call. Rameau L’Enchanteur is not a reconstruction, but an original and imaginative piece in the Baroque manner, exquisitely danced by shepherds, huntresses, courtiers, furies...In its delectable plot, a young woman (Marie Genevieve Masse), disguised as a traveler, rescues her young man from the snares of a “charming, authoritarian and capricious” princess and her dissolute court. A helpful divinity appears in the exotic form of Malavika, an exponent of Hindu dance. Rage of the Princess! Fury of the Magician! Thunder! Lightning!
Michel Hallet Eghayan runs a school in Lyon and the public is fond of him. I watched Hallet’s premiere, Orlando Furioso, in an open rehearsal for schoolchildren, and then in performance at the excellent Theatre du Huitieme. To impassioned excerpts of Vivaldi’s opera, intermixed with sections of natural sounds mumbling and trickling, Hallet presents a dry choreography drawn from a whittled-down Cunningham vocabulary and larded with occasional informal activities and perambulations, Hallet likes a pulled-up posture, with the torso tilted and the limbs used sharply, and a balletic sense of epaulement. Isolated shudderings, elegant cripplings, quasi-dramatic gestures are intense but brief, tiny, and partial. There’s a sense of cooperativeness among the dancer,s but little touching. Tight contractions of the upper chest seem willful; their force seems contained and expended too not purpose. Hallet also ignores the lyricism of the Vivaldi, only permitting it to fill the emotional hole the choreography creates.
When I’d seen Hallet’s Retour en Avant at Riverside Church, I appreciated its bony lightness and a certain curious humor But Orlando made me think again. Hallet’s notions are all in his head - the relationships he indicates are too covert and his dance phrases repetitious. You reread the same patterns of movement in changing contexts that don’t alter them one whit. Polite, diluted, Orlando’s almost as cautious as those safecracking movies where the burglars have to avoid heat sensors and electric eyes. I enjoyed his dancers, though, particularly Pascal Gouery and Jean-Christophe Bacconnier - light, quick and abrupt as a squirrel in his solo as Ruggero.
Serge Lifar, who may have been the savior of the Paris Opera Ballet, had a lecture-demonstration (with the lovely Karin Avery of the Paris Opera Ballet to help out during a couple of tendus and entrechats, as well as demonstrate the tipped and forward-thrust “Lifarienne” positions). But the Ballet du Rhin’s “Hommage a Serge Lifar,” featuring his Suite en Blanc (1943), Romeo and Juliet (1955) and Phedre (1950) - a parade of abstract divertissements, a romantic duet, a gestural drama (with guest Maya Plisetskaya) - were sufficiently pretentious and unmusical to make me glad that most of Lifar’s oeuvre had been lost. Someday when we’re buried in revivals of eminently forgettable work, and every artist can prove that they were the very first to do X, we’ll be sorry that practically everybody’s every effort is now documented to death.
Reinhild Hoffman is linked with Suzanne Linke and Pina Bausch as an exemplar of the new expressionism which evolved through the Folkwang school founded by Kurt Jooss. Much younger than Bausch, Hoffman and her Bremer Tanztheater presented a new work for the festival, Callas, in eight scenes - slowly evolving dream pictures - not biographical but clued into aspects of Maria Callas’s life and performed to Callas arias. One hundred-and-fifty or 200 seats were removed to extend the stage at the Maison de la Danse (Hoffman’s new theater is extremely deep and narrow, with room only for a small audience at the end). From the first moments, when men and women enter in red gowns, wearing over one arm white dummy torsos of their escorts, the visual element is primary, and movement secondary.
The piece is fabulous in its details but has a kind of grand indirection and a conceptual sloppiness. Some of Hoffman’s visions are spellbinding fantasies: like the final image of a woman in a black-green gown with a chair built into it whirling in torment around the stage as a girl in palest aqua and her hair loose sails blithely in on a swing in a blaze of daylight. Others, like a tedious episode in which the women run a gauntlet of eight men with bullwhips, or a party for elegant men and one plushy girl, who is briefly welcomed, then taunted and degraded, are shapeless, tasteless indulgences.
The Callas recordings create a rich and rigorously structured emotional climate. And the best scenes tend to develop quietly and steadily against the flow of the music For example to an anxiously repeating “Habanera,” intro, women emerge solemnly, one-by-one, though a rear curtain, wearing costumes replicating those Callas wore in her roles. When the men begin to join the women, you notice tha their gowns are caricatures, as they themselves are. It’s eerie ow magical and sinister this massing of mock divas is. And when they’re ll assembled, they slowly turn, as if loosening the enchantment. Or, to Callas’s singing of Gluck’s “Divinites u Styx” and “J’ai perdu mon Euridice,” arias of marital fidelity and loss, the company supports a long tablecloth attached to their waists. They sway, pretend to sit, greet and converse, and slouch over drunk. Callas, a would-be bride, mounts and slowly walks the length of the soft table and floats off the other end on the shoulders of the “groom” with her train and the entire table fabric trailing behind her in a spiral within which the wedding party dances.
Briefly in Paris, I headed for the suburbs on my last afternoon to see Francois Verret, who I’ve been hearing about for a couple of years. In the municipal theater of Bobigny, he was rehearsing a new work for the opera house in Lyon. I was happy to find all familiar faces in his company - Americans Ann Koren, Jumay Chu and Joel Luecht who danced in Viola Farber’s company and joined her at the Centre National de la Danse Contemporaine in Angers, and two French dancers from the CNDC as well, Sylvaine Richard and Mathilde Monnire. Verret came to dancing late, from an eclectic background in the martial arts, yoga and visual arts, and he brings speaking actors and musicians on stage as well as dancers (five puppet heads sit on a wide yoke across a musician’s shoulders while he does weird vocalizations). The black stage is bare, except for a much-used platform with black and gold screens, but from bits and pieces you can see that the scene itself will be an elaborate creation. Verret’s own stage presence is a fierce and haunted one; his swingy, swiveling, devious movement involves complex coordinations and shifting balances. The energy’s contained, and erupts in a sinewy way.
He makes marvelous duets and trios - one for himself, Anne and Jumay jumping on and off each other; a springy, interlocking, rhythmically intricate duet for himself and Sylvain. There’s a harsh, jumping solo for Anne, another snarling, crashing, military one for Joel. The fabric of the dance is knotted with the sense of a secret story, but a reined-in terror and fury stream beneath the surface. It’s a real dream - sharp, charged, flaring unpredictably.
That evening I hopped a press bus for Rouen to see Tranche de Cake by 22- or 23-year-old
Philippe Decoufle who’s worked with Regine Chopinot and Karole Armitage, and was currently doing a video project with Charles Atlas. The event, in the vast, empty Salle des Procurers in the exquisite, bullet-pitted Palais de Justice, was part of the department of Seine-Maritime’s roving festival of performances in regional historic sites.
Decoufle’s slick, aggressive comic-book fantasy (a saga of five Venusians) is in smashing contrast with the exquisitely flamboyant Gothic architectural details of the room. Hard and classy, chic punk, the moves are sharp, crisp, angular, flung out, with glaring stares and a kind of motorized action. There’s a stylized, severe, just-for-show brutality, like the way a man straight-arms a battling girl to keep her at a distance. But the second part turns Crayola bright, costumed by the choreographer in an extremely fanciful way: there’s a music-box ballerina with her hair wound into cones, a shoe-polish Negro with plaid pants and a banana in his coif, an Indian in knickers and sneakers. The impulsion is apparently motiveless, but the images - like airplanes in dogfights - are form the playroom and the toybox. And there’s more than a whiff of Petrouchka. Then into a truly funny, wacko future in part three, with sizable round and oblong spaceships ringing the dancers’ waists, and semi-deadly ray guns in their hands.
If France was a banquet, Decoufle was maybe dessert.
Lyon is the mercantile city your train passes through in the middle of the night on the way to the south of France It straddles the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone rivers, but a third river is said to pour into it the Beaujolais. (Actually, Cote du Rhone is generally cheaper.) And though it may not be hard to have a bad meal - McDonald’s is there - it’s awfully easy to have an excellent one. Lyon is where gluttons go instead of heaven. There for over a week as a guest of the first Biennale Internationale de la Danse, I figured on lots of spare time. But, in the end, I missed the marionette museum, the Gallo-Roman museum, the textile museum, and even the museum of dental surgery.
Faintly Italian in the pale ochers and pastels of buildings which stand as staunchly bourgeois in their uniformity as the routinely pollarded trees, the city seems surprisingly southern. The Rhone, wide and grayish, divides the center from more modern sections sprawling on the plain to the east: the Saone, narrower and green, borders the 14th and 15th century section, against the hill of Fourviere. topped by a crushingly opulent turn-of-the-century basilica and a pair of Roman amphitheaters where you can spend the afternoon baking in the sun.
Antiques glut the narrow streets and tiny squares of the old town, and along the quays of the Saone spring up daily markets for food or stalls of geegaws and cheesy clothing of synthetic fabrics for the laboring people who can’t afford to shop the main pedestrian drag.
This summer, for five weeks starting in early June, Lyon initiated a major biennial dance festival. Big guns from America were imported for the beginning, middle and end (Cunningham, Taylor Graham) to establish its international credentials, but most of the companies involved were French. The city had been looking to revitalize its annual festival, which had seen its best days in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It would have been silly to try to compete with Avignon’s theatrical circus. And music was out - there’s the Festival Berlioz in September. Dance was a logical and timely choice.
In 1980, spurred by the needs of five local dance companies, the Maison de la Danse was organized, under the direction of Guy Darmet, in a former civic auditorium/movie house dating from 1932 in the weavers’ quarter on the heights at the north end of the city. It was clear that there was substantial interest in dance. In the course of a year about 20 companies pass through, performing and giving workshops; from about 800 subscribers in 1980, Darmet can now count on 3000. And because festival money was already in the budget, it merely had to be appropriated to the new project.
The festival (with Darmet as artistic director) started out unpropitiously in early June with a costly bout of unusually cold, wet weather that rained out several outdoor events, including the opener. Merce Cunningham was a smash with his new piece Pictures. After 20 years of Cunningham injections by was of performances and teaching, which have influenced young French choreographers immensely, it’s not surprising that his work should be accessible to the public. His influence has been spread directly and indirectly through choreographers and teachers like Viola Farber, as well as via the many French and other European dancers who’ve studied at the Cunningham studio. The influence of Alwin Nikolais has also been consistently felt, partly by way of two expatriates, Susan Buirge a liberating teacher, and Carolyn Carlson, once based at the Paris Opera but now a free agent whose glamour, and popularity in unabated. The complex dreamlike world forged of emotional extremity within the German tradition we now associate with Pina Bausch, and the ghastly extravagance of the occasional Butoh performers who have been visiting Europe since 1978 is also showing in current work. Time was when French modern dance was mostly glossy surface effects and imitation But what’s new is that, at last, these influences are being transformed by distinctive and penetrating French choreographic imaginations and obsessions.
In all, the festival sponsored 16 companies plus an off-festival featuring an equal number given space and technical assistance and no money. There were eight photographic exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations, a retrospective of 21 dance films of Fred Astaire, a month-long program of about 50 dance films - from Loie Fuller imitators and the earliest reconstructed shorts of the Royal Danish Ballet to a just-made video of Jean Babilee at age 61 dancing Le Jeune Homme et La Mort during Roland Petit’s Paris season. These were sponsored by the Cinematheque de la Danse or the Cinemateque Francaise in locations varying from a tiny basement cinema to the hospitable and exquisite Lumiere mansion.
Huge photo-portraits by Delahaye filled the big lobby of the Ravel Auditorium. An exhibition of large, high-contrast blowups of 40 years of work by the late Serge Lifar opened at the Mairie de Sixieme Arrondissement: Judith Jamison, a 1947 portrait of Nijinsky, with a sweet mien and a remote gaze; Denis Ganio and Elisabetta Terabust, the fine hair shining on her arms; Yvette Chauvire, Cocteau and Tumanova, preparing for Lifar’s Phedre, like twins, all piercing eyes and cheekbones. (The opening was a serio-comic occasion- the officials made short speeches of appreciation and got their photographs taken for the papers, but there were no regular people present.) Michael Luquet, Guy Darmet’s lively assistant, assembled a superb display of photographs at the Maison de la Danse covering the entire career of Mary Wigman. Photos by Patrick Bensard (of the Cinemateque de la Danse) of New York were displayed in a multiplex hairdressing salon, Espace Barriere, with a teacup-sized backyard garden and mirrored walls like a dance studio. Next door was a shop with memorable chocolates, which melted into a grotesque but far from inedible lump in the care the next day.
Out in the streets, there was a day-long Provencal promenade in traditional Arlesian costume, augmented by hordes of boozing Danish soccer fans whose team had just won, then, that night, a folk performance by the Capouleir de Martigues in the blissfully cool Roman theater.
Being cool was a treat, because the weather had been warm and heavy and the French are not keen on air conditioning. The newspapers frequently ran articles on AC’s menace to health, detailing its pernicious effects, all of which I’ve happily forgotten. Even in my fancy hotel, the air conditioning turned up to high produced only the wispiest exhalation of cool air.
Lured to my hotel window one afternoon by bullfight music and the Andrews Sisters singing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,” I caught an exhibition of danse sportif, ballroom dancing, including a couple of children jitterbugging to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Late that evening hordes of young men stomped and jumped up and down on the same wooden dance platform to celebrate a French soccer victory.
Paul Taylor’s company danced in the Ravel Auditorium, a 2000-seat symphony hall, which was luxuriously comfortable but not well-suited to dance and a bitch for the dancers because there is no real crossover and only makeshift wings. But Taylor’s is not an inexpensive company to produce, and the alternative would have been an 800-seat house. Taylor’s Aureole suffered without a proscenium because it needs that frame to beat against, but Three Epitaphs and Esplanade were spectacular. I was struck mainly by the quality of the audience’s attention - its respectfulness, its seriousness, its unstinting enthusiasm. Mostly young and middle-aged, the audience liked “culture” and seemed inclined, as a matter of course, to trust the intention of the artist. At no performance did I encounter a suspicious audience or one that thought it was the star.
I missed Josette Baiz’s Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard) with a cast of 17 children and teenagers, but I did see her formal and perverse Prudence, ou les emotions subtiles, which also featured a surprisingly young cast of excellent dancers, her Compagnie la Place Blanche, from Aix-en-Provence. Sex and violence are the meat of the work, but Balz authentically creates a social delirium in which anything goes. Balz has been based in Aix since 1977, but she worked with Jean-Claude Gallotta in 1980, and it’s curious to see how both are currently producing work in which gritty sexual intimacy and obsession have such importance. There’s something both philosophical and low-down in their pieces, nourished, in part, by an avid fascination with the processes of spiritual debasement and exaltation.
Beautifully integrated with a musical collage engineered by three young gentlemen in tailcoats among stacks of electrical and computer equipment and keyboard playing works of Rameau and Pergolesi as well as thuds and computer blibble, Prudence also involves recitations from Sade, Laclos, Restif de la Bretonne , Diderot, Barthes... In the program, Baiz desrcibes the 18th century penchant to be moved, agitated, to weep, to live as many extreme emotions as possible. And she has stirred her chosen characters into an existential frenzy of violent and concentrated desire. Four men surround a slyly smiling, barely pubescent girl. A man bites a woman on the thigh; she shoves him back, knocks him down, hauls his upright, bites his neck, and jumps on him so both fall to the floor, rolling in a sexual fit. Four long-haired young girls move with sharp, quirky urgency, gasping and stabbing as they utter nightmare shrieks and croaks. Filled with a kind of dazed expectancy, men and women are equally desperate and savage. Two women take turns sexually handling a third, and throwing her down. Again and again they trade roles. A man curls up, pressing his head between the legs of his limp or dead partner. A line of women, clasping their men tightly, jiggle and rub their buttocks. In her orderly, relentless sequence of vignettes, Baiz builds a pent-up feeling, as if out of the dancers’ ferocious, pointless, wriggling intimacies some transcendent satisfaction must emerge. What does come out is a psychology where the characters are driven to force their feelings to the utmost in order to feel that they exist at all.
A high point of the festival, for me, was whizzing down the autoroute at 100 miles an hour, hanging on the tails of 90-mile-per-hour slowpokes, to see a rehearsal of Jean-Claude Gallotta (who wouldn’t be in Lyon till I’d gone)in his enviably spacious studio in the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble, where his company, Groupe Emile Dubois, is based. (Emile Dubois is nobody, just a made-up name.)
The company wears multi-colored torn-up clothing - fringed shirts, bras and breastplates, decorated jockstraps - suggesting an exotic and flamboyant society for Les Aventures d’Ivan Vaffan. The men, unshaven, look particularly disreputable, caressing the women’s thighs, rubbing their own chests. The music (by Henri Torque), which is a variable but powerful force in the piece, moans and pulses. The men smack their groins, snuggle their chins into the women’s necks. The movement’s full of tight, snatching gestures; when the group swarms and rushes, it’s leggy, aggressive, darting, very fast. Often, it’s like the threat display behavior of a tribe of apes.
The men clamber on and off of a sagging, ratty, nearly broken gold sofa. They sit, sunk into it, and a woman dives over the back into their laps. They stand, lower her to balance on the tops of their feet, and swing her gently. When they flip her away, she leaps back into their arms.
The atmosphere is sensual and crude, sexy and sweaty; actions are impelled, without forethought or reflection, by blunt desires and common rituals. There is no notion of privacy. Like children, the dancers are extremely interested in their own and each other’s bodies. Like animals, they inhale each other’s aroma. They whisper sharp, birdlike sounds, point and slap, scatter across the stage in short bursts of leaps, drop to the floor, stamp hard. They touch each other constantly in strange, significant ways, like when the women clasp the men and rub them head to head.
A girl perches in low attitude, quite formal. The men, on their knees, carefully take her fingers in their mouths and promenade her halfway around to romantic piano music with lots of pedal. Afterward, everyone puts their fingers in their mouths, slowly tasting, revealing that the group’s unity comes from the fact that every sensual experience is transmitted to all the group members. Much later, one man vibrates his foot against another’s crotch. When that foot touches the floor, the other dances, who are lyving down, are struck as if by an electric shock.
I loved the richness of the unusual sexual and tribal consciousness of Ivan Vaffan, and the blend of dramatically shaped segments, semi-sullen quiet times, formal rituals, public intimacies and percussive, rushing-around crowd scenes. I liked the bullheaded seriousness of Gallotta’s appalling and ambiguous comedy. In a pas de deux to some of Chopin’s Sylphides music, the couple wears rumpled,, off-white versions of ballet outfits. Initially, the man pays his partner the appropriate tender attentions, but he starts feeling her ass in the waltz. He grabs her, kissing her neck; she pulls away into arabesque, trying to maintain her composure. He grabs her by the neck, and she recoils, then he wrestles her back against him fiercely. Relentless, headstrong, utterly serious, he gets her on the couch,m still thrashing, pulls her skirt up, loosens his knickers, tries to screw her and, I guess, succeeds, because they're pooped and numb, unwilling to be close when they sit up. Such a nastily realistic ballet satire is wickedly funny, yet it’s disturbing and embarrassing to be laughing at, and even conspiring in, a rape. What starts as a giggle becomes an appallingly serious joke. But Gallota’s not catering to finicky tastes; he gets you to swallow the whole stew.
“Off” the festival, I saw Ris et Danseries’ Baroque performance in an opulent miniature opera house, Theatre des Celestins, and postmodernist Pierre Deloche in a thoughtful, muted solo using sticks, in a handsome loftish space in a building that had been closed for half a dozen years in a neighborhood that seemed to have no people in it. Deloche also offered a fragmented, somewhat mechanical trio of sharp rhythmic changes with two brightly mismatched, punkish girls. I especially liked it when one of them systematically trampled a line of pebbly snappers she’d dribbled onto the floor, retreading her path several times, and the other two echoed her stomping on areas of the floor where there was nothing to pop. In a quiet section, while they were gently wafting their hands, a little girl in the audience stood up and imitated them with an unobtrusive confidence and perfect aplomb.
Dancegoers in France are suddenly curious about dance history. A vogue for Baroque dance has accompanied a surge in the quality of work, and a more serious general appreciation of dance as an at There was a tiny but enthusiastic audience for Ris et Danseries two-act production of Francine Lancelot’s Rameau L’Enchanteur on the Sunday of the elections for the European parliament. (The populace widely abstained from voting to express dissatisfaction with the Mitterand government, Everybody went to the country.) But the audience applauded madly, unabashed by their small numbers, and demanded curtain call after curtain call. Rameau L’Enchanteur is not a reconstruction, but an original and imaginative piece in the Baroque manner, exquisitely danced by shepherds, huntresses, courtiers, furies...In its delectable plot, a young woman (Marie Genevieve Masse), disguised as a traveler, rescues her young man from the snares of a “charming, authoritarian and capricious” princess and her dissolute court. A helpful divinity appears in the exotic form of Malavika, an exponent of Hindu dance. Rage of the Princess! Fury of the Magician! Thunder! Lightning!
Michel Hallet Eghayan runs a school in Lyon and the public is fond of him. I watched Hallet’s premiere, Orlando Furioso, in an open rehearsal for schoolchildren, and then in performance at the excellent Theatre du Huitieme. To impassioned excerpts of Vivaldi’s opera, intermixed with sections of natural sounds mumbling and trickling, Hallet presents a dry choreography drawn from a whittled-down Cunningham vocabulary and larded with occasional informal activities and perambulations, Hallet likes a pulled-up posture, with the torso tilted and the limbs used sharply, and a balletic sense of epaulement. Isolated shudderings, elegant cripplings, quasi-dramatic gestures are intense but brief, tiny, and partial. There’s a sense of cooperativeness among the dancer,s but little touching. Tight contractions of the upper chest seem willful; their force seems contained and expended too not purpose. Hallet also ignores the lyricism of the Vivaldi, only permitting it to fill the emotional hole the choreography creates.
When I’d seen Hallet’s Retour en Avant at Riverside Church, I appreciated its bony lightness and a certain curious humor But Orlando made me think again. Hallet’s notions are all in his head - the relationships he indicates are too covert and his dance phrases repetitious. You reread the same patterns of movement in changing contexts that don’t alter them one whit. Polite, diluted, Orlando’s almost as cautious as those safecracking movies where the burglars have to avoid heat sensors and electric eyes. I enjoyed his dancers, though, particularly Pascal Gouery and Jean-Christophe Bacconnier - light, quick and abrupt as a squirrel in his solo as Ruggero.
Serge Lifar, who may have been the savior of the Paris Opera Ballet, had a lecture-demonstration (with the lovely Karin Avery of the Paris Opera Ballet to help out during a couple of tendus and entrechats, as well as demonstrate the tipped and forward-thrust “Lifarienne” positions). But the Ballet du Rhin’s “Hommage a Serge Lifar,” featuring his Suite en Blanc (1943), Romeo and Juliet (1955) and Phedre (1950) - a parade of abstract divertissements, a romantic duet, a gestural drama (with guest Maya Plisetskaya) - were sufficiently pretentious and unmusical to make me glad that most of Lifar’s oeuvre had been lost. Someday when we’re buried in revivals of eminently forgettable work, and every artist can prove that they were the very first to do X, we’ll be sorry that practically everybody’s every effort is now documented to death.
Reinhild Hoffman is linked with Suzanne Linke and Pina Bausch as an exemplar of the new expressionism which evolved through the Folkwang school founded by Kurt Jooss. Much younger than Bausch, Hoffman and her Bremer Tanztheater presented a new work for the festival, Callas, in eight scenes - slowly evolving dream pictures - not biographical but clued into aspects of Maria Callas’s life and performed to Callas arias. One hundred-and-fifty or 200 seats were removed to extend the stage at the Maison de la Danse (Hoffman’s new theater is extremely deep and narrow, with room only for a small audience at the end). From the first moments, when men and women enter in red gowns, wearing over one arm white dummy torsos of their escorts, the visual element is primary, and movement secondary.
The piece is fabulous in its details but has a kind of grand indirection and a conceptual sloppiness. Some of Hoffman’s visions are spellbinding fantasies: like the final image of a woman in a black-green gown with a chair built into it whirling in torment around the stage as a girl in palest aqua and her hair loose sails blithely in on a swing in a blaze of daylight. Others, like a tedious episode in which the women run a gauntlet of eight men with bullwhips, or a party for elegant men and one plushy girl, who is briefly welcomed, then taunted and degraded, are shapeless, tasteless indulgences.
The Callas recordings create a rich and rigorously structured emotional climate. And the best scenes tend to develop quietly and steadily against the flow of the music For example to an anxiously repeating “Habanera,” intro, women emerge solemnly, one-by-one, though a rear curtain, wearing costumes replicating those Callas wore in her roles. When the men begin to join the women, you notice tha their gowns are caricatures, as they themselves are. It’s eerie ow magical and sinister this massing of mock divas is. And when they’re ll assembled, they slowly turn, as if loosening the enchantment. Or, to Callas’s singing of Gluck’s “Divinites u Styx” and “J’ai perdu mon Euridice,” arias of marital fidelity and loss, the company supports a long tablecloth attached to their waists. They sway, pretend to sit, greet and converse, and slouch over drunk. Callas, a would-be bride, mounts and slowly walks the length of the soft table and floats off the other end on the shoulders of the “groom” with her train and the entire table fabric trailing behind her in a spiral within which the wedding party dances.
Briefly in Paris, I headed for the suburbs on my last afternoon to see Francois Verret, who I’ve been hearing about for a couple of years. In the municipal theater of Bobigny, he was rehearsing a new work for the opera house in Lyon. I was happy to find all familiar faces in his company - Americans Ann Koren, Jumay Chu and Joel Luecht who danced in Viola Farber’s company and joined her at the Centre National de la Danse Contemporaine in Angers, and two French dancers from the CNDC as well, Sylvaine Richard and Mathilde Monnire. Verret came to dancing late, from an eclectic background in the martial arts, yoga and visual arts, and he brings speaking actors and musicians on stage as well as dancers (five puppet heads sit on a wide yoke across a musician’s shoulders while he does weird vocalizations). The black stage is bare, except for a much-used platform with black and gold screens, but from bits and pieces you can see that the scene itself will be an elaborate creation. Verret’s own stage presence is a fierce and haunted one; his swingy, swiveling, devious movement involves complex coordinations and shifting balances. The energy’s contained, and erupts in a sinewy way.
He makes marvelous duets and trios - one for himself, Anne and Jumay jumping on and off each other; a springy, interlocking, rhythmically intricate duet for himself and Sylvain. There’s a harsh, jumping solo for Anne, another snarling, crashing, military one for Joel. The fabric of the dance is knotted with the sense of a secret story, but a reined-in terror and fury stream beneath the surface. It’s a real dream - sharp, charged, flaring unpredictably.
That evening I hopped a press bus for Rouen to see Tranche de Cake by 22- or 23-year-old
Philippe Decoufle who’s worked with Regine Chopinot and Karole Armitage, and was currently doing a video project with Charles Atlas. The event, in the vast, empty Salle des Procurers in the exquisite, bullet-pitted Palais de Justice, was part of the department of Seine-Maritime’s roving festival of performances in regional historic sites.
Decoufle’s slick, aggressive comic-book fantasy (a saga of five Venusians) is in smashing contrast with the exquisitely flamboyant Gothic architectural details of the room. Hard and classy, chic punk, the moves are sharp, crisp, angular, flung out, with glaring stares and a kind of motorized action. There’s a stylized, severe, just-for-show brutality, like the way a man straight-arms a battling girl to keep her at a distance. But the second part turns Crayola bright, costumed by the choreographer in an extremely fanciful way: there’s a music-box ballerina with her hair wound into cones, a shoe-polish Negro with plaid pants and a banana in his coif, an Indian in knickers and sneakers. The impulsion is apparently motiveless, but the images - like airplanes in dogfights - are form the playroom and the toybox. And there’s more than a whiff of Petrouchka. Then into a truly funny, wacko future in part three, with sizable round and oblong spaceships ringing the dancers’ waists, and semi-deadly ray guns in their hands.
If France was a banquet, Decoufle was maybe dessert.
Spice on Ice
August 14
By noon on July 24 there was mush on the the Metropolitan Opera Stage, not ice, and by two in the afternoon the management knew there would be no performance. A tight time schedule between Alvin Ailey’s last performance and John Curry’s opening left no room for technical difficulties. By seven there was ice, but not adequate for skating. It had to be scraped down, more layers frozen and scraped again before it would be safe and fit for the skaters.
Still, when the show finally hit the ice, it was worth the trouble and the gamble. It was far better than any other onstage ice show I’ve seen, including Curry’s own Ice Dancing, presented in 1978-79 at the Felt Forum and the Minskoff. Curry, whose work accounts for over half the pieces this season, has made big strides as a choreographer. And he has commissioned work by a range of contemporaries. The Met programs included new works by Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, and Curry, as well as older works by Peter Martins, Twyla Tharp, and some of the above - and these generally paid off. But the huge Metropolitan stage also made thrills possible that few other theaters could.
The whole stage became a rink, including the rear stage tat no one performs on, though some deep opera sets sit there. ABT uses maybe 45 or 48 feet of the stages depth. Curry used about 85 feet (and Jennifer Tipton got to light it all). What that meant was that skaters had the space to get up speed; it also meant that the size of performers changed drastically depending on where they were and that movement forward and back became unusually dramatic. One soloist easily filled the entire luminous space; but all 17 skaters whizzing at once had plenty of room.
Often, skaters use only the rhythms, mood, and climaxes of their music, but Curry, and the choreographers he’s chosen, generally weave the skating much more intimately into its lines. In Glides, the first piece on the first program, to Glazunov, none of the company sail smoothly, in a sculptural cluster like a great ship, then split into three groups moving through tighter curves. After this quiet beginning, during which you scarcely breathe, Curry swiftly alters the composition and mass of the groups, moving skaters on and off in the blink of an eye, deftly delivering a solo, for example, to show off a blond boy’s snaky turns or a woman’s backbent spins that go so fast the figure nearly evanesces. Lots of variety and a pleasant lilt to the choreography. Nice too, near the end, when a couple of men lunge low to release their partners into motionless, speeding arabesques. It’s also interesting to see, right away, the balletic strictness of some of the moves - not just turns, but real pirouettes, and cabrioles that beat - along with the virtuoso skating vocabulary. Many of the smaller pieces are well-put-together items served up to satisfy our lust for flash. Even Skaters Waltz, duets for Curry and JoJo Starbuck which starts modestly with slow glides, gets awfully cute and finishes up pretty hot with swinging loops and Starbuck in a death spiral. David Santee, who audiences always adore, flies into Cossack leaps that whip into demonic spins in Curry’s Russian Sailor’s Dance (to Gliere) and does tormented ‘30s hood shtick with slicked hair and sunglasses in Nightmare (to Artie Shaw). Rodeo’s a bouncing, bow-legged, horsey whoop-de-doo for female cowpersons. Peter Martins’s Tang Tango is a constricted solo for Curry to Stravinsky, placed back-to-back with flamboyant mock tango - like very other tango that pretends we’re beyond believing in its romantic machismo - with him and a saucy JoJo Starbuck in a black shawl and an orchid dress with red underskirts.
Vivacious and sporty Dorothy Hamill has three solos; Winter Storms displays her limber torso and her emphatic attack. The speed of her skating makes palatable some pretty conceits and some come-ons we usually snicker at. But Hamill often plays too coy and cute in Curry’s negligible Pennies from Heaven and Butterfly (to Puccini), wearing the kind of fantasy costume Pavlova might have worn. Pennies was also set (in the first half of the second program) among a group of ‘30s period pieces which were all injured by the similarities.
Twyla Tharp’s understated 1976 After All is as exquisite as ever and still surprising in its delicate twists and swively liveliness in the hip, succulent looseness...
Peter Martins’s other contribution, La Valse, which naturally owed a debt to Balanchine, was a well-paced, doom-laden work, with Death sailing through the frozen figures of the other skaters at the start, conjuring his victim with the movements of his body and whirling to send the other skaters in a centrifugal swirl around him at the finish.
Lar Lubovitch’s new Court of Ice, to Bach, seemed stiff and his duet, Tilt-a-Whirl, for Curry and Hamill, to Philip Glass, was anything but. It’s exactly what the title says, with the pair turning and tilting, veering and maybe threatening to tip with the center of weight low in the body. What was missing in these pally doings was a continuum of energy, a rushing ribbon of movement which caught and tossed them together. Laura Dean’s new Burn, to second-rate music of Jean-Michel Jarre, started with a Curry solo where he spins regularly around the perimeter and breaks into backwards plie arabesques, or fast, skittering phrases. Sometimes, going around, he slaps the ice Sometimes his phrases are uninflected; sometimes he adds wiggles and twists and flicking hand motions. Six more skaters, in red, come in bouncing, and Curry sets them spinning separately as he passes. The piece’s steady drive keeps thrusting the skaters into symmetrical groups and pairings, leaving Curry the odd man out.
Two of Curry’s group pieces were particularly exciting. Willa Kim costumes the four men and three women of Presto Barbaro (tough, scrappy music by Leonard Bernstein) like dark and glowingly splotched multicolor punk/Injun/birds for this reckless dance battle that’s all thrills and no fight. Fierce as leaping tigers, spinning and skidding and sliding, the skaters fill the space and empty and fill it again in a rush. William Tell starts out symmetrical, formal, and bright, with groups of three intercutting in a kind of square dance. There’s exhilarating force and clarity; then everybody races back for the beginning of the Lone Ranger music, when they come whizzing out in pairs for sharp dadadum dadadum dadadumdumDUM spins. Then they all wheel in a circle in the back, peel off in leaps, and feed back into fly off again like a Catherine Wheel of human fireworks.
All in all, a mixed bag. But a damn good show both times. The other skaters I’ve missed naming are: Nathan Birch, Jim Bowser, Editha Dotson, J. Scott Driscoll, Bill Fauver, Adam Leib, Shaun McGill, Lee Ann Miller, Timothy J. Murphy, Lori Nichol, and Joan Vienneau. And Charles Barker conducted a spirited orchestra.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 25 to 30).
By noon on July 24 there was mush on the the Metropolitan Opera Stage, not ice, and by two in the afternoon the management knew there would be no performance. A tight time schedule between Alvin Ailey’s last performance and John Curry’s opening left no room for technical difficulties. By seven there was ice, but not adequate for skating. It had to be scraped down, more layers frozen and scraped again before it would be safe and fit for the skaters.
Still, when the show finally hit the ice, it was worth the trouble and the gamble. It was far better than any other onstage ice show I’ve seen, including Curry’s own Ice Dancing, presented in 1978-79 at the Felt Forum and the Minskoff. Curry, whose work accounts for over half the pieces this season, has made big strides as a choreographer. And he has commissioned work by a range of contemporaries. The Met programs included new works by Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, and Curry, as well as older works by Peter Martins, Twyla Tharp, and some of the above - and these generally paid off. But the huge Metropolitan stage also made thrills possible that few other theaters could.
The whole stage became a rink, including the rear stage tat no one performs on, though some deep opera sets sit there. ABT uses maybe 45 or 48 feet of the stages depth. Curry used about 85 feet (and Jennifer Tipton got to light it all). What that meant was that skaters had the space to get up speed; it also meant that the size of performers changed drastically depending on where they were and that movement forward and back became unusually dramatic. One soloist easily filled the entire luminous space; but all 17 skaters whizzing at once had plenty of room.
Often, skaters use only the rhythms, mood, and climaxes of their music, but Curry, and the choreographers he’s chosen, generally weave the skating much more intimately into its lines. In Glides, the first piece on the first program, to Glazunov, none of the company sail smoothly, in a sculptural cluster like a great ship, then split into three groups moving through tighter curves. After this quiet beginning, during which you scarcely breathe, Curry swiftly alters the composition and mass of the groups, moving skaters on and off in the blink of an eye, deftly delivering a solo, for example, to show off a blond boy’s snaky turns or a woman’s backbent spins that go so fast the figure nearly evanesces. Lots of variety and a pleasant lilt to the choreography. Nice too, near the end, when a couple of men lunge low to release their partners into motionless, speeding arabesques. It’s also interesting to see, right away, the balletic strictness of some of the moves - not just turns, but real pirouettes, and cabrioles that beat - along with the virtuoso skating vocabulary. Many of the smaller pieces are well-put-together items served up to satisfy our lust for flash. Even Skaters Waltz, duets for Curry and JoJo Starbuck which starts modestly with slow glides, gets awfully cute and finishes up pretty hot with swinging loops and Starbuck in a death spiral. David Santee, who audiences always adore, flies into Cossack leaps that whip into demonic spins in Curry’s Russian Sailor’s Dance (to Gliere) and does tormented ‘30s hood shtick with slicked hair and sunglasses in Nightmare (to Artie Shaw). Rodeo’s a bouncing, bow-legged, horsey whoop-de-doo for female cowpersons. Peter Martins’s Tang Tango is a constricted solo for Curry to Stravinsky, placed back-to-back with flamboyant mock tango - like very other tango that pretends we’re beyond believing in its romantic machismo - with him and a saucy JoJo Starbuck in a black shawl and an orchid dress with red underskirts.
Vivacious and sporty Dorothy Hamill has three solos; Winter Storms displays her limber torso and her emphatic attack. The speed of her skating makes palatable some pretty conceits and some come-ons we usually snicker at. But Hamill often plays too coy and cute in Curry’s negligible Pennies from Heaven and Butterfly (to Puccini), wearing the kind of fantasy costume Pavlova might have worn. Pennies was also set (in the first half of the second program) among a group of ‘30s period pieces which were all injured by the similarities.
Twyla Tharp’s understated 1976 After All is as exquisite as ever and still surprising in its delicate twists and swively liveliness in the hip, succulent looseness...
Peter Martins’s other contribution, La Valse, which naturally owed a debt to Balanchine, was a well-paced, doom-laden work, with Death sailing through the frozen figures of the other skaters at the start, conjuring his victim with the movements of his body and whirling to send the other skaters in a centrifugal swirl around him at the finish.
Lar Lubovitch’s new Court of Ice, to Bach, seemed stiff and his duet, Tilt-a-Whirl, for Curry and Hamill, to Philip Glass, was anything but. It’s exactly what the title says, with the pair turning and tilting, veering and maybe threatening to tip with the center of weight low in the body. What was missing in these pally doings was a continuum of energy, a rushing ribbon of movement which caught and tossed them together. Laura Dean’s new Burn, to second-rate music of Jean-Michel Jarre, started with a Curry solo where he spins regularly around the perimeter and breaks into backwards plie arabesques, or fast, skittering phrases. Sometimes, going around, he slaps the ice Sometimes his phrases are uninflected; sometimes he adds wiggles and twists and flicking hand motions. Six more skaters, in red, come in bouncing, and Curry sets them spinning separately as he passes. The piece’s steady drive keeps thrusting the skaters into symmetrical groups and pairings, leaving Curry the odd man out.
Two of Curry’s group pieces were particularly exciting. Willa Kim costumes the four men and three women of Presto Barbaro (tough, scrappy music by Leonard Bernstein) like dark and glowingly splotched multicolor punk/Injun/birds for this reckless dance battle that’s all thrills and no fight. Fierce as leaping tigers, spinning and skidding and sliding, the skaters fill the space and empty and fill it again in a rush. William Tell starts out symmetrical, formal, and bright, with groups of three intercutting in a kind of square dance. There’s exhilarating force and clarity; then everybody races back for the beginning of the Lone Ranger music, when they come whizzing out in pairs for sharp dadadum dadadum dadadumdumDUM spins. Then they all wheel in a circle in the back, peel off in leaps, and feed back into fly off again like a Catherine Wheel of human fireworks.
All in all, a mixed bag. But a damn good show both times. The other skaters I’ve missed naming are: Nathan Birch, Jim Bowser, Editha Dotson, J. Scott Driscoll, Bill Fauver, Adam Leib, Shaun McGill, Lee Ann Miller, Timothy J. Murphy, Lori Nichol, and Joan Vienneau. And Charles Barker conducted a spirited orchestra.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 25 to 30).
Light on the Subject
June 5
I was glad not to be one of the dancers bouncing and running on the pink granite floor of the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris in Mel Wong’s Future Antiquities. Wong used the wide and extremely short shallow space, and a short, wide flight of stairs that descends from within the middle of the audience. In two rows, one behind the dancers and one facing them behind the mass of the audience, were Cathy Biillian’s handsome, smooth, but jagged-toothed light sculptures - dark, metallic-surfaced, rectangular upright forms with gleaming pink and chartreuse crystals in their jaws. But in the Philip Morris space, with general lighting on full, these sculptures don’t illuminate much, and their pastel lights seem timid signals.
These were confusing circumstances for viewing Wong’s work, I think, since it was impossible to effectively create an atmosphere. And it must have been grim for the dancers to cope with that space, with that floor, with such proximity to the audience - since the character of the work is meant to distance them. But, under any conditions, I would have found Wong’s piece opaque. Not because it illustrates a private world to which outsiders are denied access, but because its world is only a shell. It seems to me that Wong is leery of thoroughly transforming his conception into the physical/spiritual experience it must be if it is to mean anything to us. Future Antiquities is refined in the separate elements of its presentation, but the idea seems raw, undeveloped, at least in terms of offering us something we can grasp. We can speculate about it till doomsday, because it’s intended more to mystify than to clue us in. Whatever Wong’s specific ideas or perspectives in “exploring the relationship between technology and antiquity” are, the work itself seems detached from them, detached from whatever would identify it. By creating a work to be performed. Wong commits himself to pulling his ideas out of their rarefied air, and rooting them in a homelier medium. Ideas from the “pure realm of thought” are not the building blocks of art works. It is a commonplace that as soon as an idea is put on paper, articulated through the body of a dancer, expressed in materials, it is, perforce, transformed. And that transformation does not always entirely submit to the will of the artist. But Wong manages to resist that step, that specificity; he keeps the work in mid-air, afloat in a murk of semiabstraction. So what we see seems superficial, arid; it’s pretty enough to diddle us along, not substantial enough to mean a damn thing.
The 14 dancers, in an array of black and white garments, are usually in two groups. One is composed of Wong’s regular company of six. The other, all women, poses on the steps. They flick their hands, wobble their heads, suggesting by their stances hunters or stargazers. They draw small circles in the air, move in curves with swinging legs while Ron Kuvilla’s music grows from a hum into a deep, satisfyingly powerful buzz. There’s something narrow about these people, like robot servants with limited capacity, or like the Eloi of The Time Machine, dim but happy enough. The astronomical focus persists through the work, with the music later turning into the electrical sizzle and piercing cascade of yammering that accompanies, in movies, the landing of a giant spacecraft which the dancers, vaguely curious, would probably be coolly disposed to welcome. The liveliest intelligence seems to be, courtesy of Big Brother, a white video camera on the balcony swinging in half-circles with vigilant and absolute regularity.
The movement, often dry and erect, stresses thrusting, swinging arm and upper body movement, and is full of emphatic signals and significant gestures and actions (pointing up or down, cupping hand to brow) whose import we cannot guess. Shining black flashlights here and there, holding odd little lit-up brushes, carrying flat, circular lamps, the dancers are puzzling. Who are they? What are they doing? The women pull each other down the steps in line like oppressed peasants in a Mexican mural. In couples, they shake their hands alongside the bowed heads of their partners. Pairs run to the audience and hold up instructive signs: VISIBLE SIGNALS, MYSTERY, ALCHEMY, DECAY, DAWN, ETERNAL. They write the same words on the floor, outline fallen bodies in chalk. Wong’s titles act more like obstacles than keys, helping to thwart a direct response. In this case, less information would be more useful.
Anything that happens in unison or in contrasting groups - like jumping formations or dovetailing sequences of bends, or sharp gestural repetitions - has force even in this distracting space. In it, setting a pattern is usually stronger than any particular movement sequence, partly because pattern tends to establish its own context, whereas the movement’s context is the nebulous whole. Except that Joel Luecht, long and long-limbed, with a blond splash across his hair, dances toward the end with lightness, speed, and interior passion that is its own justification and explanation He whips into twitchy poses, arched-back turns, carries a partner with a strangely delicate, high-stepping perching walk. Sharply arrowing his hands, executing wonderful shivery twists, he’s as angular and unlikely as some benign pterodactyl, doing movement as if he’s never done it and you’ve never seen it. He makes it matter that he’s human, and not just some articulate, multi-limbed mechanical blip.
At Whitney Museum of American Art (May 18 to 22).
I was glad not to be one of the dancers bouncing and running on the pink granite floor of the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris in Mel Wong’s Future Antiquities. Wong used the wide and extremely short shallow space, and a short, wide flight of stairs that descends from within the middle of the audience. In two rows, one behind the dancers and one facing them behind the mass of the audience, were Cathy Biillian’s handsome, smooth, but jagged-toothed light sculptures - dark, metallic-surfaced, rectangular upright forms with gleaming pink and chartreuse crystals in their jaws. But in the Philip Morris space, with general lighting on full, these sculptures don’t illuminate much, and their pastel lights seem timid signals.
These were confusing circumstances for viewing Wong’s work, I think, since it was impossible to effectively create an atmosphere. And it must have been grim for the dancers to cope with that space, with that floor, with such proximity to the audience - since the character of the work is meant to distance them. But, under any conditions, I would have found Wong’s piece opaque. Not because it illustrates a private world to which outsiders are denied access, but because its world is only a shell. It seems to me that Wong is leery of thoroughly transforming his conception into the physical/spiritual experience it must be if it is to mean anything to us. Future Antiquities is refined in the separate elements of its presentation, but the idea seems raw, undeveloped, at least in terms of offering us something we can grasp. We can speculate about it till doomsday, because it’s intended more to mystify than to clue us in. Whatever Wong’s specific ideas or perspectives in “exploring the relationship between technology and antiquity” are, the work itself seems detached from them, detached from whatever would identify it. By creating a work to be performed. Wong commits himself to pulling his ideas out of their rarefied air, and rooting them in a homelier medium. Ideas from the “pure realm of thought” are not the building blocks of art works. It is a commonplace that as soon as an idea is put on paper, articulated through the body of a dancer, expressed in materials, it is, perforce, transformed. And that transformation does not always entirely submit to the will of the artist. But Wong manages to resist that step, that specificity; he keeps the work in mid-air, afloat in a murk of semiabstraction. So what we see seems superficial, arid; it’s pretty enough to diddle us along, not substantial enough to mean a damn thing.
The 14 dancers, in an array of black and white garments, are usually in two groups. One is composed of Wong’s regular company of six. The other, all women, poses on the steps. They flick their hands, wobble their heads, suggesting by their stances hunters or stargazers. They draw small circles in the air, move in curves with swinging legs while Ron Kuvilla’s music grows from a hum into a deep, satisfyingly powerful buzz. There’s something narrow about these people, like robot servants with limited capacity, or like the Eloi of The Time Machine, dim but happy enough. The astronomical focus persists through the work, with the music later turning into the electrical sizzle and piercing cascade of yammering that accompanies, in movies, the landing of a giant spacecraft which the dancers, vaguely curious, would probably be coolly disposed to welcome. The liveliest intelligence seems to be, courtesy of Big Brother, a white video camera on the balcony swinging in half-circles with vigilant and absolute regularity.
The movement, often dry and erect, stresses thrusting, swinging arm and upper body movement, and is full of emphatic signals and significant gestures and actions (pointing up or down, cupping hand to brow) whose import we cannot guess. Shining black flashlights here and there, holding odd little lit-up brushes, carrying flat, circular lamps, the dancers are puzzling. Who are they? What are they doing? The women pull each other down the steps in line like oppressed peasants in a Mexican mural. In couples, they shake their hands alongside the bowed heads of their partners. Pairs run to the audience and hold up instructive signs: VISIBLE SIGNALS, MYSTERY, ALCHEMY, DECAY, DAWN, ETERNAL. They write the same words on the floor, outline fallen bodies in chalk. Wong’s titles act more like obstacles than keys, helping to thwart a direct response. In this case, less information would be more useful.
Anything that happens in unison or in contrasting groups - like jumping formations or dovetailing sequences of bends, or sharp gestural repetitions - has force even in this distracting space. In it, setting a pattern is usually stronger than any particular movement sequence, partly because pattern tends to establish its own context, whereas the movement’s context is the nebulous whole. Except that Joel Luecht, long and long-limbed, with a blond splash across his hair, dances toward the end with lightness, speed, and interior passion that is its own justification and explanation He whips into twitchy poses, arched-back turns, carries a partner with a strangely delicate, high-stepping perching walk. Sharply arrowing his hands, executing wonderful shivery twists, he’s as angular and unlikely as some benign pterodactyl, doing movement as if he’s never done it and you’ve never seen it. He makes it matter that he’s human, and not just some articulate, multi-limbed mechanical blip.
At Whitney Museum of American Art (May 18 to 22).
Wake Up in Darkness
May 29
In the modest Kiva loft, with modest means, Renee Rockoff has created a mysterious performance work of powerful meditative presence. Called Likomeng: (The Sacred Songs), it moves slowly, in imagistic episodes that emerge from and then drop back into darkness. Without any sort of commentary or analysis, he piece explores, feels out connections between natural elements and the person, between intransigent spirits and a transcendent world between the terror and the consolation of the dark.
The ceiling is hung with long bundles of slender branches; a thin horizontal beam illuminates them. The music (wonderfully apt stuff by and compiled by Nigel Rollings) first drawls in long tones and then, well in the background, we hear sounds of war or horrors, of natural squawks and outcries. A man in white (Charles Richardson) enters and slowly unhooks and gathers up the branches. A black-and-white slide shows us a porch and a slant-back wooden chair. Maybe in the Adirondacks? Is it evening? Rockoff, in shadow, speaks of when we were children, of playing hide-and-seek, of feeling one’s way in the dark. There’s urgent, ominous piano music, and she shrieks in the middle of it somewhere. She and Ivy Sky Rutzsky are on the floor, or low t it, crawling, shining flashlights on each other. Bent over, their gleaming faces peer at us upside down or right side up. Rockoff’s white face seems to rise starkly, oddly like a cold moon over her silhouetted legs.
Under a spotlight stands a tall sheaf of twigs. A broom-headed spirit figure, sack-clad, and crowned with a stiff row of feathers, looking like a giant Chimu effigy or some kind of shamanic creature, slashes at the top of the stack, knocking it apart as the light goes out and we hear something smash.
At the far end of a sheet of cloth a woman wrapped in white is arched back. She rotates her head and torso, tumbles onto her side, and rolls forward. Lying there, a red-gloved hand pokes out like some perverse seedling or the sign of a grievous inner wound.
An orange light gleams in shadow, at a great distance, it seems, like a sign of morning. Then it narrows, and dwindles away. I’m wondering it it’s a light shining on a mirror, when there’s bone-chilling howl. I see a quite small, pale, cloudy figure suspended in a reddish fog, and hear heavy breathing. I strain to ascertain what I’m actually looking at, to define what’s hovering there in the dark. I like the slightly amorphous way these images appear; that they may be simple tricks takes nothing from their effectiveness. And the attention I invest to clarify what I think I’m seeing draws me into the image. Like following any kind of phantom or curiosity, you may go further than you intend, and find yourself unguarded, in strange territory.
No external logic seems to rule Rockoff’s selection of images or their sequence - though there are many parallels and links - but they feel coherent, right. A hooded figure holds a video monitor which shows black-and-white images of parts of the human body - a model of a heart, a cross-section of the head and neck, a hand revealing its network of nerves, inescapably analogous to the branches that keep appearing. The figure bends with the monitor and slowly opens her hand part way as if to accept an offering, though not to beg, and then withdraws.
In the dark, here’s a great, wild thumping and dragging, growling and smacking. A thick litter of slender branches, almost like some kind of rowdy nest, has been deposited, and within it, amid a crackle of snapping twigs, the two women move on the floor, enmeshed among the branches and pushing them aside with their legs. When they emerge, they walk to the windows; the window light seems like morning sun - I forget that it can’t be light from the outside and that it isn’t morning - and, in unison, they climb into white jumpsuits, in a quiet routine of preparatory calm. The space fills with a black and white projection of, I don’t know, masses of leaves, or eggs, millions of pale ovals. The volume of the space is thrillingly transformed and given an amazing vibrancy. Two more people in white enter the speckled landscape and together everyone rehangs the branches, sets them quietly swinging, and exits.
I was elated. I wish that had been the end, but the projection eventually faded, the women ran screaming and chasing each other and knocking the branches haywire, sprawling and flopping. The broom-head returned and picked up one of the women, leaving the other squatting motionless on the floor. I sensed a faintly dramatizing, more personal overtone that seemed intrusive. Then the spotted slide, with black and white reversed, returned, and consumed the space again. A light shining behind an oblong rectangle, like an aura, seeped across the stage...
I guess I’d been taken as far as I could go, and that last section seemed, overall, like a kind of needless summary, or - weird thought - a justification of what went before. But throughout I was absorbed by the play of light against dark, of light in darkness - more complex and yielding than, say, in Pelleas and Melisande - of human and natural and even technological elements being of equal value, participating equally in forming the images. The effect was to make a situation where you can feel - beyond any rationalization - the common root of the natural things of the earth, ourselves, and even our peculiar brain children. The powers that inflame or subdue us spread their influences in every direction. And animate or inanimate, what we share goes deeper than we usually care to know.
At Kiva (May 4 to 20).
In the modest Kiva loft, with modest means, Renee Rockoff has created a mysterious performance work of powerful meditative presence. Called Likomeng: (The Sacred Songs), it moves slowly, in imagistic episodes that emerge from and then drop back into darkness. Without any sort of commentary or analysis, he piece explores, feels out connections between natural elements and the person, between intransigent spirits and a transcendent world between the terror and the consolation of the dark.
The ceiling is hung with long bundles of slender branches; a thin horizontal beam illuminates them. The music (wonderfully apt stuff by and compiled by Nigel Rollings) first drawls in long tones and then, well in the background, we hear sounds of war or horrors, of natural squawks and outcries. A man in white (Charles Richardson) enters and slowly unhooks and gathers up the branches. A black-and-white slide shows us a porch and a slant-back wooden chair. Maybe in the Adirondacks? Is it evening? Rockoff, in shadow, speaks of when we were children, of playing hide-and-seek, of feeling one’s way in the dark. There’s urgent, ominous piano music, and she shrieks in the middle of it somewhere. She and Ivy Sky Rutzsky are on the floor, or low t it, crawling, shining flashlights on each other. Bent over, their gleaming faces peer at us upside down or right side up. Rockoff’s white face seems to rise starkly, oddly like a cold moon over her silhouetted legs.
Under a spotlight stands a tall sheaf of twigs. A broom-headed spirit figure, sack-clad, and crowned with a stiff row of feathers, looking like a giant Chimu effigy or some kind of shamanic creature, slashes at the top of the stack, knocking it apart as the light goes out and we hear something smash.
At the far end of a sheet of cloth a woman wrapped in white is arched back. She rotates her head and torso, tumbles onto her side, and rolls forward. Lying there, a red-gloved hand pokes out like some perverse seedling or the sign of a grievous inner wound.
An orange light gleams in shadow, at a great distance, it seems, like a sign of morning. Then it narrows, and dwindles away. I’m wondering it it’s a light shining on a mirror, when there’s bone-chilling howl. I see a quite small, pale, cloudy figure suspended in a reddish fog, and hear heavy breathing. I strain to ascertain what I’m actually looking at, to define what’s hovering there in the dark. I like the slightly amorphous way these images appear; that they may be simple tricks takes nothing from their effectiveness. And the attention I invest to clarify what I think I’m seeing draws me into the image. Like following any kind of phantom or curiosity, you may go further than you intend, and find yourself unguarded, in strange territory.
No external logic seems to rule Rockoff’s selection of images or their sequence - though there are many parallels and links - but they feel coherent, right. A hooded figure holds a video monitor which shows black-and-white images of parts of the human body - a model of a heart, a cross-section of the head and neck, a hand revealing its network of nerves, inescapably analogous to the branches that keep appearing. The figure bends with the monitor and slowly opens her hand part way as if to accept an offering, though not to beg, and then withdraws.
In the dark, here’s a great, wild thumping and dragging, growling and smacking. A thick litter of slender branches, almost like some kind of rowdy nest, has been deposited, and within it, amid a crackle of snapping twigs, the two women move on the floor, enmeshed among the branches and pushing them aside with their legs. When they emerge, they walk to the windows; the window light seems like morning sun - I forget that it can’t be light from the outside and that it isn’t morning - and, in unison, they climb into white jumpsuits, in a quiet routine of preparatory calm. The space fills with a black and white projection of, I don’t know, masses of leaves, or eggs, millions of pale ovals. The volume of the space is thrillingly transformed and given an amazing vibrancy. Two more people in white enter the speckled landscape and together everyone rehangs the branches, sets them quietly swinging, and exits.
I was elated. I wish that had been the end, but the projection eventually faded, the women ran screaming and chasing each other and knocking the branches haywire, sprawling and flopping. The broom-head returned and picked up one of the women, leaving the other squatting motionless on the floor. I sensed a faintly dramatizing, more personal overtone that seemed intrusive. Then the spotted slide, with black and white reversed, returned, and consumed the space again. A light shining behind an oblong rectangle, like an aura, seeped across the stage...
I guess I’d been taken as far as I could go, and that last section seemed, overall, like a kind of needless summary, or - weird thought - a justification of what went before. But throughout I was absorbed by the play of light against dark, of light in darkness - more complex and yielding than, say, in Pelleas and Melisande - of human and natural and even technological elements being of equal value, participating equally in forming the images. The effect was to make a situation where you can feel - beyond any rationalization - the common root of the natural things of the earth, ourselves, and even our peculiar brain children. The powers that inflame or subdue us spread their influences in every direction. And animate or inanimate, what we share goes deeper than we usually care to know.
At Kiva (May 4 to 20).