1985 CONTINUED
1000 Witness Murder in Brooklyn
June 25
Huge - maybe four stories tall - grim ice cliffs set off Jacques D’Amboise’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a project of the National Dance Institute, performed in the schoolyard of P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill by 600 kids from 5 to 12 - pretty much every kid in the school - plus 20 teachers, administrators, cafeteria and janitorial staff.
The evening I went, second night, it started an hour later than scheduled, but nobody seemed to mind. Little girls in baggy, pale ocher sweatshirts carrying foam-rubber antlers are reindeer. Boys in brown sweatshirts and ear muffs gotta be dogs. Older girls in leotards and white gloves with long tails and penciled whiskers are cat. The kids with big, brown rabbity ears are...what? Wolves.
Set to a lively score by Galt McDermot (who conducted, too, from the electric piano), Dan McGrew also featured first-rate professional musicians and singers. Those dandy melodies McDermot pours out makes most of the original Broadway shows of the past decade or so (think of Cats, or Cage, etc.), whose composers barely manage one real song, look pretty sad. Snowflakes - some of the youngest children, in white, gleefully run through in stormy, bouncing waves, vigorously shaking sticks with white pompoms. A bearded derelict wrapped in a bearlike fur rolls in; he’s the Stranger, Bill Cratty, the guy who eventually does in Dan McGrew. The reindeer cluster around, their knees quaking. The wolves gather, making tame, clawing gestures. And in the “blackout”, spelled BLACKOUT, the impatient youngster carrying the L card runs ahead of the dawdling A. Hundreds of kids march in from both sides of the yard.
“It’s just your regular neighborhood bar,” mutters my neighbor, “with lots of cats and dogs and bears and miners.” Yes. And dance hall girls. And, in the background, the adults from faculty and administration swaying back and forth disguised as whiskey bottles. Then there’s a card game, with a select group of maybe half a dozen miners or trappers. An altercation (“You calling me a cheater?!”) between McGrew and the big winner. Consternation among the patrons. And sudden death. Little - snowflake size - gray-garbed kids in gray helmets - no, they’re not mice, they’re “buckshot” - get “shot” out of a fat, gold blunderbuss, and the ex-winner lies dead in the schoolyard.
I like the way the sea of children urgently parts for soloists, like Charlotte d’Amboise, the Lady Known as Lou, when she’s tarting it up all over the stage. Anyone can easily see how the levels of skill and interest cary among the children rocking and bouncing and kicking and frugging and keeping time. And, the basic choreography - which gets mobs running in and out, or surrounding the main action, is appropriately simple and miraculously well-organized. The three leads, I imagine had a lot to do with the choreography for their own parts.
D’Amboise’s delivery shouts Broadway loud and clear but she doesn’t bring together the two aspects of her part: the adoring girl the Stranger falls in love with and marries in a flashback and the Klondike vamp who’s only interested in a man for his money. McGrew’s a link between these two aspects, but why he interrupts the wedding scene (maybe it’s a flash forward inside the flashback?) looking like a preacher (all in black), and sucks the bride to him, I didn’t understand. Donlin Foreman is wicked and inscrutable and quite dashing as McGrew, and the weight and tension of the Graham vocabulary serve him well in the role. But Bill Cratty, whose part as devised is no less stereotypical, gives a performance - in this broadest of all possibly productions - that was dramatically complex without being blurry. As the Stranger, Cratty, who was a soloist with the Limon company for eight years, was a large-scale as d’Amboise or Foreman, but never had to resort to mugging. Passionate and responsive, dancing with an emotional clarity and a fine edge, he was incredibly alive, even subtle. Completely there.
Unforgettable, as well, were the Northern Lights, little, little kids in many different colors and fringe; the wedding flowers, very young girls bedecked with paper flowers who raced shyly in and out; the game assistant principal who bounced around in red gatkes and fat furry feet as a Big Bear.
Performed by the children and staff of P.S. 29, Brooklyn (June 7 to 9).
Huge - maybe four stories tall - grim ice cliffs set off Jacques D’Amboise’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a project of the National Dance Institute, performed in the schoolyard of P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill by 600 kids from 5 to 12 - pretty much every kid in the school - plus 20 teachers, administrators, cafeteria and janitorial staff.
The evening I went, second night, it started an hour later than scheduled, but nobody seemed to mind. Little girls in baggy, pale ocher sweatshirts carrying foam-rubber antlers are reindeer. Boys in brown sweatshirts and ear muffs gotta be dogs. Older girls in leotards and white gloves with long tails and penciled whiskers are cat. The kids with big, brown rabbity ears are...what? Wolves.
Set to a lively score by Galt McDermot (who conducted, too, from the electric piano), Dan McGrew also featured first-rate professional musicians and singers. Those dandy melodies McDermot pours out makes most of the original Broadway shows of the past decade or so (think of Cats, or Cage, etc.), whose composers barely manage one real song, look pretty sad. Snowflakes - some of the youngest children, in white, gleefully run through in stormy, bouncing waves, vigorously shaking sticks with white pompoms. A bearded derelict wrapped in a bearlike fur rolls in; he’s the Stranger, Bill Cratty, the guy who eventually does in Dan McGrew. The reindeer cluster around, their knees quaking. The wolves gather, making tame, clawing gestures. And in the “blackout”, spelled BLACKOUT, the impatient youngster carrying the L card runs ahead of the dawdling A. Hundreds of kids march in from both sides of the yard.
“It’s just your regular neighborhood bar,” mutters my neighbor, “with lots of cats and dogs and bears and miners.” Yes. And dance hall girls. And, in the background, the adults from faculty and administration swaying back and forth disguised as whiskey bottles. Then there’s a card game, with a select group of maybe half a dozen miners or trappers. An altercation (“You calling me a cheater?!”) between McGrew and the big winner. Consternation among the patrons. And sudden death. Little - snowflake size - gray-garbed kids in gray helmets - no, they’re not mice, they’re “buckshot” - get “shot” out of a fat, gold blunderbuss, and the ex-winner lies dead in the schoolyard.
I like the way the sea of children urgently parts for soloists, like Charlotte d’Amboise, the Lady Known as Lou, when she’s tarting it up all over the stage. Anyone can easily see how the levels of skill and interest cary among the children rocking and bouncing and kicking and frugging and keeping time. And, the basic choreography - which gets mobs running in and out, or surrounding the main action, is appropriately simple and miraculously well-organized. The three leads, I imagine had a lot to do with the choreography for their own parts.
D’Amboise’s delivery shouts Broadway loud and clear but she doesn’t bring together the two aspects of her part: the adoring girl the Stranger falls in love with and marries in a flashback and the Klondike vamp who’s only interested in a man for his money. McGrew’s a link between these two aspects, but why he interrupts the wedding scene (maybe it’s a flash forward inside the flashback?) looking like a preacher (all in black), and sucks the bride to him, I didn’t understand. Donlin Foreman is wicked and inscrutable and quite dashing as McGrew, and the weight and tension of the Graham vocabulary serve him well in the role. But Bill Cratty, whose part as devised is no less stereotypical, gives a performance - in this broadest of all possibly productions - that was dramatically complex without being blurry. As the Stranger, Cratty, who was a soloist with the Limon company for eight years, was a large-scale as d’Amboise or Foreman, but never had to resort to mugging. Passionate and responsive, dancing with an emotional clarity and a fine edge, he was incredibly alive, even subtle. Completely there.
Unforgettable, as well, were the Northern Lights, little, little kids in many different colors and fringe; the wedding flowers, very young girls bedecked with paper flowers who raced shyly in and out; the game assistant principal who bounced around in red gatkes and fat furry feet as a Big Bear.
Performed by the children and staff of P.S. 29, Brooklyn (June 7 to 9).
Another Marriage Made in Heaven
August 6
There’s no way of erasing Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel from your mind, even if you can barely remember it. And I liked Roland Petit’s version, supposedly closer to the original Heinrich Man novel, Professor Unrat, better than much of his choreography in the past, though it felt more like a mime drama with dance than a ballet. Far from letting me forget the film, Petit’s Blue Angel kept making me wish for intertitles to interrupt and comment on the scenes.
Petit has made a prosy, long-winded ballet, burdened with literal explication and reiteration. What we needed was a 20-minute ballet that grasped the wretchedness of the ludicrous mismatch of the stiff professor and the floozie. The subject is intimate, there are only two characters of importance: you don’t need or necessarily want, hordes of people. But, audiences supposedly prefer big works, ballet companies eternally have faith in that blockbuster moneymaker in the sky, and it’s hard, and possibly foolish, for any choreographer to turn down an opportunity to do a big piece on a big stage.
Petit skillfully manipulates his corps of anonymous male students, cabaret habitues, and dance-hall girls. But only rarely does the whiff of an authentic character come across. Joseph Svoboda’s excellent set, a dark, looming city skyline over which clouds sometimes gather, and in front of which, like a black-and-white double exposure, the veil-like curtain and chandeliers of the cabaret sometime drop, is essentially simple and atmospheric, and manages to suggest the abstract presence of a kind of spiritual or psychic blight. Marius Constant’s music starts murkily, and often seems roiling and inflated, or infected with muttering quarrelsomeness and mechanical gimmickry. At other moments - piano, solos, - it slides into a lush, Elvira Madigan sentimentality. The students are men, not boys. Tight and precise, quasi-military in their uniforms, they dance like toughs, with sharpness in the gestures of the hands and feet, flaunting their keen energy. They snap their heads, shimmy stiffly,,,, forward with legs wide and feet flat, let their knees vibrate with a brimming, barely contained sexual tension. Later, when pals (Thomas Karlborg, Tim Almaas, and Jean-Pierre as Lohmann, Rosa’s lover), challenge each other in mock fights, a lyric flamboyance enters into their leaping. Their combative vigor and resilience counterbalances Professor Raat (Petit), who is normally erect as his students, but a martinet, stiff and prissy -stork-like. Windows light up in the backdrop at night, when the professor follows the trio of students who relentlessly needle him. Guys in black coats cross the stage, hunched over and hoppy as toads, or march like squadrons of trudging undertakers. At the cabaret, the stage bursts into color, with a kickline of dance-hall girls. Trouble is, a dumb, tacky, girlie number - whatever its dramatic purpose - is still dumb. A dark-voiced singer (Barbara Scherler,speaking German) introduces Rosa (Natalia Markarova), who saunters onstage swathed in smoke and a boa. Wearing a top hat and a slight pink garment, she poses saucily and shivers her hips just a bit, so you know she likes knowing she can drive men mad.
Unfortunately, the characterization never goes very much deeper, though it is full of vivid details, particularly when she’s being a bitch. Her sexiness is unaffecting, though. It seems just a pose, arch and overly controlled. Dietrich’s plump carelessness in the film is in extreme contract. It’s irritating too that one of Rosa’s most characteristic dance gestures in the first act is to spread her legs as wide as possible in splits and lifts. We understand that she’s available.
A more serious problem is that the dancing never gets off the ground. It’s not simple that it rarely takes to the air, except when the students are sporting, but it doesn’t have weight either, and it’s rhythmically tedious. Except for a number of quirky signals, Petit’s dance language is essentially inexpressive; almost all the storytelling and characterization is indicated through mime Actually, some of the individual scenes between Markarova and Petit have a natural kind of flow in their semi-realistic acting, but when they shift into more dancerly gear they become artificial. With her student admirers, Markarova/Rosa seems a vain, playful pre-flapper, vaguely flattered and amused by their attention. Aviotte/Lohmann’s assertiveness, though, arouses her to an acquisitive, feline sexuality. But alone in her dressing room, she’s self-conscious. She’s mischievous at first with the stiff, fumbling Professor Raat, teasing him, giggling at him, reducing him with a bye-bye kiss to near paralysis. And when Raat returns, laden with a bouquet, she coyly lures him into putting on her shoe, and turns him gleeful and boyish: he gets a foolish kind of hippity-hop in his step. She seems truly touched by him in an odd way: when he lifts her she flexes her feet as if curling her toes with pleasure. She tickles him, and wriggles up from the floor into his arms, though when he tires to hold her she pushes him away, as if to say, “I am a free spirit!” When she does jump into his arms, he looks doubtful, even terrifies, suddenly caught up short by how far things have progressed. And she snuggles there like a baby. In the second act, she’s bored and restless, dreams of other men; he seems paunchy, depleted. They’re married now, possibly for a while, but it could almost be the next day. They have nothing to say to each other.
Impulsive, nasty, taunting, Markarova is marvelous at expressing her irritation. She cruelly smears some makeup on Raat’s face, tries to make him muse her. She can’t stop pushing; he doesn’t know how to be anything but an oafish lump. Their bickering turns into a real fight, and he nearly hits her. After that, having tuned those smears of make-up into full whiteface, he does, futilely, try to entertain her with some artful clowning and fake juggling. Petit does this eloquently, but its entirely out of character; if Raat were capable of this wit, their relationship wouldn’t be the quagmire it is. Rosa’s old cronies arrive to liven things up, and she takes a quick turn with several of the men. When Lohmann appears, everything stops head for a moment. And when he kisses Rosa, the “guests” encircle the couple and their heads snap toward Raat. Raat rushes up in a rage, but the “guests” keep neatly cutting between hi and Lohmann, framing and reframing the scene. Lohmann seems to be a kind of diabolical presence, not merely the impudent tormentor of the professor he appears to be early on. The unlikely way the guests protect him makes it seem just possible that he has engineered this humiliation from the very beginning.
Petit finally hits his theatrical stride at the very end. Raat is left alone, riddled with stitches and tremors, a literal bundle of nerves, stumbling off to disappear at the rear of the stage, diminishing in size until he becomes invisible. Masses of those nameless students/undertakers in coats sweep across the stage, and Rosa, valise in hand, grimly makes her way through the alleys and blockades they form. They grow tall, shrink down, collapse like war or plague victims. And Raat, following after her, trembling and stumbling, falls in a heap at her feet.
At the Metopolitan Opera House (July 23 to August 3).
There’s no way of erasing Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel from your mind, even if you can barely remember it. And I liked Roland Petit’s version, supposedly closer to the original Heinrich Man novel, Professor Unrat, better than much of his choreography in the past, though it felt more like a mime drama with dance than a ballet. Far from letting me forget the film, Petit’s Blue Angel kept making me wish for intertitles to interrupt and comment on the scenes.
Petit has made a prosy, long-winded ballet, burdened with literal explication and reiteration. What we needed was a 20-minute ballet that grasped the wretchedness of the ludicrous mismatch of the stiff professor and the floozie. The subject is intimate, there are only two characters of importance: you don’t need or necessarily want, hordes of people. But, audiences supposedly prefer big works, ballet companies eternally have faith in that blockbuster moneymaker in the sky, and it’s hard, and possibly foolish, for any choreographer to turn down an opportunity to do a big piece on a big stage.
Petit skillfully manipulates his corps of anonymous male students, cabaret habitues, and dance-hall girls. But only rarely does the whiff of an authentic character come across. Joseph Svoboda’s excellent set, a dark, looming city skyline over which clouds sometimes gather, and in front of which, like a black-and-white double exposure, the veil-like curtain and chandeliers of the cabaret sometime drop, is essentially simple and atmospheric, and manages to suggest the abstract presence of a kind of spiritual or psychic blight. Marius Constant’s music starts murkily, and often seems roiling and inflated, or infected with muttering quarrelsomeness and mechanical gimmickry. At other moments - piano, solos, - it slides into a lush, Elvira Madigan sentimentality. The students are men, not boys. Tight and precise, quasi-military in their uniforms, they dance like toughs, with sharpness in the gestures of the hands and feet, flaunting their keen energy. They snap their heads, shimmy stiffly,,,, forward with legs wide and feet flat, let their knees vibrate with a brimming, barely contained sexual tension. Later, when pals (Thomas Karlborg, Tim Almaas, and Jean-Pierre as Lohmann, Rosa’s lover), challenge each other in mock fights, a lyric flamboyance enters into their leaping. Their combative vigor and resilience counterbalances Professor Raat (Petit), who is normally erect as his students, but a martinet, stiff and prissy -stork-like. Windows light up in the backdrop at night, when the professor follows the trio of students who relentlessly needle him. Guys in black coats cross the stage, hunched over and hoppy as toads, or march like squadrons of trudging undertakers. At the cabaret, the stage bursts into color, with a kickline of dance-hall girls. Trouble is, a dumb, tacky, girlie number - whatever its dramatic purpose - is still dumb. A dark-voiced singer (Barbara Scherler,speaking German) introduces Rosa (Natalia Markarova), who saunters onstage swathed in smoke and a boa. Wearing a top hat and a slight pink garment, she poses saucily and shivers her hips just a bit, so you know she likes knowing she can drive men mad.
Unfortunately, the characterization never goes very much deeper, though it is full of vivid details, particularly when she’s being a bitch. Her sexiness is unaffecting, though. It seems just a pose, arch and overly controlled. Dietrich’s plump carelessness in the film is in extreme contract. It’s irritating too that one of Rosa’s most characteristic dance gestures in the first act is to spread her legs as wide as possible in splits and lifts. We understand that she’s available.
A more serious problem is that the dancing never gets off the ground. It’s not simple that it rarely takes to the air, except when the students are sporting, but it doesn’t have weight either, and it’s rhythmically tedious. Except for a number of quirky signals, Petit’s dance language is essentially inexpressive; almost all the storytelling and characterization is indicated through mime Actually, some of the individual scenes between Markarova and Petit have a natural kind of flow in their semi-realistic acting, but when they shift into more dancerly gear they become artificial. With her student admirers, Markarova/Rosa seems a vain, playful pre-flapper, vaguely flattered and amused by their attention. Aviotte/Lohmann’s assertiveness, though, arouses her to an acquisitive, feline sexuality. But alone in her dressing room, she’s self-conscious. She’s mischievous at first with the stiff, fumbling Professor Raat, teasing him, giggling at him, reducing him with a bye-bye kiss to near paralysis. And when Raat returns, laden with a bouquet, she coyly lures him into putting on her shoe, and turns him gleeful and boyish: he gets a foolish kind of hippity-hop in his step. She seems truly touched by him in an odd way: when he lifts her she flexes her feet as if curling her toes with pleasure. She tickles him, and wriggles up from the floor into his arms, though when he tires to hold her she pushes him away, as if to say, “I am a free spirit!” When she does jump into his arms, he looks doubtful, even terrifies, suddenly caught up short by how far things have progressed. And she snuggles there like a baby. In the second act, she’s bored and restless, dreams of other men; he seems paunchy, depleted. They’re married now, possibly for a while, but it could almost be the next day. They have nothing to say to each other.
Impulsive, nasty, taunting, Markarova is marvelous at expressing her irritation. She cruelly smears some makeup on Raat’s face, tries to make him muse her. She can’t stop pushing; he doesn’t know how to be anything but an oafish lump. Their bickering turns into a real fight, and he nearly hits her. After that, having tuned those smears of make-up into full whiteface, he does, futilely, try to entertain her with some artful clowning and fake juggling. Petit does this eloquently, but its entirely out of character; if Raat were capable of this wit, their relationship wouldn’t be the quagmire it is. Rosa’s old cronies arrive to liven things up, and she takes a quick turn with several of the men. When Lohmann appears, everything stops head for a moment. And when he kisses Rosa, the “guests” encircle the couple and their heads snap toward Raat. Raat rushes up in a rage, but the “guests” keep neatly cutting between hi and Lohmann, framing and reframing the scene. Lohmann seems to be a kind of diabolical presence, not merely the impudent tormentor of the professor he appears to be early on. The unlikely way the guests protect him makes it seem just possible that he has engineered this humiliation from the very beginning.
Petit finally hits his theatrical stride at the very end. Raat is left alone, riddled with stitches and tremors, a literal bundle of nerves, stumbling off to disappear at the rear of the stage, diminishing in size until he becomes invisible. Masses of those nameless students/undertakers in coats sweep across the stage, and Rosa, valise in hand, grimly makes her way through the alleys and blockades they form. They grow tall, shrink down, collapse like war or plague victims. And Raat, following after her, trembling and stumbling, falls in a heap at her feet.
At the Metopolitan Opera House (July 23 to August 3).
Pam on Wry
August 27
Pam Quinn, a member of ODC/San Francisco (formerly Oberlin Dance Collective), and actor writer
Michael O'Connor have been collaborating for the past two years. O’Connor (he talks, and moves too) has also worked with ODC, as well as in Herbert Blau’s Kraken ensemble, and with Bill Irwin and Doug Skinner.
In Five Brief Pieces, the loosest collaboration of their program on Dance Theater Workshop’s annual summer “Out of Towners” series, Quinn’s and O’Connor’s precise, clean styles acquire an exhilarating f\lash by their proximity. But in the pieces where the two collaborate more closely, and fir together more intricately, their edges rub down a little duller. First on the program Five Brief Pieces, was a deft and savvy exercise - poetic monologues by O’Connor that take delight in the art of rhetoric alternating with rather quick dance solos by Quinn that manage an almost impromptu sort of dash. A thoughtful slightly sinister O’Connor, humorously overserious, turns his head to inquire “Under What Circumstances May We Laugh?” with a kind of sing-song yet professorial intonation. Each inclination of his head or minor realignment of his body adds a further note of rueful concern to his slyly grave text.
In “Inside This Thing,” next, Quinn is a gleaming contrast- sleek and dangerously feline, though she looks like she could be prim. A little ballerinaish, and, uh oh, a little werewolfish. She dives neatly onto her shoulder, leaves her tush in the air. O’Connor’s vivid, pictorial recitations grow more fanciful, less scholastic, but the fantasies - on “a man who lived on fish” and a [portrait of surreal Prague - are lofted by the elaborate, unlikely reasoning at their cores. In Quinn’s second solo, “Under the Weather,” (it’s the fourth section - postfish and pre-Prague), she wears a casual, red-striped suit that might almost be pjs. She’s light-footed and musing, but exact, and moves with a jazzy, slouchy feeling. The slouchiness isn’t in a lazy torso, it’s in the looseness of the legs. Quinn’s dancing rides over and delves into Doug Skinner’s music in a lovely, breezy way.
In The Stage of Injury, O’Connor’s text microscopically inspects various aspects of injury - what injury is, as in football; in Christian tradition; significance of; etc. - while Quinn dances simultaneously or alternately, and is occasionally visited by some brief affliction. Discussing the sympathy one feels for an injury victim, O’Connor unconcernedly seats himself on Quinn’s bowed back: she has stumbled to the floor out of a series of turns. Such is the ironic, cautiously antagonistic relationship of their roles. Quinn is an elegant dancer, with a keen sense of phrasing and an ability to carve the shapes her body passes through without overdefining them. There are particularly nice moments during O’Connor’s discussion of “fatal injuries,” when the two move smoothly side by side, sometimes leaning, or limping. And a hasty scherzo for Quinn of fast, perching turns, forceful legwork, tugging elbows, slicing arms. But by the time we're into this piece, we know O’Connor’s careful habits too well, and his wry manner of speaking feels narrow, even though his verbal offerings are as compressed and delectable in their way, and as tenacious in their attempts to categorize, define, and ornament, as an essay by Francis Bacon. The Domenico Scarlatti sonatas that accompany Injury lend it just the right measure of relaxation and brittleness. But what keeps the piece a thin, too theoretical enterprise is that the “injuries” are purely gestural deviations; injuries without pain, without affect, without consequences: disposable devices.
Satisfying slow motion and murky, allusive feelings color the unelucidated scenes of the final duet, Other Peoples Dreams. In the plainest and single gripping episode, Quinn and O’Connor face each other. She claps her hands in front of his face to get some kind of rise out of him. No response. Suddenly, he pulls his hand back; she flinches. Blackout. The other episodes seem aimless and patient, and O’Connor and Quinn like androids going through the human motions with sober exactitude. Other People’s Dreams also features projected drawings by O’Connor of old-young cherubs - sometimes just white baby-faces, puff-cheeked, scowling, sour - dropped out of the black background. An arrow, alone on the screen at the beginning, has, by the end, pierced a baby through the belly - a cold and dreadful image that’s dramatically unjustified even though it’s mechanically predictable and an appropriately vengeful use of Cupid’s dart.
Though beautifully performed, the wordless Dreams is the least fresh of the three collaborations. The exhaustively extended subject of Injury wears out too quickly, in part because of the harping way the text scrapes away at its subject and the dances keep deflecting from it. Five Brief Pieces allows the performers the most room. And it had the happy advantage of being first.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 8 to 10).
Pam Quinn, a member of ODC/San Francisco (formerly Oberlin Dance Collective), and actor writer
Michael O'Connor have been collaborating for the past two years. O’Connor (he talks, and moves too) has also worked with ODC, as well as in Herbert Blau’s Kraken ensemble, and with Bill Irwin and Doug Skinner.
In Five Brief Pieces, the loosest collaboration of their program on Dance Theater Workshop’s annual summer “Out of Towners” series, Quinn’s and O’Connor’s precise, clean styles acquire an exhilarating f\lash by their proximity. But in the pieces where the two collaborate more closely, and fir together more intricately, their edges rub down a little duller. First on the program Five Brief Pieces, was a deft and savvy exercise - poetic monologues by O’Connor that take delight in the art of rhetoric alternating with rather quick dance solos by Quinn that manage an almost impromptu sort of dash. A thoughtful slightly sinister O’Connor, humorously overserious, turns his head to inquire “Under What Circumstances May We Laugh?” with a kind of sing-song yet professorial intonation. Each inclination of his head or minor realignment of his body adds a further note of rueful concern to his slyly grave text.
In “Inside This Thing,” next, Quinn is a gleaming contrast- sleek and dangerously feline, though she looks like she could be prim. A little ballerinaish, and, uh oh, a little werewolfish. She dives neatly onto her shoulder, leaves her tush in the air. O’Connor’s vivid, pictorial recitations grow more fanciful, less scholastic, but the fantasies - on “a man who lived on fish” and a [portrait of surreal Prague - are lofted by the elaborate, unlikely reasoning at their cores. In Quinn’s second solo, “Under the Weather,” (it’s the fourth section - postfish and pre-Prague), she wears a casual, red-striped suit that might almost be pjs. She’s light-footed and musing, but exact, and moves with a jazzy, slouchy feeling. The slouchiness isn’t in a lazy torso, it’s in the looseness of the legs. Quinn’s dancing rides over and delves into Doug Skinner’s music in a lovely, breezy way.
In The Stage of Injury, O’Connor’s text microscopically inspects various aspects of injury - what injury is, as in football; in Christian tradition; significance of; etc. - while Quinn dances simultaneously or alternately, and is occasionally visited by some brief affliction. Discussing the sympathy one feels for an injury victim, O’Connor unconcernedly seats himself on Quinn’s bowed back: she has stumbled to the floor out of a series of turns. Such is the ironic, cautiously antagonistic relationship of their roles. Quinn is an elegant dancer, with a keen sense of phrasing and an ability to carve the shapes her body passes through without overdefining them. There are particularly nice moments during O’Connor’s discussion of “fatal injuries,” when the two move smoothly side by side, sometimes leaning, or limping. And a hasty scherzo for Quinn of fast, perching turns, forceful legwork, tugging elbows, slicing arms. But by the time we're into this piece, we know O’Connor’s careful habits too well, and his wry manner of speaking feels narrow, even though his verbal offerings are as compressed and delectable in their way, and as tenacious in their attempts to categorize, define, and ornament, as an essay by Francis Bacon. The Domenico Scarlatti sonatas that accompany Injury lend it just the right measure of relaxation and brittleness. But what keeps the piece a thin, too theoretical enterprise is that the “injuries” are purely gestural deviations; injuries without pain, without affect, without consequences: disposable devices.
Satisfying slow motion and murky, allusive feelings color the unelucidated scenes of the final duet, Other Peoples Dreams. In the plainest and single gripping episode, Quinn and O’Connor face each other. She claps her hands in front of his face to get some kind of rise out of him. No response. Suddenly, he pulls his hand back; she flinches. Blackout. The other episodes seem aimless and patient, and O’Connor and Quinn like androids going through the human motions with sober exactitude. Other People’s Dreams also features projected drawings by O’Connor of old-young cherubs - sometimes just white baby-faces, puff-cheeked, scowling, sour - dropped out of the black background. An arrow, alone on the screen at the beginning, has, by the end, pierced a baby through the belly - a cold and dreadful image that’s dramatically unjustified even though it’s mechanically predictable and an appropriately vengeful use of Cupid’s dart.
Though beautifully performed, the wordless Dreams is the least fresh of the three collaborations. The exhaustively extended subject of Injury wears out too quickly, in part because of the harping way the text scrapes away at its subject and the dances keep deflecting from it. Five Brief Pieces allows the performers the most room. And it had the happy advantage of being first.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 8 to 10).
Tango Gold
Whatever the tango’s mixed blood origins in African, Spanish and Indian rhythms, it is an extraordinarily powerful and distinct national expression. It is occasionally, the tough, smoldering number that slightly embarrassed couples are shy at playing straight. But, clearly, after seeing Tango Argentino, a full and fast-moving evenings of tangos danced, sung a, squeezed, fiddled and plinked, by a large cast of well-seasoned performers, it is very much more.
No wonder the world was intoxicated when Valentino burned up the floor in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and when the tango hit Paris in the ‘20s. It had smoothed over its low-class whorehouse beginnings, but its pragmatic roughnesses still grated just under the surface. The tangos that spring immediately to my mind are classics like “La Cumparsita,” or Frankie Lane’s ‘50s hits - “Kiss of Fire,” “Jealousy,” “I Get Ideas” - all slow-stepping, determined dances. Formality, regularity, and suave sexual role-playing were what gave the tango I knew its style, and the same elements that made it so tauntingly beautiful make it ludicrous and out-of-date.
Tango Argentino showed me something else- its immense temperamental range, from playful to desolate. The small orchestra’s arranged in a steep pyramid onstage: four men on bandoneon, a kind of small accordion that they stretch across their laps and bounce on their knees. Behind them, six men play strings and two pianists switch off. Interspersed with instrumentals usually highlighted by the slightly sour whine of the bandoneons are songs (sung by Raul Lavie, Jovita Luna, Elba Beron, Maria Grana and Roberto Goyeneche), and an array of dances, which in the first half of the program seems to be an unforced “tango through the ages” saga. The songs mostly appear to be disastrous tales of longing, and the words matter. Even if you’ve only got eight words of Spanish, you know from the singer’s melancholy intonations that he or she’s explaining to your sympathetic ear or to the next-to-last cocktail just why and how they can’t shake their blues away. Too bad that inferior and excessive amplification flattens out their voices when they’re going strong - makes them sound like records, a friend complains - and turns the piano tinny.
The dancers are something special. They’re not youngsters. They’re not on leave from some ballet company. Some of the men might be Mafia lawyers or barbers. Of course, with their hair slicked down, they’d have to look like that. The women’s zillion snazzy dreses - all gleaming black and/or white, like the men’s outfits - are slit to the hip or the crotch, which isn’t just sleazy, but necessary for the savage legwork. Everyone’s very savvy, full of good humor and abandon and the reckless precision of people who, I guess, really do this for a living. The men enter first, looking like antique gangsters, in dark suits and hats, and partner each other. Their fast, snaking footwork is as much of a shocker as the sexual surprise. Their legs crisscross and swivel, hook on and tap each other in sharp deflecting conversation. When they’re soon joined by some long-skirted women, the moves become more perky and flippant: there’re tight, vining, patterns of steps, stamping, a kind of folky air.
The dances almost always contain an amazing variety of this tricky, assertive, angular footwork, as well as the twining and reversing patterns. One couple breezes through in high spirits, clasped together doing fast showoff runs, rocking sinuously through the upper body. In “La Morocha,” two upper-class young women in ruffled white dresses dance together in a cautious, but more lyrical way, gently arching the torso, dipping into a modest lunge. Later, to “La Cumparsita,” Maria and Carlos Rivarola, the ultimate in pre-World War I soignee elegance, dance a marvelous reserved and measured tango, a distillation of refined passion Here are those deep backward archings, the languorous dips. Just slightly moony. For the first time, we’re seeing the equality in the partnership shift: he leads, she is shown off. That impulse to give the woman the flash stuff, the decorative steps, grows in the next dance, with the Dinzels. It’s a saucy, hard ‘20s number of sharp swivels and twisting legs, flashing knees and calves like a Lindy Hopper, that’s explicitly sexy; she caresses his cheek; climbs leg over leg up on his thigh with the tenacious grip of a strangler fig. Soon we see more seriousness, less glee. More clinches, more long holds, more attitude. The lagging foot dragging to close, the surreptitious slide, the individual steps more isolated, sharply accented, and held.
The brilliant challenging riffs of interlocking footwork yielding, more frequently, to a somber presentation of the public self and conventionalized passion. Nelida and Nelson stalk through the beginning of “Jealousy,” but soon their legs are a blizzard of slashing and stamping, sliding and brushing, locking and swinging together. The mazy intricacies of the ways the coupes’ legs - no, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet - whip and wrap and undercut is miraculously intimate yet cool-headed. Gloria and Eduardo are ferociously precise: when she freezes a leg for a moment, he releases it down with a touch of his foot. Mayoral and Elsa Maria attack “La Yumba” tall and tight and full of drastic intention. Maria Nieves’s bold legwork is particularly assertive and independent. But she and [partner Juan Carlos Copes avoid any glance with a snap of their heads, surrender no clues to the teasing, caressing action below the waist. After a whole evening, I keep hearing a kind of last-gasp raucousness in some of its gaiety, a sense that the music and dancing are all that keep us from falling into despair and bitterness. But precarious as it may be, the tango keeps us riding high over that abyss.
No wonder the world was intoxicated when Valentino burned up the floor in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and when the tango hit Paris in the ‘20s. It had smoothed over its low-class whorehouse beginnings, but its pragmatic roughnesses still grated just under the surface. The tangos that spring immediately to my mind are classics like “La Cumparsita,” or Frankie Lane’s ‘50s hits - “Kiss of Fire,” “Jealousy,” “I Get Ideas” - all slow-stepping, determined dances. Formality, regularity, and suave sexual role-playing were what gave the tango I knew its style, and the same elements that made it so tauntingly beautiful make it ludicrous and out-of-date.
Tango Argentino showed me something else- its immense temperamental range, from playful to desolate. The small orchestra’s arranged in a steep pyramid onstage: four men on bandoneon, a kind of small accordion that they stretch across their laps and bounce on their knees. Behind them, six men play strings and two pianists switch off. Interspersed with instrumentals usually highlighted by the slightly sour whine of the bandoneons are songs (sung by Raul Lavie, Jovita Luna, Elba Beron, Maria Grana and Roberto Goyeneche), and an array of dances, which in the first half of the program seems to be an unforced “tango through the ages” saga. The songs mostly appear to be disastrous tales of longing, and the words matter. Even if you’ve only got eight words of Spanish, you know from the singer’s melancholy intonations that he or she’s explaining to your sympathetic ear or to the next-to-last cocktail just why and how they can’t shake their blues away. Too bad that inferior and excessive amplification flattens out their voices when they’re going strong - makes them sound like records, a friend complains - and turns the piano tinny.
The dancers are something special. They’re not youngsters. They’re not on leave from some ballet company. Some of the men might be Mafia lawyers or barbers. Of course, with their hair slicked down, they’d have to look like that. The women’s zillion snazzy dreses - all gleaming black and/or white, like the men’s outfits - are slit to the hip or the crotch, which isn’t just sleazy, but necessary for the savage legwork. Everyone’s very savvy, full of good humor and abandon and the reckless precision of people who, I guess, really do this for a living. The men enter first, looking like antique gangsters, in dark suits and hats, and partner each other. Their fast, snaking footwork is as much of a shocker as the sexual surprise. Their legs crisscross and swivel, hook on and tap each other in sharp deflecting conversation. When they’re soon joined by some long-skirted women, the moves become more perky and flippant: there’re tight, vining, patterns of steps, stamping, a kind of folky air.
The dances almost always contain an amazing variety of this tricky, assertive, angular footwork, as well as the twining and reversing patterns. One couple breezes through in high spirits, clasped together doing fast showoff runs, rocking sinuously through the upper body. In “La Morocha,” two upper-class young women in ruffled white dresses dance together in a cautious, but more lyrical way, gently arching the torso, dipping into a modest lunge. Later, to “La Cumparsita,” Maria and Carlos Rivarola, the ultimate in pre-World War I soignee elegance, dance a marvelous reserved and measured tango, a distillation of refined passion Here are those deep backward archings, the languorous dips. Just slightly moony. For the first time, we’re seeing the equality in the partnership shift: he leads, she is shown off. That impulse to give the woman the flash stuff, the decorative steps, grows in the next dance, with the Dinzels. It’s a saucy, hard ‘20s number of sharp swivels and twisting legs, flashing knees and calves like a Lindy Hopper, that’s explicitly sexy; she caresses his cheek; climbs leg over leg up on his thigh with the tenacious grip of a strangler fig. Soon we see more seriousness, less glee. More clinches, more long holds, more attitude. The lagging foot dragging to close, the surreptitious slide, the individual steps more isolated, sharply accented, and held.
The brilliant challenging riffs of interlocking footwork yielding, more frequently, to a somber presentation of the public self and conventionalized passion. Nelida and Nelson stalk through the beginning of “Jealousy,” but soon their legs are a blizzard of slashing and stamping, sliding and brushing, locking and swinging together. The mazy intricacies of the ways the coupes’ legs - no, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet - whip and wrap and undercut is miraculously intimate yet cool-headed. Gloria and Eduardo are ferociously precise: when she freezes a leg for a moment, he releases it down with a touch of his foot. Mayoral and Elsa Maria attack “La Yumba” tall and tight and full of drastic intention. Maria Nieves’s bold legwork is particularly assertive and independent. But she and [partner Juan Carlos Copes avoid any glance with a snap of their heads, surrender no clues to the teasing, caressing action below the waist. After a whole evening, I keep hearing a kind of last-gasp raucousness in some of its gaiety, a sense that the music and dancing are all that keep us from falling into despair and bitterness. But precarious as it may be, the tango keeps us riding high over that abyss.
Tokyo Trio
August 13
It’s 8 a.m. next morning according to my body, but in Tokyo it’s dusk. A young Dutch couple follows us out of the Tokyo subway looking for the Butoh, in fact, a performance by spry 79-year-old Kazuo Ohno (one of the founders of Butoh in the early ‘60s). It’s at the new quarters of Tenkei-Gekijo, an experimental theater group, in a former warehouse in Hikawadai, and out-of-the-way, smal manufacturing district. Outside the theater, more than 200 people - like any young downtown New York crowd - mill about in the street until it’s line-up time, according to ticket number. Like elementary school, but it’s orderly, and it’s not size places. The “younger” the ticket, the better the seat. Two Japanese style Port-o-Sans stand near the box office; once we’re squashed in, there’ll be no way to slip out to take a pee, so do it now. And everybody check your parcels because the theater’s so small it crowds in about 200, legally, on a double bank of steps, and a few extras manage to weasel in.
The street was sweltering; the theater is deliciously icy. Some Strauss waltz is playing faintly. Ohno comes on stage in a creamy white dress and cape, silver heels, dark frizzy hair; is face is made up stark white, and his lips red red. He stands pigeon-toed, with his head slightly twisted, fingers gnarled, and his face inexpressibly sad. He drops his arms, lets his torso go slack. Although his wedding veil is covered with blossoms, it seems funereal. An avalanche of rumbling sends him huddling against the wall, and he utters little moans as he skitters around the stage. The sadness is nearly unbearable, as if Miss Havisham were to dance for us. Ohno’s solos are like illogical, alogical suites, series upon series of pictures in a sequence that only he can justify. His piquant gestures and his emotional potency have the power to fascinate, but his absolute authenticity, his amazing truthfulness is al that gives form to the work.
This piece, The Dead Sea: Vienna Waltzes and the Ghost, is a sort of double solo, to which his son, Yoshito Ohno, lends a serene presence. All in white, his head shaved, he enters quietly as moonlight, and bows us welcome. Later, he can hardly hold himself erect; the sand keeps running out of him. Ohno is a great costume-changer; he;s got vintage clothing for all occasions. In a white, Victorian, high-waisted dress, he describes a smooth orbit of movement through his upper torso. Like some dippy Elizabethan courtier with a Dali mustache, little flags in his tin-foil crown, and a small doll hooked on the shoulder of his cape, he eagerly tramps and rides to a march, whomping himself on the rump till the gaiety fizzles into sudden collapse. Or he’s in a Renaissance robe with fat, bunched, pleated sleeves. And then on his back, legs in the air, scratching his pale calves. Ladylike in an old, faded apricot dress with a ruffled collar, and a thick, rice-green obi bound over his chest, he moves to a Mozart minuet, twists into appalling and arcane postures, smiles a dim and sweet smile.
Admiring La Argentina, a piece he first performed in 1977, was inspired by an abstract painting by Natsuyuki Nakanishi which embodied, for him, literally, La Argentina. He saw her dance once 50 years before from the top balcony of Tokyo’s Imperial Theater. She and Harald Kreutzberg stand behind his urge to dance. Ohno is a fragile wreck of a grande dame in a cape, black velvet gown, wit black net gloves, a hat with an opulent, floppy flower. His head bends, imploring, his wrists curve; the gestures are feeble, twisted, faltering, tender - only sometimes brusque. At the end of the first section, to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, he loosens the cape and - a little Blanche Dubois - holds it in front of him like a dress he once wore for a special occasion. The resonance of memory is brutal in its strength. He drags the cape on the ground, leaves it there, hitches up his skirt gamely, and takes two pitiful jumps. Enough to break your heart.
Two Puccini arias recorded by Maria Callas accompany parts of this piece and, for me, they have enormous power. The way Callas’s voice exposes the music is exactly in tune with Ohno’s emotional nakedness. In white, a flat white bow in his hair, like an abandoned, illl-used child, he lies on the cape as if in a rumpled bed and presses the hat to his bosom. In faded red and wine-colored ruffles, to a selection of tangos, he takes little steps, curls his hands coyly. His shoulders twist, wrists bend, fingers splay, in a faint, dried-rose peta echo of Spanish dance. In white again - a long, narrow gown and embroidered shawl and a flowered headpiece like Princess Sakura - he treads with tiny, teetery steps, occasionally stamping, then throws off the shawl with a creaky flair, and circles the stage with curved arms.
The aura and power of suggestion of Ohno’s dancing remind me somewhat of Maria Theresa Duncan. But one looks through Maria Theresa to an evocation of Isadora; with Ohno, 50 years of filtered memories of La Argentina let you peer into his own mysterious soul. Ohno’s emotional truthfulness pierces through the decrepitude of age, and is heightened by it. There is no conventional beauty in this work, only a beauty of spirit. This same kind of truthfulness is the bone and sinew of the work of Kinuko Kisanuki, a young modern dancer influenced to some degree by Butoh. Always fluid, her dancing is all transition. She has a marvelous delicacy in her movement and apparent vulnerability to her surroundings, though those surroundings, as for Ohno, are the dreamlike vision in her own mind.
I wander back and forth across the railroad tracks that bisect an area of Tokyo that’s like a small village, looking for the studio Kisanuki’s working in. Rebuilt after World War II without any planning or overseeing by the government, it’s a neighborhood of narrow, winding streets and appropriately low buildings. The studio she borrows is small, in what looks like a private house. There are ballet barres on the walls, but it usually houses calligraphy classes. Lean and elegant, with a gentle oval face, Kisanuki has the kind of peaceful, modest mien that seems to soak up impressions. Twenty-seven now, in 1981 she got an award from the Japan Contemporary Dance Association as best dancer of the year, which rarely goes to anyone under 30. In the same year, she won a government prize which would have enabled her to study overseas while receiving a reasonable stipend. But she passed up the opportunity, which would have brought with it conventional obligations: opening a studio upon returning to Japan, gathering students, giving performances for which the students sell tickets to members of their families and people they know. In these circumstances, audiences, with no particular passion for dance, are cool.
Kisanuki decided to avoid this circumscribed structure. She dances the beginning of the sixth and newest piece in a series entitled Butterfly, for which she chose the antique form of the word, tef-tef. Her choice of word represents a desire to renew cultural roots, out of a perception that Japanese people are losing touch with their “heart.” Like the child that thinks orange juice comes from a container, and never associates it with a spherical citrus fruit. But her instinct is not so much to portray the malaise she senses as to heal it, to create the inner feeling that she feels is being dissipated. She focuses on images from ordinary life, aiming to express “all of herself and all of her history and the external world of circumstances,” and recollects, in her dancing, actual occurrences, augmented by imagination, or, in her words, “travels the road that doesn’t exist.”
When she’s in the studio rehearsing, she may sit for long periods in a corner, turning the images in her mind. But the personal, private images in the dancing are transmuted into something unsentimental, objective. What happens is that she - like Ohno again - isn’t dancing her history and identity in any explanatory way, but simply trying to bring all of herself into the moment of performance. Though the performance may be extremely beautiful, a vivid personal truthfulness is the major source of its attraction, without it being at all biographical. She doesn’t show her dancing, but seems to undergo it, moment by moment, as if experiencing it for the first time, with imperturbable commitment. Like a sleepwalker you don’t dare wake, she draws you in. But for all the sensitivity of the body surface - it’s as if her skin were all eyes - and her extremely refined kind of sensuality, she seems essentially other-worldly and pristine.
Physically, Western dancers move more brightly through the joints, trust their limbs with more force, take space more eagerly. Kisanuki usually prefers her native approach - ideally, to stir the air as little as possible. But there’s an overall (thoroughly un-Butoh-like) sense of lift to her body. She naturally seems to float free from the sagging, melting movements that accompany her introspection, and can burst out with effortless force. In her mind, Kisanuki says, she is always dancing. “The stage is only a moment when you appear in front of an audience.” And she tells a story from her childhood that bears on her relation to dance. She had captured butterflies in a net and put them in a basket. Then, her mother explained to her that even the smallest insect has its own life. But by the time she went to release the butterflies, they were dead. She buried them, and later had a dream in which the powder from the butterflies’ wings was falling from the sky and attaching itself to her face, her lips. “All of a sudden,” she says, “I don’t know when I was dancing.”
Natusu Nakajima, of the female Butoh group Muteki-sha, meets me at the game center under Nakameguro station to take me to the windowless basement studio she shares nearby. Back in the early ‘60s, Nakajima almost came to New York to study at the Cunnningham studio, but met Tatsumi Hijikata, the pioneer of Butoh, worked with him, and founded her own company in 1969. Like Ohno and Kisanuki, Nakajima also gives voice to the notion that her dancing and her ordinary life are not separate.
The fragments I watch of Nakajima’s Niwa/The Garden, “the story of woman from baby to ghost,” echo, in part, her own history. Characteristic of Butoh, the movements and gestures that the emotional core of the piece generates aren’t necessarily aesthetically pleasing; the physical expression seems hampered, instead of thrust, by the power of feeling behind it. The face seems to resist feeling by puckering, tightening, bloating, grinning,; the limbs respond with an erratic feebleness or sudden stiffening. Maybe this is related, however obliquely, to the concept of hana, whereby strong emotion is masked by something milder, pleasanter, so that other people aren’t troubled or dismayed. Nakajima’s cheery partner, Yuriko Maezawa, with a fluffy ponytail and glittering red nail polish, crouches with her fists over her eyes. There’s the sound of howling wind, or maybe warplanes. Her face takes on a toothy grin of terror, or maybe happy idiocy, as extreme emotions slide into their opposites. When she tries to stand, she wobbles on collapsing ankles, then takes tiny, padding steps. Holding her arms straight like a marksman, and making a pistol of her fingers, she swivels like a gun turret. Her cheeks puff up as if stuffed with food she doesn’t dare chew; then she seems to tremble with the weakness of hunger Her lips pinch and flatten against her teeth. She describes with her hands the trajectory of planes, zigzags sideways, a hapless figure with her elbows stuck out, her forearms dangling, staring suint-eyed at those planes. Maezawa takes a turn at the tape machine. To whirring, chiming music, Nakajima stands clumped, her gaze high and desolate. Her body settles even more heavily with a jolt. She look sup, twisting her body slightly, letting one side sag. The two sides of the body often seem divided to me in Butoh, as if subject to different afflictions.
The pace of Nakajima’s piece, like Ohno’s and Kisanuki’s very dissimilar work, seems to be at dream speed, taking whatever time it requires the performers to call up an inner vision and to enter it; any appreciable speed might jog the vision loose. Nakajima’ hands reach up and out, floppy and erratic; her feet stumble flabbily on the floor. Her face, which seems ready to dissolve into uncontrollable tears, calms. It’s three years since Nakajima made The Garden. I’ve changed it a lot already,” she says. “It’s too serious for me now. But hard to break out of it.”
Ohno and Kisanuki will appear at the Joyce Theater November 19 to 24.
Muteki-sha performs at the Asia Society September 28 and 29).
It’s 8 a.m. next morning according to my body, but in Tokyo it’s dusk. A young Dutch couple follows us out of the Tokyo subway looking for the Butoh, in fact, a performance by spry 79-year-old Kazuo Ohno (one of the founders of Butoh in the early ‘60s). It’s at the new quarters of Tenkei-Gekijo, an experimental theater group, in a former warehouse in Hikawadai, and out-of-the-way, smal manufacturing district. Outside the theater, more than 200 people - like any young downtown New York crowd - mill about in the street until it’s line-up time, according to ticket number. Like elementary school, but it’s orderly, and it’s not size places. The “younger” the ticket, the better the seat. Two Japanese style Port-o-Sans stand near the box office; once we’re squashed in, there’ll be no way to slip out to take a pee, so do it now. And everybody check your parcels because the theater’s so small it crowds in about 200, legally, on a double bank of steps, and a few extras manage to weasel in.
The street was sweltering; the theater is deliciously icy. Some Strauss waltz is playing faintly. Ohno comes on stage in a creamy white dress and cape, silver heels, dark frizzy hair; is face is made up stark white, and his lips red red. He stands pigeon-toed, with his head slightly twisted, fingers gnarled, and his face inexpressibly sad. He drops his arms, lets his torso go slack. Although his wedding veil is covered with blossoms, it seems funereal. An avalanche of rumbling sends him huddling against the wall, and he utters little moans as he skitters around the stage. The sadness is nearly unbearable, as if Miss Havisham were to dance for us. Ohno’s solos are like illogical, alogical suites, series upon series of pictures in a sequence that only he can justify. His piquant gestures and his emotional potency have the power to fascinate, but his absolute authenticity, his amazing truthfulness is al that gives form to the work.
This piece, The Dead Sea: Vienna Waltzes and the Ghost, is a sort of double solo, to which his son, Yoshito Ohno, lends a serene presence. All in white, his head shaved, he enters quietly as moonlight, and bows us welcome. Later, he can hardly hold himself erect; the sand keeps running out of him. Ohno is a great costume-changer; he;s got vintage clothing for all occasions. In a white, Victorian, high-waisted dress, he describes a smooth orbit of movement through his upper torso. Like some dippy Elizabethan courtier with a Dali mustache, little flags in his tin-foil crown, and a small doll hooked on the shoulder of his cape, he eagerly tramps and rides to a march, whomping himself on the rump till the gaiety fizzles into sudden collapse. Or he’s in a Renaissance robe with fat, bunched, pleated sleeves. And then on his back, legs in the air, scratching his pale calves. Ladylike in an old, faded apricot dress with a ruffled collar, and a thick, rice-green obi bound over his chest, he moves to a Mozart minuet, twists into appalling and arcane postures, smiles a dim and sweet smile.
Admiring La Argentina, a piece he first performed in 1977, was inspired by an abstract painting by Natsuyuki Nakanishi which embodied, for him, literally, La Argentina. He saw her dance once 50 years before from the top balcony of Tokyo’s Imperial Theater. She and Harald Kreutzberg stand behind his urge to dance. Ohno is a fragile wreck of a grande dame in a cape, black velvet gown, wit black net gloves, a hat with an opulent, floppy flower. His head bends, imploring, his wrists curve; the gestures are feeble, twisted, faltering, tender - only sometimes brusque. At the end of the first section, to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, he loosens the cape and - a little Blanche Dubois - holds it in front of him like a dress he once wore for a special occasion. The resonance of memory is brutal in its strength. He drags the cape on the ground, leaves it there, hitches up his skirt gamely, and takes two pitiful jumps. Enough to break your heart.
Two Puccini arias recorded by Maria Callas accompany parts of this piece and, for me, they have enormous power. The way Callas’s voice exposes the music is exactly in tune with Ohno’s emotional nakedness. In white, a flat white bow in his hair, like an abandoned, illl-used child, he lies on the cape as if in a rumpled bed and presses the hat to his bosom. In faded red and wine-colored ruffles, to a selection of tangos, he takes little steps, curls his hands coyly. His shoulders twist, wrists bend, fingers splay, in a faint, dried-rose peta echo of Spanish dance. In white again - a long, narrow gown and embroidered shawl and a flowered headpiece like Princess Sakura - he treads with tiny, teetery steps, occasionally stamping, then throws off the shawl with a creaky flair, and circles the stage with curved arms.
The aura and power of suggestion of Ohno’s dancing remind me somewhat of Maria Theresa Duncan. But one looks through Maria Theresa to an evocation of Isadora; with Ohno, 50 years of filtered memories of La Argentina let you peer into his own mysterious soul. Ohno’s emotional truthfulness pierces through the decrepitude of age, and is heightened by it. There is no conventional beauty in this work, only a beauty of spirit. This same kind of truthfulness is the bone and sinew of the work of Kinuko Kisanuki, a young modern dancer influenced to some degree by Butoh. Always fluid, her dancing is all transition. She has a marvelous delicacy in her movement and apparent vulnerability to her surroundings, though those surroundings, as for Ohno, are the dreamlike vision in her own mind.
I wander back and forth across the railroad tracks that bisect an area of Tokyo that’s like a small village, looking for the studio Kisanuki’s working in. Rebuilt after World War II without any planning or overseeing by the government, it’s a neighborhood of narrow, winding streets and appropriately low buildings. The studio she borrows is small, in what looks like a private house. There are ballet barres on the walls, but it usually houses calligraphy classes. Lean and elegant, with a gentle oval face, Kisanuki has the kind of peaceful, modest mien that seems to soak up impressions. Twenty-seven now, in 1981 she got an award from the Japan Contemporary Dance Association as best dancer of the year, which rarely goes to anyone under 30. In the same year, she won a government prize which would have enabled her to study overseas while receiving a reasonable stipend. But she passed up the opportunity, which would have brought with it conventional obligations: opening a studio upon returning to Japan, gathering students, giving performances for which the students sell tickets to members of their families and people they know. In these circumstances, audiences, with no particular passion for dance, are cool.
Kisanuki decided to avoid this circumscribed structure. She dances the beginning of the sixth and newest piece in a series entitled Butterfly, for which she chose the antique form of the word, tef-tef. Her choice of word represents a desire to renew cultural roots, out of a perception that Japanese people are losing touch with their “heart.” Like the child that thinks orange juice comes from a container, and never associates it with a spherical citrus fruit. But her instinct is not so much to portray the malaise she senses as to heal it, to create the inner feeling that she feels is being dissipated. She focuses on images from ordinary life, aiming to express “all of herself and all of her history and the external world of circumstances,” and recollects, in her dancing, actual occurrences, augmented by imagination, or, in her words, “travels the road that doesn’t exist.”
When she’s in the studio rehearsing, she may sit for long periods in a corner, turning the images in her mind. But the personal, private images in the dancing are transmuted into something unsentimental, objective. What happens is that she - like Ohno again - isn’t dancing her history and identity in any explanatory way, but simply trying to bring all of herself into the moment of performance. Though the performance may be extremely beautiful, a vivid personal truthfulness is the major source of its attraction, without it being at all biographical. She doesn’t show her dancing, but seems to undergo it, moment by moment, as if experiencing it for the first time, with imperturbable commitment. Like a sleepwalker you don’t dare wake, she draws you in. But for all the sensitivity of the body surface - it’s as if her skin were all eyes - and her extremely refined kind of sensuality, she seems essentially other-worldly and pristine.
Physically, Western dancers move more brightly through the joints, trust their limbs with more force, take space more eagerly. Kisanuki usually prefers her native approach - ideally, to stir the air as little as possible. But there’s an overall (thoroughly un-Butoh-like) sense of lift to her body. She naturally seems to float free from the sagging, melting movements that accompany her introspection, and can burst out with effortless force. In her mind, Kisanuki says, she is always dancing. “The stage is only a moment when you appear in front of an audience.” And she tells a story from her childhood that bears on her relation to dance. She had captured butterflies in a net and put them in a basket. Then, her mother explained to her that even the smallest insect has its own life. But by the time she went to release the butterflies, they were dead. She buried them, and later had a dream in which the powder from the butterflies’ wings was falling from the sky and attaching itself to her face, her lips. “All of a sudden,” she says, “I don’t know when I was dancing.”
Natusu Nakajima, of the female Butoh group Muteki-sha, meets me at the game center under Nakameguro station to take me to the windowless basement studio she shares nearby. Back in the early ‘60s, Nakajima almost came to New York to study at the Cunnningham studio, but met Tatsumi Hijikata, the pioneer of Butoh, worked with him, and founded her own company in 1969. Like Ohno and Kisanuki, Nakajima also gives voice to the notion that her dancing and her ordinary life are not separate.
The fragments I watch of Nakajima’s Niwa/The Garden, “the story of woman from baby to ghost,” echo, in part, her own history. Characteristic of Butoh, the movements and gestures that the emotional core of the piece generates aren’t necessarily aesthetically pleasing; the physical expression seems hampered, instead of thrust, by the power of feeling behind it. The face seems to resist feeling by puckering, tightening, bloating, grinning,; the limbs respond with an erratic feebleness or sudden stiffening. Maybe this is related, however obliquely, to the concept of hana, whereby strong emotion is masked by something milder, pleasanter, so that other people aren’t troubled or dismayed. Nakajima’s cheery partner, Yuriko Maezawa, with a fluffy ponytail and glittering red nail polish, crouches with her fists over her eyes. There’s the sound of howling wind, or maybe warplanes. Her face takes on a toothy grin of terror, or maybe happy idiocy, as extreme emotions slide into their opposites. When she tries to stand, she wobbles on collapsing ankles, then takes tiny, padding steps. Holding her arms straight like a marksman, and making a pistol of her fingers, she swivels like a gun turret. Her cheeks puff up as if stuffed with food she doesn’t dare chew; then she seems to tremble with the weakness of hunger Her lips pinch and flatten against her teeth. She describes with her hands the trajectory of planes, zigzags sideways, a hapless figure with her elbows stuck out, her forearms dangling, staring suint-eyed at those planes. Maezawa takes a turn at the tape machine. To whirring, chiming music, Nakajima stands clumped, her gaze high and desolate. Her body settles even more heavily with a jolt. She look sup, twisting her body slightly, letting one side sag. The two sides of the body often seem divided to me in Butoh, as if subject to different afflictions.
The pace of Nakajima’s piece, like Ohno’s and Kisanuki’s very dissimilar work, seems to be at dream speed, taking whatever time it requires the performers to call up an inner vision and to enter it; any appreciable speed might jog the vision loose. Nakajima’ hands reach up and out, floppy and erratic; her feet stumble flabbily on the floor. Her face, which seems ready to dissolve into uncontrollable tears, calms. It’s three years since Nakajima made The Garden. I’ve changed it a lot already,” she says. “It’s too serious for me now. But hard to break out of it.”
Ohno and Kisanuki will appear at the Joyce Theater November 19 to 24.
Muteki-sha performs at the Asia Society September 28 and 29).
TV Garni
September 10
Wendy Morris’s initial stage arrangement at Dance Theater Workshop was a marvelous exhibition, an exuberant jungle of technology and vegetable life: seven skinny tables plastered with big leaves,, plus trailing ivy, philodendrons, spider plants, and an occasional areca palm. Although, according to the program, Morris’s multimedia piece in four parts, Shadow to Frame: a Search for the Nature of (Im)Mortality, was provoked by participation in a seminar on dying, and by thinking about the connections between technology and death in contemporary America and the ephemerality of dance in contrast to the permanence of performance fixed on tape, these big subjects seem to have been domesticated and fuzzed. Though mortality may have served as the germinal subject, it has shrunken to a tangential thematic element.
The first part of the first section, The Wee Wendy Bang Bang Show - all video - jams together snatches of Morris dancing with death-courting cartoon disasters, wrestling, bits of sit-coms, and Roadrunner’s beep-beep at high speed. In the second part of it, video artist James Byrne catches Morris’s impulsive, self-involved dancing live in the space behind the TV’s, and gives her to us across the seven screens. It’s most interesting when he turns her upside down for us, or catches her from angles we can’t see, or when, in close up, her feet jump up off the screen and never come down. The spectacle of the cameraman/video artist “dancing” around to capture the dancer’s image is a purposeful, if awkward one. But Morris doesn’t make us alert to the kinesthetic or spatial awareness that governs her momentary movement choices; she might just be noodling around. Tracking this middling stuff with the camera seems to blow it out of proportion to its value. Though when Byrne’s camera whizzes around the space and blasts a whirl of light across all those tubes - that has a definite grandeur.
In the second piece, River Sticks, Morris explores the uses of various objects - sticks, shiny aluminum bowls, small kitchen utensils. On video she does this in shifting locations, from a studio to the snowy outdoors, though the video dance itself progresses seamlessly; onstage, Morris enacts the dance - which starts with a litany of slow, open arm movements - in synch, having relearned it from the tape. William Larkin’s score - a vibrant rumbling, highlighted occasionally by a flutey whistle, then a deep twanging - affirms a kind of natural continuity with its resonance and long stretchy sounds. With the TV sets arranged in an arc, Morris defines her space with three sticks, later shifts camp to a smaller area. It’s nice when she uses a stick to prop herself up or to vault with, or when, as she walks onscreen across a winter stream on rocks and ice, she picks her way, live, across a row of overturned mixing bowls. But, although all the movement was developed in relation to the objects, it rarely eel more than casually related to them. Morris’s fourth section, Framing the Shadow, is straight dancing to familiar rhymes having to do with death (like Solomon Grundy), personal thoughts on tape, and reflections of women recovering from breast cancer.
What most strikes my sympathy is one remark, roughly: “I’ve learned so much from my body, but now I wish I could shove it and get a new one.” I could go for that too. But it all seems so limp. And Morris lacks the ability to transmit through her dancing much sense of the matters that inform it. It’s too opaque, unidimensional.
I’ve skipped the third part, An Unveiling, to save the best for last. It’s a rich and melancholy section in which Morris and Doris Dypia paint with projected light images rather than color alone. Forest sounds of Wendy Ultan’s score ring loudly in your ears accompanying slides of verdant woods, birds, animals, family snapshots, glossy fashion shots of a few decades ago. A pair of veil-like curtains - perhaps of Chinese silk - descend, and beams from the three slide machines pierce them eerily, exposing Morris’s doubled shadow. Projected images overlap; Morris’s silhouette cuts into the body of a bird. Shots of a child and a fashionable woman fade in and out, over one another, as determined by the interference of Morris’ unseen body with the projected images. A woman’s face transforms into that of a man. His eyes pop open as they become hers, like a blinking Jesus. Some images swallow or embrace others. Or one woman becomes someone else - gaining a turban and bright red lips - as the curtain sways gently. The delicate play of Morris’s giant shadow hand reveals and hides personae at will, erasing now this face, marrying these others. In the program, Morris notes how the mages speak of “how culture forces us apart from nature, “ and in an array side by side, the slides may fall into antipathetic categories like natural and artificial, warm and cold, personal and commercial. But in the tender blending of the images, in their temporary unions and fragile transience, (a small motion can evaporate them), we sense that these elements fuse at some deep level, confirming that we all are bound together in inexplicable ways. All this says nothing to me of mortality.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 15 to 18).
Wendy Morris’s initial stage arrangement at Dance Theater Workshop was a marvelous exhibition, an exuberant jungle of technology and vegetable life: seven skinny tables plastered with big leaves,, plus trailing ivy, philodendrons, spider plants, and an occasional areca palm. Although, according to the program, Morris’s multimedia piece in four parts, Shadow to Frame: a Search for the Nature of (Im)Mortality, was provoked by participation in a seminar on dying, and by thinking about the connections between technology and death in contemporary America and the ephemerality of dance in contrast to the permanence of performance fixed on tape, these big subjects seem to have been domesticated and fuzzed. Though mortality may have served as the germinal subject, it has shrunken to a tangential thematic element.
The first part of the first section, The Wee Wendy Bang Bang Show - all video - jams together snatches of Morris dancing with death-courting cartoon disasters, wrestling, bits of sit-coms, and Roadrunner’s beep-beep at high speed. In the second part of it, video artist James Byrne catches Morris’s impulsive, self-involved dancing live in the space behind the TV’s, and gives her to us across the seven screens. It’s most interesting when he turns her upside down for us, or catches her from angles we can’t see, or when, in close up, her feet jump up off the screen and never come down. The spectacle of the cameraman/video artist “dancing” around to capture the dancer’s image is a purposeful, if awkward one. But Morris doesn’t make us alert to the kinesthetic or spatial awareness that governs her momentary movement choices; she might just be noodling around. Tracking this middling stuff with the camera seems to blow it out of proportion to its value. Though when Byrne’s camera whizzes around the space and blasts a whirl of light across all those tubes - that has a definite grandeur.
In the second piece, River Sticks, Morris explores the uses of various objects - sticks, shiny aluminum bowls, small kitchen utensils. On video she does this in shifting locations, from a studio to the snowy outdoors, though the video dance itself progresses seamlessly; onstage, Morris enacts the dance - which starts with a litany of slow, open arm movements - in synch, having relearned it from the tape. William Larkin’s score - a vibrant rumbling, highlighted occasionally by a flutey whistle, then a deep twanging - affirms a kind of natural continuity with its resonance and long stretchy sounds. With the TV sets arranged in an arc, Morris defines her space with three sticks, later shifts camp to a smaller area. It’s nice when she uses a stick to prop herself up or to vault with, or when, as she walks onscreen across a winter stream on rocks and ice, she picks her way, live, across a row of overturned mixing bowls. But, although all the movement was developed in relation to the objects, it rarely eel more than casually related to them. Morris’s fourth section, Framing the Shadow, is straight dancing to familiar rhymes having to do with death (like Solomon Grundy), personal thoughts on tape, and reflections of women recovering from breast cancer.
What most strikes my sympathy is one remark, roughly: “I’ve learned so much from my body, but now I wish I could shove it and get a new one.” I could go for that too. But it all seems so limp. And Morris lacks the ability to transmit through her dancing much sense of the matters that inform it. It’s too opaque, unidimensional.
I’ve skipped the third part, An Unveiling, to save the best for last. It’s a rich and melancholy section in which Morris and Doris Dypia paint with projected light images rather than color alone. Forest sounds of Wendy Ultan’s score ring loudly in your ears accompanying slides of verdant woods, birds, animals, family snapshots, glossy fashion shots of a few decades ago. A pair of veil-like curtains - perhaps of Chinese silk - descend, and beams from the three slide machines pierce them eerily, exposing Morris’s doubled shadow. Projected images overlap; Morris’s silhouette cuts into the body of a bird. Shots of a child and a fashionable woman fade in and out, over one another, as determined by the interference of Morris’ unseen body with the projected images. A woman’s face transforms into that of a man. His eyes pop open as they become hers, like a blinking Jesus. Some images swallow or embrace others. Or one woman becomes someone else - gaining a turban and bright red lips - as the curtain sways gently. The delicate play of Morris’s giant shadow hand reveals and hides personae at will, erasing now this face, marrying these others. In the program, Morris notes how the mages speak of “how culture forces us apart from nature, “ and in an array side by side, the slides may fall into antipathetic categories like natural and artificial, warm and cold, personal and commercial. But in the tender blending of the images, in their temporary unions and fragile transience, (a small motion can evaporate them), we sense that these elements fuse at some deep level, confirming that we all are bound together in inexplicable ways. All this says nothing to me of mortality.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 15 to 18).
29 Bessies Awarded
“You’re my tribe,” said Dana Reitz, picking up a “Bessie” award for Severe Clear, her untransportable collaboration at MIT with designer James Turrell. “This is quite a thrill. Thanks,” remarked choreographer Susan Rethorst, briskly escaping the microphone. Frank Moore, sharing an award of $1800 with choreographer Jim Self for their film cllaboartion Beehive, informed interested members of the audience that “checks will be going out in the morning.” Performance artist Judith Re-Lay had an impressive stylized fit, and then said thank you. “I was up in the balcony,” said John Jesurun, having clambered onstage wile the presenters were trying to figure out where he was or if he was anywhere. Cornelius Conboy, picking up an award for 8BC with his partner Dennis Gattra, remarked, “They framed it and everything. They spelled your name right. Let’s get out of here.” The second annual New York Dance and Performance Awards, called “The Bessies,” were given Thursday night, September 26, in a - shades of the Oscars! - three-and-a-half-hour ceremony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s packed-to-the-rafters Helen Carey Playhose. Four lawyers (available after the show to sue the members of the “Bessies” committee, according to David R. White) opened the evening demonstrating gestural urgency and unusual legal shutmouth in an excerpt form a piece by Ann Carlson. Harvey Lichtenstein of BAM introduced White, director of Dance Theater Workshop, through which the awards, established under a grant from Morgan Guaranty Trust, are administered. Award recipients were chosen by a 15-member panel (including myself), which whittled down 1875 nominations to 29 awards over the course of the year. This year, eight cash awards of$1800 were given to choreographer/creators” and, for the first time, five cash awards of $500 each were given to dancers, “the most vulnerable economic link in our community,” as Carolyn Adams stated in presenting these awards. This is a particularly happy award, since nobody funds dancers and their contributions are never honored directly by grant-giving organizations. Alien Comic (Tom Murrin) invadd the ceremonies to announce his own awards to denizens of lower Second Avenue, while stripping down progressively from one costumes to another, before being carried offstage when he got down to rubber boobs. Mime Bob Berky, only slightly peccable in formal tails and galoshes and Rhoda Grauer, who has worn many hats in the dance world, including that of director of the NEA’s dance program, and who is now associate director of performance at WNET, hosted the evening. Louise Lecavalier and Marc Beland knocked themselves silly in a savage excerpt from Edouard Lock’s Human Sex; Meredith Monk and Ping Chong delighted the audience in a wry, exquisite portion of their 1972 collaboration, Paris; Jawole Willa Jo Zollar evoked the joy of community with two sections from her River Songs; David Parsons dazzled us with the closing piece, Caught. The “choreographer/creator” awards, along with $1800, went to Johanna Boyce, for “embodying in her dances contemporary ideals of humanity,” as well as to Susan Marshall, Cydney Wilkes, Robert Longo, Jesurun, Ren-Lay, Rethorst and Frank Moore/Jim Self. Tony Giovanetti received a lighting design award for his work with Meredith Monk over many years, and Carol McDowell for her design for John Bernd’s Be Good To Me, at P.S. 122. Peter Gordon, David Linton and Dudu Tucci received composer awards, and Pepon Osorio, Renata Petroni, Liliana Villegas and Huck Snyder picked up the honors for visual design. Awards of $500 recognized the sustained achievement of Vicky Shick (for her work with Trisha Brown) and Teri Weksler. Also so honored were Sean Curran in Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s Secret Pastures, and Louise Lecavalier and vocalist Frederike Bedard in Edouard Lock’s Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel. The special achievement of Val Bourne and the ever-precarious London Dance Umbrella was acknowledged in an award for “sustaining, under difficult circumstances, a model of international opportunity for independent choreographers from both sides of the Atlantic.” “It seems strange,” she said, “to get an award for something that gives me so much pleasure.” Phyllis Lamhut announced herself as the shortest presenter, and was certainly the blondest. She harked back to a meeting 27 years ago at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College to mysteriously introduce an award to Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt “for a clear, uncompromising eye and mind that have documented contemporary dance with understanding and humility.” “The words,” Jowitt said gratefully, “are really built on the muscles and brains and hearts of the choreographers.” “Hello, I’m the other Bessie,” softly said choreography consultant and teacher Bessie Schonerg, who long headed the dance department at Sarah Lawrence College and for whom “the Bessies” are fondly nicknamed. “I have known her since the beginning of her career...as a serious,m unorthodox student,” she said gravely, leading up to an award to Meredith Monk for sustained achievement over 20 years. Schonberg went on to praise Monk affectionately for “exceeding my highest expectations and, finally, making a student out of a teacher.” The Wooster Group, who displayed their tushes in an excerpt from Hula, at least year’s “Bessies” awards, also received an award for sustained creative achievement, delivered by Peter Sellars in a burst of ironic bombast. Elaine Summers presented an award to Robert Ellis Dunn, hose teaching included the innovations of the Judson Dance Theater, and who’s still at it. “We should go on...bringing the future into being every day,” Dunn urged. Special citations also were presented t the seven program directors of the National Endowment of the Arts over the past 20 years.
A Breath of Hot Air
September 17
P.S. 122 opened its fall season with a mixed bag “New Stuff” program on a sweltering evening alleviated by Rolling Rock in long-neck bottles. Nina Martin’s new group piece, Moving Violations, made in workshop in collaboration with the 16 performers, is a roughneck marathon of sharply fluctuating energies. The dancers are a small horde of variously shaped people clad in duds that could have been garnered in random raids on the neighborhood laundromats. They’re not afraid to move, either. Martin’s conceived and directed the piece and has a definite knack for getting people on and off the stage, as well as for arranging them while they’re there. In this piece, one woman runs slow-motion through the group, and when she reaches the front, and another dancer collapses backward over her, the stage bursts into a fury of jumping, bumping and all fall down. A soloist emerges from the fallen bodies, then everybody’s up again, swinging, vaulting, catching. Organized chaos. The stage drains again swiftly, leaving only a single performer, and refills. Everyone huddles and lifts one girl out of their midst, carries her across the stage where she takes hold of a trapeze and hangs as the chorus sinks to the floor and everyone somersaults slowly backward. Moving violations are a major part of the physical { } of the action: the performers smash into each other, drop their partners. Three women run in to crash onto a hysterical babbler, and all four bodies are dragged off. Three other pull in a trio of slanting bodies, shove them around, and then haul them out splayed crookedly across their torsos. The middle woman is draped out of a squashed push-up sandwich. No matter what happens, everyone keeps coming back for more - like the Living Dead.
In Getting Back on the Horse and Playing Hard, Barbara Mahler confronts rejection, snuggled on the floor with a substantial teddy bear. “Dear applicant,: two taped voices crisply and politely inform her, “you just didn’t make it.” While she’s lying down, her legs suddenly spring out, and she keeps her arms carefully pretzeled. When she’s up she reminds me, in her determined expressiveness, of an athletic, Joan Crawford (the faithful,, injured lover, not the bitch boss lady). But her movement/gesture choices seem stiff and even when four more performers enter, the action remains schematic.
Ralph Lemon’s quartet, Scarecrow, part of a work in progress that won’t be shown complete till late next spring, starts with a story about a man who has a hollow pumpkin for a head. It’s a vigorous chunk of juicy dancing, with much of its interest in the lushness of the arms and the verticality of the movement. There’s a looseness in some parts of the body: the hands can flap, the head swing, the hips wobble. But Lemon’s use of space seems undifferentiated at this stage, and the piece, like Mahler’s, insufficiently stringent. But I rather liked Chris Hart’s score - so full of phrase repetitions that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was constructed out of only 15 seconds, or even six, of original material. A long drink of water, performance artist Mark Anderson hails from Seattle. Lean and gangly and dressed in a dark shirt, a rumpled gray plaid tweed jacket, and jeans, he eyes us suspiciously, fumbles for a cigarette, finds an egg in his pocket, silkily but secretively slips it around his fingers with the dexterity of a juggler as the cigarette drops to the floor. He confesses he’s a performance junkie, but he claims to have quit. With shy demeanor, in a beautiful long riff, he delicately details his efforts to give up performance. At first, he didn’t realize he was ill, of course. Now he’s trying to act normal just one day at a time.
Mark Dendy’s exhilarating and zany Beat was simply a smash. Bare-chested Dendy, Mario Comacho, Jaime Martinez and Heidi Michel, in black shorts and dark sneakers, jumingbet over so hands and feet whack the floor simultaneously, thump thump in and out again and again to a heavy count of four. One flies in from the wings. They trt through with little steps double time, do kind of weird quasi-military calisthenics. They’re not counting, but they mutter numbers together with breathless seriousness as they exercise, and hoot out garbledpseudo-words. Sweat pouring, eyes glittering - whether they’re slightly hunched over like a troupe of apes, or campily gleeful - the energy keeps shifting. “Huh-uh,” they exclaim, pushing out the movement and hitting each beat with a swivelly bump of the pelvis. A curly-headed guy (Martinez) - changing into pink sneakers for the occasion - comes out for a fierce solo that has him leaping from side to side at speeds just beyond the possible, at angles that keep flattening till he slides to the floor - 1,2,3,4 - to the left side, and switches to the right,2,3,4 for a quartet of hushed little whispering taps. The beat goes on.
P.S. 122 opened its fall season with a mixed bag “New Stuff” program on a sweltering evening alleviated by Rolling Rock in long-neck bottles. Nina Martin’s new group piece, Moving Violations, made in workshop in collaboration with the 16 performers, is a roughneck marathon of sharply fluctuating energies. The dancers are a small horde of variously shaped people clad in duds that could have been garnered in random raids on the neighborhood laundromats. They’re not afraid to move, either. Martin’s conceived and directed the piece and has a definite knack for getting people on and off the stage, as well as for arranging them while they’re there. In this piece, one woman runs slow-motion through the group, and when she reaches the front, and another dancer collapses backward over her, the stage bursts into a fury of jumping, bumping and all fall down. A soloist emerges from the fallen bodies, then everybody’s up again, swinging, vaulting, catching. Organized chaos. The stage drains again swiftly, leaving only a single performer, and refills. Everyone huddles and lifts one girl out of their midst, carries her across the stage where she takes hold of a trapeze and hangs as the chorus sinks to the floor and everyone somersaults slowly backward. Moving violations are a major part of the physical { } of the action: the performers smash into each other, drop their partners. Three women run in to crash onto a hysterical babbler, and all four bodies are dragged off. Three other pull in a trio of slanting bodies, shove them around, and then haul them out splayed crookedly across their torsos. The middle woman is draped out of a squashed push-up sandwich. No matter what happens, everyone keeps coming back for more - like the Living Dead.
In Getting Back on the Horse and Playing Hard, Barbara Mahler confronts rejection, snuggled on the floor with a substantial teddy bear. “Dear applicant,: two taped voices crisply and politely inform her, “you just didn’t make it.” While she’s lying down, her legs suddenly spring out, and she keeps her arms carefully pretzeled. When she’s up she reminds me, in her determined expressiveness, of an athletic, Joan Crawford (the faithful,, injured lover, not the bitch boss lady). But her movement/gesture choices seem stiff and even when four more performers enter, the action remains schematic.
Ralph Lemon’s quartet, Scarecrow, part of a work in progress that won’t be shown complete till late next spring, starts with a story about a man who has a hollow pumpkin for a head. It’s a vigorous chunk of juicy dancing, with much of its interest in the lushness of the arms and the verticality of the movement. There’s a looseness in some parts of the body: the hands can flap, the head swing, the hips wobble. But Lemon’s use of space seems undifferentiated at this stage, and the piece, like Mahler’s, insufficiently stringent. But I rather liked Chris Hart’s score - so full of phrase repetitions that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was constructed out of only 15 seconds, or even six, of original material. A long drink of water, performance artist Mark Anderson hails from Seattle. Lean and gangly and dressed in a dark shirt, a rumpled gray plaid tweed jacket, and jeans, he eyes us suspiciously, fumbles for a cigarette, finds an egg in his pocket, silkily but secretively slips it around his fingers with the dexterity of a juggler as the cigarette drops to the floor. He confesses he’s a performance junkie, but he claims to have quit. With shy demeanor, in a beautiful long riff, he delicately details his efforts to give up performance. At first, he didn’t realize he was ill, of course. Now he’s trying to act normal just one day at a time.
Mark Dendy’s exhilarating and zany Beat was simply a smash. Bare-chested Dendy, Mario Comacho, Jaime Martinez and Heidi Michel, in black shorts and dark sneakers, jumingbet over so hands and feet whack the floor simultaneously, thump thump in and out again and again to a heavy count of four. One flies in from the wings. They trt through with little steps double time, do kind of weird quasi-military calisthenics. They’re not counting, but they mutter numbers together with breathless seriousness as they exercise, and hoot out garbledpseudo-words. Sweat pouring, eyes glittering - whether they’re slightly hunched over like a troupe of apes, or campily gleeful - the energy keeps shifting. “Huh-uh,” they exclaim, pushing out the movement and hitting each beat with a swivelly bump of the pelvis. A curly-headed guy (Martinez) - changing into pink sneakers for the occasion - comes out for a fierce solo that has him leaping from side to side at speeds just beyond the possible, at angles that keep flattening till he slides to the floor - 1,2,3,4 - to the left side, and switches to the right,2,3,4 for a quartet of hushed little whispering taps. The beat goes on.
Body Count
October 22
Bodies keep hitting the floor, arms chop and slap and half caress. There’s a desperate and pungent flinging and sliding. The four dancers in Edouard Lock’s Human Sex - in duets and trios and even solos - flip themselves into the air, smash themselves on the ground, cushioned only by an arm. One throws him or herself at the other, who crashes to the ground under him; both rebound, and they go at each other again. Tough, and absolutely game, the inexhaustible dancers in Lock’s Montreal-based company wear dreary black outfits - the women in long-line black bras and the men in sleeveless shirts - that look like they’re crudely overprinted with electric circuitry. They vault each others’ backs, rush to catch and nearly miss, slide under a partner’s flying body just before it hits the floor. Two sturdy guys - Marc Beland and Claude Godin - and two sleakly muscled women - Louise Lacavalier and Carole Courtois - mix it up in exhausting roughhouse episodes. Sometimes they just lie on the floor panting: then they revive as indomitable as Schwarzeneger’s Terminator. Lacavalier wears a neat, blond mustache to match her spiky, bleached hair. When she kisses Beland, she comes away with her mouth looking bloody from his lipstick.
Everybody’s fierce and brave; Chuck Norris would be proud to have them on his team. I can’t begin to number the choreographers (from Senta Driver to Mark Dendy) who for years, have been assigning men and women the same brute tasks to undermine sexual stereotyping and prove women equal to men in oldness and strength Not to mention the more numerous others who have chosen to ignore or to play with conventional sex-role distinctions. But while Lacavalier looked boy-girlishly attractive in her mustache (as Meredith Monk, among others, has looked before her), Human Sex’s sexual Reform politics is too blunt to be news. Though the action looks wild and careless, the dancers’ reactions are necessarily fine tuned. The overt violence of the movement and the body contact is initially thrilling but finally something less than amazing. The ultimate becomes the norm. I suppose it will be a few years till the body-damage reports come in, though anything so consciously hard probably does less harm than those disciplines - like ballet - in which the physical cruelty is masked.
I liked the blasting density of the music, and the way the dancers shoved their arms and hands into weird, open laser-contraptions, producing thunderstrokes or aural frenzies of thin, fizzy strums of sound. One is like a creepy rocket cradle that occasionally pours smoke, the other a rectangular kind of high-tech lyre, whose laser beams wriggle redly on the backs of the dancers’ hands. Sometimes the dancers become musicians. Lacavalier claws at the guitar strings; Beland beats on the bongos; everybody sings. Lock, who appears mostly as a musician and an MC, eventually drifts into his own slippery, private brand of dancing. Three tilted video screens flash with blue-and-pink sheets of light (blue for boys, pink for you know what), Intermittently, the piece moves into a reflective, ironic key, though the conversational metaphors of these sections never quite make sense or, nonsense, to me.
Lock is too coy to be really up-front about his subject matter I think I’m being slightly hood-winked. There has always been a large element of riskiness in the dancing Lock choreographs but his 1981 Lili Marlene in the Jungle and the 1982 Oranges were more tantalizing. His intellect is whimsical and tricky; now that his role removes him more from the other dancers, I picture him as a kind of idle tactician, plotting in his private Pentagon, then sending his dancer-soldiers on suicide missions to the front.
Bodies keep hitting the floor, arms chop and slap and half caress. There’s a desperate and pungent flinging and sliding. The four dancers in Edouard Lock’s Human Sex - in duets and trios and even solos - flip themselves into the air, smash themselves on the ground, cushioned only by an arm. One throws him or herself at the other, who crashes to the ground under him; both rebound, and they go at each other again. Tough, and absolutely game, the inexhaustible dancers in Lock’s Montreal-based company wear dreary black outfits - the women in long-line black bras and the men in sleeveless shirts - that look like they’re crudely overprinted with electric circuitry. They vault each others’ backs, rush to catch and nearly miss, slide under a partner’s flying body just before it hits the floor. Two sturdy guys - Marc Beland and Claude Godin - and two sleakly muscled women - Louise Lacavalier and Carole Courtois - mix it up in exhausting roughhouse episodes. Sometimes they just lie on the floor panting: then they revive as indomitable as Schwarzeneger’s Terminator. Lacavalier wears a neat, blond mustache to match her spiky, bleached hair. When she kisses Beland, she comes away with her mouth looking bloody from his lipstick.
Everybody’s fierce and brave; Chuck Norris would be proud to have them on his team. I can’t begin to number the choreographers (from Senta Driver to Mark Dendy) who for years, have been assigning men and women the same brute tasks to undermine sexual stereotyping and prove women equal to men in oldness and strength Not to mention the more numerous others who have chosen to ignore or to play with conventional sex-role distinctions. But while Lacavalier looked boy-girlishly attractive in her mustache (as Meredith Monk, among others, has looked before her), Human Sex’s sexual Reform politics is too blunt to be news. Though the action looks wild and careless, the dancers’ reactions are necessarily fine tuned. The overt violence of the movement and the body contact is initially thrilling but finally something less than amazing. The ultimate becomes the norm. I suppose it will be a few years till the body-damage reports come in, though anything so consciously hard probably does less harm than those disciplines - like ballet - in which the physical cruelty is masked.
I liked the blasting density of the music, and the way the dancers shoved their arms and hands into weird, open laser-contraptions, producing thunderstrokes or aural frenzies of thin, fizzy strums of sound. One is like a creepy rocket cradle that occasionally pours smoke, the other a rectangular kind of high-tech lyre, whose laser beams wriggle redly on the backs of the dancers’ hands. Sometimes the dancers become musicians. Lacavalier claws at the guitar strings; Beland beats on the bongos; everybody sings. Lock, who appears mostly as a musician and an MC, eventually drifts into his own slippery, private brand of dancing. Three tilted video screens flash with blue-and-pink sheets of light (blue for boys, pink for you know what), Intermittently, the piece moves into a reflective, ironic key, though the conversational metaphors of these sections never quite make sense or, nonsense, to me.
Lock is too coy to be really up-front about his subject matter I think I’m being slightly hood-winked. There has always been a large element of riskiness in the dancing Lock choreographs but his 1981 Lili Marlene in the Jungle and the 1982 Oranges were more tantalizing. His intellect is whimsical and tricky; now that his role removes him more from the other dancers, I picture him as a kind of idle tactician, plotting in his private Pentagon, then sending his dancer-soldiers on suicide missions to the front.
Hit Me with Your Best Shot
October 29
As a choreographer, Pina Bausch has an edge that counts for a great deal in a piece like Seven Deadly Sins: she’s able to put ugliness onstage. The sour cautionary tale of the two Annas - the strict but motherly business head who manages their moneymaking schemes, and the women who puts her body on the line for seven years in seven cities to keep their “family” in comfort, and the family manse a-building - profits from Bausch’s capacity to show unglamorized emotion, habitual cruelty, mindlessness. The ugliness gives her work novelty and enormous force.
For “Sloth” tough women in black throw pillows at Anna II (Joesphine Ann Endicott). A workhorse, like Cinderella, Anna’s got to pick them up. Anna I (Ann Holing), a chunkier, blonde Anna, is the singing half, with a harsh voice that can slide into seductive tones; she whips Anna II into shape between encounters and sends her briskly back into the world. In “Pride,” Anna II tries to pull her skirt down while a photographer snaps pictures, but she gets to like the attention and lifts her skirt higher. Men lurk abut. Underwear flies onstage. Other women come on in thin, clinging, see-through garments with dragging trains. Men paw them. The women look like they never sleep. One displays her breasts on her hands, as if serving them on a platter. A man runs through, picking up and sniffing the underwear that’s lying around.
I can’t always keep track of which sin is being highlighted; so many evils share the spotlight at one time. There’s a kickline of sullen, corseted women, jiggling their bodies; the women are grim, only the one at the head of the line smiles wickedly. Anna II tries to hide from a man who’s attacking her, but the line is no protection. Slimy men grab some of the women, jam their bodies tightly against them, dance close, gripping onto the women’s asses. The unused women march off; Anna II is left dancing alone, in silence. Another man hefts her several ways - she’s meat, right? - measures her weight, thighs, knees, crotch to shoulder, nipple to nipple. Then humps her standing, savagely shoving her ass from side to side. Men march on in a threatening diagonal (the line includes all the women too, cross-dressed), they stamp and turn and stalk Anna. She backs away from them one at a time, hard, any which way. They slam against her and she snatches a trophy - a jacket, a vest - with each encounter. That’s “Covetousness.”
Afterward, exhausted, sated, Anna II lets her head sag toward her knees; Anna I, behind her, snaps it straight, unswerving from the Seven Year Plan. In the epilogue, Anna I croons to Anna II about the family, about home; Anna II faces her weeping. With the flavor of Bertolt Brecht’s bitterly ironic text and Kurt Weill’s gorgeous musical structure to work within, and against, Pina Bausch’s version of The Seven Deadly Sins has a forward thrust and conclusiveness that her pieces often lack. In many of those others, the construction is patchy: Bausch prolongs images, but won’t develop them; she doesn’t seem to want to end scenes, except by letting them dwindle while she distracts us with something else; she hits us on the head with a statement or an image and reinforces it, repeats it until the bludgeoning erases the impact.
In Gerbirge, for example, you remember the marvelous trees; the men briskly haul on dozens of evergreens, floods the stage with them, and a few women cavort coyly. Finally then men run in again and drag the greenery out. The arrival of the trees is an exhilarating refreshment, but when the initial impulse fades, there’s no next step except erasure. Or take Lutz Forster and Dominique Mercy in the same work: Forster makes a clean, flinging gesture with his arm that can almost make you weep with its eloquence - a “beautiful” gesture is so rare here. His body follows the gesture, racing across the stage till Mercy puts something, anything, in his way. But Bausch lets this continue long after there’s anything to be made of it, and repeats the episode several times later on Eventually, it becomes tedious and empty.
I don’t believe it is truly her intention to squeeze the value out of everything and leave us only with eggshells and orange rinds and shriveling debris. But she lets almost every episode run until it’s dead. The images and scenes are all given equal value, and the more spectacular inevitably have greater weight But not because Bausch shapes them; she only delivers them. The audience is impressed, but - when you look around - no one is moved. Yet this is hardly dry, intellectual work - it aims for the gut. So why do I feel that her concerns aren’t of interest to me? Does that make me hard, shallow?
I find the pieces essentially cold, and I become gradually repelled by them. What comes across to me after a while is a sense of overwhelming waste. And - despite all the humorous bite - a commitment to the pain that inhabits her work and within which the work exists. Many of the images are bold and fascinating and executed by a company with absolute conviction. But the work itself, however, doesn’t seem profound. It can’t dig into the pain, the hunger, the cruelty, the anger that seems so close to the surface: it presupposes it. This is work that is grandly visionary and flamboyant, yet thoroughly dismal and defensive. It has taken on the identity of its enemy. Pain is its reason for being, its justification, its future.
Bausch keeps defining the relation of men and women as a ruthless battle for dominance, and as much as the dancers wrestle with each other, they are doomed to remain within the confines of the definition. She cannot show us anger, only the thirst of frustration. In this kind of set up, I don’t see why I should want to watch the victims struggle uselessly. Bausch creates flurries of enormous vivacity within a climate of hopelessness and emotional inertia. But the impact of these flurries is minimal. When each is over, the collagey waters roll over and wash it away.
In the cheerfully degenerate Don’t Be Afraid, when red-headed Silvia Kesselheim pops her head repeatedly against a head-size black ball, she sums up the Bausch world view pretty well. The dancers give themselves completely to the work, which compels them and distorts them. Many seem to be trapped wearing the same expression from piece to piece. The excellent Josephine Ann Endicott gives her all and more in Seven Deadly Sins, but she is falling to pieces by the end; she seem strong, seems even abandoned in her movement, but I think she becomes weak and lost, working on will alone Bausch’s work deprives her of the terrible strength she needs to do it; the dancing pits her, and the other dancers, against themselves. Their muscles fight their muscles, and every movement costs them double. If they aren’t in extremis, forcing themselves, they’re collapsed. Then, when something has to happen, they’ve got to find all the energy at once. Usually they can’t, so they seem slightly behind themselves, trying to catch their energy up to where their bodies have gone.
Anyway, I think it’s a crock: there are other choices. There are plenty of fine reasons for perceiving the world so grimly. No matter what horror you can put on stage, the world is infinitely worse. But that’s not the whole story either. Bausch can depict varieties of pain with the utmost brilliance, but the face of it seems to strike her dumb. She locks into perception, makes it vivid and makes it permanent, and leaves us with a harvest of depletion and futility.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 1 to 22).
The dancing is the least part of Jane Comfort’s TV Love: a nine-part saga inspired by elements of television that hardly need satirizing. It’s about celebrity. About being wonderful, or wonderful enough, and needing your wonderfulness affirmed by everybody. About looking for love in all the wrong places and desiring the wonderful person everybody else wants too.
But with this subject matter, it’s hard to get beyond the obvious. TV talk shows are dumb, but we watch them anyway, and few of us, I imagine, would refuse to climb into the little screen with Merv or Johnny. And Comfort does pull off a marvelous parody, partly through glitzy dress-up (she, for example, is in a Tina Turner wig, wearing TT’s sneer-smile and a strapless black gown that she nearly jiggles her breasts out of). Larry Maxwell is a perfect host. Ann Papoulis and David Thomson, like Comfort, are exceedingly glamorous and envious and self-promoting.
But what makes it memorable is the talk - stripped down only to the most essential cliches - and the skipping rhythms of the chitchat. “Talking talk talk, talking big money talk,” they say. “Talking fabulous.” The talking rhythms contain most of the wit of TV Love, which, on the whole, feels clumsily structured and vague in direction. The clever rhythms Comfort once put into the dancing and highlighted with verbal play have pretty much slipped out of the dancing and persist almost entirely in the words. In the beginning, domineering Ann Papoulis smoothes her hair, makes fascinating, conjuring gestures, frames her head within a diamond of her arms, sways. Her fingers say “come here, “go away,” “give me money!” David Thomson, dancing far behind her, is as elegant and precise in the use of his long limbs as a giraffe. Bradley Lake, on a chair at the side, begins to talk about “Mr. Wonderful, you’re so wonderful...” which Papoulis picks up. They start to diddle with the sense, and build a mildly ecstatic expectation in the tempo and the tone, until they reach a kind of culmination and ease off. “It’s everything I imagines it would be,” breathes Papoulis.
Talk in an overblown, romantic vein (“I want to be the father of your children!”) swells into the second part, to some beautiful skirling saxophone playing by Richard Landry. Then men get out of their shirts. Papoulis slips out of an underskirt and they wind up in a pile. Where they are DISCOVERED! by Karen Callaghan, who gets furious with Lake as the others back off and begin to dress. Lake claims it’s all “pretend,” it’s acting, but the argument continues and a gun goes off. Then all play the entire scene backward, reversing the conversation word by word. Through the abstraction of the rewind, the scene maintains its overripe tone and daffy emotional flow. So much - for the moment - for romantic love. On to popularity.
The talk show itself, plus the preparations and the aftermath, is acutely observed and executed: from an unsure, self-conscious Comfort getting practical tips from Francine Hunter in advance, to the high-pitched rivalrous babble on camera of the flittering Comfort as Fortuna Desir. Thomson (“personal trainer to eh stars”), and Papoulis (“famous beauty stage and screen, talk fabulous”), plus three quarreling, doubting alter-egos that back them up. Poor Papoulis goes off the deep end in a soliloquy accompanies by her distressed shadow. Then everybody gets into a big aerobic dance number. Comfort, left alone afterward, worries that she wasn’t - isn’t - wonderful, and begins to make small gestures for a dead camera she’s standing near. As she backs up slowly, this gradually expands into a muted, introspective flow of movement that’s quite touching.
But the big moment is the end. Everybody's dream man, “the new Mr. Wonderful” (Alan Pratt) appears. Big smile, dark suit, mirrored sunglasses, a bottle of champagne. His admirers - Comfort, Lake, Papoulis, Thomson, Callaghan - move toward him. As he begins to strip, the “count” a rapid accompaniment: “50 40 fuck, 50 fairly fast...” Pratt pours the champagne over his head and chest, over his clothes. Off come the cuff links, flying; the shirt; he rips off his undershirt which seems to peel apart; kicks off his shoes. He shakes those hips. runs, and bumps. Under his shorts there’s another pair of shorts, another, and another, till he’s down to a gold G-string. “Five, five, five, five, five, five,” his audience shouts with appropriate urgency. “Oh!” And they collapse on the floor. You were so great,” murmurs Thomson. “You can’t leave now,” shouts Lake, as Pratt exits in his own sweet time and the outside door of St. Mark’s slams with a tomb-like bang.
At St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (October 17 to 20).
As a choreographer, Pina Bausch has an edge that counts for a great deal in a piece like Seven Deadly Sins: she’s able to put ugliness onstage. The sour cautionary tale of the two Annas - the strict but motherly business head who manages their moneymaking schemes, and the women who puts her body on the line for seven years in seven cities to keep their “family” in comfort, and the family manse a-building - profits from Bausch’s capacity to show unglamorized emotion, habitual cruelty, mindlessness. The ugliness gives her work novelty and enormous force.
For “Sloth” tough women in black throw pillows at Anna II (Joesphine Ann Endicott). A workhorse, like Cinderella, Anna’s got to pick them up. Anna I (Ann Holing), a chunkier, blonde Anna, is the singing half, with a harsh voice that can slide into seductive tones; she whips Anna II into shape between encounters and sends her briskly back into the world. In “Pride,” Anna II tries to pull her skirt down while a photographer snaps pictures, but she gets to like the attention and lifts her skirt higher. Men lurk abut. Underwear flies onstage. Other women come on in thin, clinging, see-through garments with dragging trains. Men paw them. The women look like they never sleep. One displays her breasts on her hands, as if serving them on a platter. A man runs through, picking up and sniffing the underwear that’s lying around.
I can’t always keep track of which sin is being highlighted; so many evils share the spotlight at one time. There’s a kickline of sullen, corseted women, jiggling their bodies; the women are grim, only the one at the head of the line smiles wickedly. Anna II tries to hide from a man who’s attacking her, but the line is no protection. Slimy men grab some of the women, jam their bodies tightly against them, dance close, gripping onto the women’s asses. The unused women march off; Anna II is left dancing alone, in silence. Another man hefts her several ways - she’s meat, right? - measures her weight, thighs, knees, crotch to shoulder, nipple to nipple. Then humps her standing, savagely shoving her ass from side to side. Men march on in a threatening diagonal (the line includes all the women too, cross-dressed), they stamp and turn and stalk Anna. She backs away from them one at a time, hard, any which way. They slam against her and she snatches a trophy - a jacket, a vest - with each encounter. That’s “Covetousness.”
Afterward, exhausted, sated, Anna II lets her head sag toward her knees; Anna I, behind her, snaps it straight, unswerving from the Seven Year Plan. In the epilogue, Anna I croons to Anna II about the family, about home; Anna II faces her weeping. With the flavor of Bertolt Brecht’s bitterly ironic text and Kurt Weill’s gorgeous musical structure to work within, and against, Pina Bausch’s version of The Seven Deadly Sins has a forward thrust and conclusiveness that her pieces often lack. In many of those others, the construction is patchy: Bausch prolongs images, but won’t develop them; she doesn’t seem to want to end scenes, except by letting them dwindle while she distracts us with something else; she hits us on the head with a statement or an image and reinforces it, repeats it until the bludgeoning erases the impact.
In Gerbirge, for example, you remember the marvelous trees; the men briskly haul on dozens of evergreens, floods the stage with them, and a few women cavort coyly. Finally then men run in again and drag the greenery out. The arrival of the trees is an exhilarating refreshment, but when the initial impulse fades, there’s no next step except erasure. Or take Lutz Forster and Dominique Mercy in the same work: Forster makes a clean, flinging gesture with his arm that can almost make you weep with its eloquence - a “beautiful” gesture is so rare here. His body follows the gesture, racing across the stage till Mercy puts something, anything, in his way. But Bausch lets this continue long after there’s anything to be made of it, and repeats the episode several times later on Eventually, it becomes tedious and empty.
I don’t believe it is truly her intention to squeeze the value out of everything and leave us only with eggshells and orange rinds and shriveling debris. But she lets almost every episode run until it’s dead. The images and scenes are all given equal value, and the more spectacular inevitably have greater weight But not because Bausch shapes them; she only delivers them. The audience is impressed, but - when you look around - no one is moved. Yet this is hardly dry, intellectual work - it aims for the gut. So why do I feel that her concerns aren’t of interest to me? Does that make me hard, shallow?
I find the pieces essentially cold, and I become gradually repelled by them. What comes across to me after a while is a sense of overwhelming waste. And - despite all the humorous bite - a commitment to the pain that inhabits her work and within which the work exists. Many of the images are bold and fascinating and executed by a company with absolute conviction. But the work itself, however, doesn’t seem profound. It can’t dig into the pain, the hunger, the cruelty, the anger that seems so close to the surface: it presupposes it. This is work that is grandly visionary and flamboyant, yet thoroughly dismal and defensive. It has taken on the identity of its enemy. Pain is its reason for being, its justification, its future.
Bausch keeps defining the relation of men and women as a ruthless battle for dominance, and as much as the dancers wrestle with each other, they are doomed to remain within the confines of the definition. She cannot show us anger, only the thirst of frustration. In this kind of set up, I don’t see why I should want to watch the victims struggle uselessly. Bausch creates flurries of enormous vivacity within a climate of hopelessness and emotional inertia. But the impact of these flurries is minimal. When each is over, the collagey waters roll over and wash it away.
In the cheerfully degenerate Don’t Be Afraid, when red-headed Silvia Kesselheim pops her head repeatedly against a head-size black ball, she sums up the Bausch world view pretty well. The dancers give themselves completely to the work, which compels them and distorts them. Many seem to be trapped wearing the same expression from piece to piece. The excellent Josephine Ann Endicott gives her all and more in Seven Deadly Sins, but she is falling to pieces by the end; she seem strong, seems even abandoned in her movement, but I think she becomes weak and lost, working on will alone Bausch’s work deprives her of the terrible strength she needs to do it; the dancing pits her, and the other dancers, against themselves. Their muscles fight their muscles, and every movement costs them double. If they aren’t in extremis, forcing themselves, they’re collapsed. Then, when something has to happen, they’ve got to find all the energy at once. Usually they can’t, so they seem slightly behind themselves, trying to catch their energy up to where their bodies have gone.
Anyway, I think it’s a crock: there are other choices. There are plenty of fine reasons for perceiving the world so grimly. No matter what horror you can put on stage, the world is infinitely worse. But that’s not the whole story either. Bausch can depict varieties of pain with the utmost brilliance, but the face of it seems to strike her dumb. She locks into perception, makes it vivid and makes it permanent, and leaves us with a harvest of depletion and futility.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 1 to 22).
The dancing is the least part of Jane Comfort’s TV Love: a nine-part saga inspired by elements of television that hardly need satirizing. It’s about celebrity. About being wonderful, or wonderful enough, and needing your wonderfulness affirmed by everybody. About looking for love in all the wrong places and desiring the wonderful person everybody else wants too.
But with this subject matter, it’s hard to get beyond the obvious. TV talk shows are dumb, but we watch them anyway, and few of us, I imagine, would refuse to climb into the little screen with Merv or Johnny. And Comfort does pull off a marvelous parody, partly through glitzy dress-up (she, for example, is in a Tina Turner wig, wearing TT’s sneer-smile and a strapless black gown that she nearly jiggles her breasts out of). Larry Maxwell is a perfect host. Ann Papoulis and David Thomson, like Comfort, are exceedingly glamorous and envious and self-promoting.
But what makes it memorable is the talk - stripped down only to the most essential cliches - and the skipping rhythms of the chitchat. “Talking talk talk, talking big money talk,” they say. “Talking fabulous.” The talking rhythms contain most of the wit of TV Love, which, on the whole, feels clumsily structured and vague in direction. The clever rhythms Comfort once put into the dancing and highlighted with verbal play have pretty much slipped out of the dancing and persist almost entirely in the words. In the beginning, domineering Ann Papoulis smoothes her hair, makes fascinating, conjuring gestures, frames her head within a diamond of her arms, sways. Her fingers say “come here, “go away,” “give me money!” David Thomson, dancing far behind her, is as elegant and precise in the use of his long limbs as a giraffe. Bradley Lake, on a chair at the side, begins to talk about “Mr. Wonderful, you’re so wonderful...” which Papoulis picks up. They start to diddle with the sense, and build a mildly ecstatic expectation in the tempo and the tone, until they reach a kind of culmination and ease off. “It’s everything I imagines it would be,” breathes Papoulis.
Talk in an overblown, romantic vein (“I want to be the father of your children!”) swells into the second part, to some beautiful skirling saxophone playing by Richard Landry. Then men get out of their shirts. Papoulis slips out of an underskirt and they wind up in a pile. Where they are DISCOVERED! by Karen Callaghan, who gets furious with Lake as the others back off and begin to dress. Lake claims it’s all “pretend,” it’s acting, but the argument continues and a gun goes off. Then all play the entire scene backward, reversing the conversation word by word. Through the abstraction of the rewind, the scene maintains its overripe tone and daffy emotional flow. So much - for the moment - for romantic love. On to popularity.
The talk show itself, plus the preparations and the aftermath, is acutely observed and executed: from an unsure, self-conscious Comfort getting practical tips from Francine Hunter in advance, to the high-pitched rivalrous babble on camera of the flittering Comfort as Fortuna Desir. Thomson (“personal trainer to eh stars”), and Papoulis (“famous beauty stage and screen, talk fabulous”), plus three quarreling, doubting alter-egos that back them up. Poor Papoulis goes off the deep end in a soliloquy accompanies by her distressed shadow. Then everybody gets into a big aerobic dance number. Comfort, left alone afterward, worries that she wasn’t - isn’t - wonderful, and begins to make small gestures for a dead camera she’s standing near. As she backs up slowly, this gradually expands into a muted, introspective flow of movement that’s quite touching.
But the big moment is the end. Everybody's dream man, “the new Mr. Wonderful” (Alan Pratt) appears. Big smile, dark suit, mirrored sunglasses, a bottle of champagne. His admirers - Comfort, Lake, Papoulis, Thomson, Callaghan - move toward him. As he begins to strip, the “count” a rapid accompaniment: “50 40 fuck, 50 fairly fast...” Pratt pours the champagne over his head and chest, over his clothes. Off come the cuff links, flying; the shirt; he rips off his undershirt which seems to peel apart; kicks off his shoes. He shakes those hips. runs, and bumps. Under his shorts there’s another pair of shorts, another, and another, till he’s down to a gold G-string. “Five, five, five, five, five, five,” his audience shouts with appropriate urgency. “Oh!” And they collapse on the floor. You were so great,” murmurs Thomson. “You can’t leave now,” shouts Lake, as Pratt exits in his own sweet time and the outside door of St. Mark’s slams with a tomb-like bang.
At St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (October 17 to 20).
Teamwork
November 12
“We solved an ending today, but every idea you have is a million dollars. What if we had these ropes suspended fro the ceiling and the dancers are dancing away and they take a plie for the next thing and they go WHOMP! The lights go out and nobody’s on the ground. Probably cost $4,000. So you can forget it, right?”
Nina Wiener is up, talking a mile and minute. Her makeup’s worn thin; she looks sharp and a bit giddy. “We had such a hot rehearsal! We’ve been working like 10 hours a day,” finishing In Closed Time, which premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music November 7. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear. They’re never gonna get their energy up.’ You know? And then they looked so great. So on the dime, you know?"
“I was a little insecure about the second section because for me it’s kind of minimal and it’s very ‘beautiful,’ you know, so it was like looking at bolts of silk in different colors. And I was trying to, like, extend my style so it goes somewhere else by the end of the dance and people can see the new direction. I want to make a real dramatic effect, which I haven’t done before. Usually you don’t take those kind of chances at the Opera House. But if you’re going to do the Opera House, you might as well take your biggest chance. I mean, why mince it? It’s the big carrot.”
When Wiener started on the first section, which developed out of a dance she made for North Carolina Dance Theater, she had been working with Meredith Monk’s music. “Originally, I wanted her to do a new score, but her music comes so much out of her own visual/dramatic working that that really isn’t a good way to work with her. So I just picked things up that already existed.” For the second part, Wiener used Sergio Cervetti, with whom she’s worked several times, most recently in her 1983 extravaganza Wind Devil. “I just kind of tell him a concept or show him a little piece of material. Then he comes in the next day with a musical idea. He’s so good at establishing very moving, pictorial images. Or, you know, sometimes he’ll bring me a little idea. ‘What do you think of this?’ And that’ll clarify a bunch of stuff for me.
“Working in a collaborative way is perfectly suited to the way I work myself - establishing ‘core material,’ and doing problems on the material, and all these things where a lot of people really participate. Although I make the final decisions on the overall picture and stuff, I listen to what people have to say.” Wiener got Elliott Sharp to do the music for the third part. She wanted a different composer for each section because, “I really wanted a big shift...Elliott’s music is real physical. It’s very New Wave and has a kind of African underbeat and sounds where the instruments don’t even sound like themselves - they sound like lots of conversations happening."
“First, Elliott sent me a couple of cassettes with all his old music on them. And I just listened through and picked out the songs that I liked, so that we had a base to work on. Because we didn’t know each other at all. I had started making movement for the third section and I located it on types of material - just two or three samplings, not like 10 - and I related it to the other two sections of the dance. I showed him what happened before his music. And I said, “I want to make a real finale here."
“And then Elliott did something which is, like, completely out of my line of working. It makes me feel amorphic. Elliott wanted to do some improv stuff where we kind of danced around to his music. This makes me totally creeped out. I think about it and I just want to go ‘Oooh, ‘60s, oooh.’ ‘Cause I’m kind of like a child of the ‘60s; I hit New York when they were really into all that stuff. But I thought, all right, don’t be negative, ‘cause maybe he needs something from this. So why don’t you just do it?"
“So Elliott came in with his guitar with the two necks and his saxophone, and he played around and we danced around and while this was happening I started working with this really intense actions in the upper body, things that were not always so controlled. I was feeling very much like I wanted to break out. I didn’t want to be stuck in my concept of port de bras.” A complex use of the arms has always been a germinal element in her work. “I didn’t want to feel like, OK, this is what your dances are about now and forever. That’s what they're going to put on your gravestone."
“His music seemed to be about qualities and textures. He would play along, and I’d go, well, OK. I can’t relate to the saxophones. So he’d stop playing the saxophones. Then he’d try something else till we felt we’d come to a point where there was a connection. Then we threw all that away. But three days later we had a score."
“Elliott works by layering, like I do. He’ll layer something on, and then he’ll put on another concept, and then he’ll deal with some kind of structural thing n top of that. Then he pulls things out, so different things come to the forefront. So its not just 16 layers running across the screen. All my material is made before it’s located. It’s all made from ‘core phrases’ which have an emotional base having to do with the section or from ports de bras which have the specific gestures that are going to be used in the section. OK. So the material is all there and then it gets located and some of it gets shifted. And new stuff gets put in for the connections. So we had a similarity of working styles, which I think is one of the most important things when you’re doing a collaboration."
“I’m so up because it was a really productive day - not that I don’t have tons of work. I hate sloppy dancing, and I’m a very meticulous cleaner. And because my dance is so dense, if it’s not clean, you don’t see it. It’s really about shifting shapes and shifting textures and sculpturally manipulating the space, you know, plus all these emotional ideas. I mean, I’m happy with this idea for the end. Well, I have to think about it some more. Maybe it’s too tricky."
“When I got this wonderful opportunity to perform in the Opera House and to have this beautiful space, I though, “What I really want to deal with is scale. All right? Scale is very important in that space, unless you just want to run around dealing with that 50-by-50 floor all the time. So I thought, all right, I want someone who comes down in scale not someone who goes up in scale. And an architect was the most likely thing for that.”
About three years ago, Wiener’s brother Michael, a young architect, showed her magazine photos of work by Arquitectonica, and suggested that the well-known architectural firm do a design for her. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Dream on.” But the occasion arrived. “I just called Laurinda (Spear) on the telephone. She had been thinking about doing a set with a company in Miami but they didn’t really have the money or the space or whatever. I didn’t really have the money, but I had the space and the exposure. If she did a set for me, it would kind of...” Somebody would see it.
“The whole world would see it, because it’s going to tour all over as part of the Next Wave touring program. “Laurinda used a lot of buildings in her design because that’s how she thinks. She said her first idea was to use three oversize rooms. Then she thought the dance would look subservient to the set. So, I thought, well, that’s nice that she thinks about that. So, she decided on 15 buildings - some were real whimsical and different shapes. “When I looked at them they came into three groupings: the kind of buildings that were about different kinds of surface shapes. Then there’s this series of buildings - a lot of which got cut out because they were very expensive - that were kind of organic element buildings. One was shaped like a big round ball, you know, kind of the Earth. There was a building made out of leaves. And then there was one with lots of stones and steps. That building all by itself cost about $20,0000 so that was the first to go. I’m going on and on about the cost. But { } so money sits on my mind like a big rock. Then, this was my most favorite building in the world even though it was the most expensive. It’s call the cloud building, and it’s like a clear Plexiglas building, so it looks like windows, but inside is dry ice."
“We sent the whole 15 buildings out for bid with the specs and it took about a month to respond and the bid came back at $200,000. Right? And we had about $20,000 for the set. And I’d told Laurinda, like, Laurinda, we only have about $20,000. So when I came back at $200,000, I though, well, maybe I’ll kill her. But the good thing was she was really flexible. She said, well, use the buildings how you want to, we won’t use them all. So I said OK. “My style is very continuous, and I wanted to introduce some kind of rhythmic stops into the stuff. And my tendency is always to fill up the space. Like, I’m not a minimalist. So when I’m looking at something happening in the space I want to put more in. And more and more, and more and more and more. Until I have all the information I can process. So I thought, this is a good exercise for me. We’re going to try to make this simpler. And we’re going to try to hold the concept together through the whole three dances instead of making it like an emotional diary, which is what my work had been about, and I felt, all right, now I need new goals. Here I was having a mid-life crisis right in the middle of my BAM piece! You know? In the middle of the second section, I’m having a mid-life crisis!"
One of my friends said, ‘Here’s this book, Passages, why don’t you read this book? So I was on the airplane going to Holland and I started reading and I thought, hey, everybody goes through this this is OK. And I got really calm.
“One of the things about collaborations is, you have to collaborate with someone when there’s something at stake. Like my costume designer, Robin Klingensmith Now, this is a big thing for her, because if she comes through, this elevates her to another level, and she has the talent, the creativity to be at that level, but not the opportunity. So, just like Harvey [Lichtenstein, president of BAM] gave me an opportunity, I felt I could give her an opportunity D’you know what I mean? "
“The thing about collaboration is it’s bigger than any one person. It’s bigger than a single mind and that’s why it’s interesting. But, you know, one of the biggest problems is, in a lot of instances, people don’t really work together. One person goes off to their corner and does their thing, and then the choreographer doesn’t see it till the last minute. I totally insist on starting work at least a year in advance, which everybody thinks is completely insane. But, you know, if that person’s not going to work out for you, you have to know before they hand you the music and you have to put your dance on it. I mean you can’t just do that. And you have to leave enough time so that no one feels so pressured that they can’t rethink their ideas. If a collaboration is about a melding of the minds, you have to be together. That person has to be involved all the time for months and months and months. And that other stuff, those things that don’t work, it’s because those people didn’t interact their concepts and someone wasn’t willing to take control. I’m perfectly happy to take control. I mean, if it doesn’t work, hey, the darts come here. And if it works, great! gimme the roses. “There is one mind making the decisions, and all the other minds - although everyone is participating - are subservient to those decisions. That means people have to have very strong egos.” Strong enough to be able to yield...
“Strong enough to yield. It’s not that everything is subservient to the dance, it’s that everything is subservient to the whole image, and the whole image has to making a production, you’re not making a dance.
“We solved an ending today, but every idea you have is a million dollars. What if we had these ropes suspended fro the ceiling and the dancers are dancing away and they take a plie for the next thing and they go WHOMP! The lights go out and nobody’s on the ground. Probably cost $4,000. So you can forget it, right?”
Nina Wiener is up, talking a mile and minute. Her makeup’s worn thin; she looks sharp and a bit giddy. “We had such a hot rehearsal! We’ve been working like 10 hours a day,” finishing In Closed Time, which premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music November 7. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, dear. Oh, dear. They’re never gonna get their energy up.’ You know? And then they looked so great. So on the dime, you know?"
“I was a little insecure about the second section because for me it’s kind of minimal and it’s very ‘beautiful,’ you know, so it was like looking at bolts of silk in different colors. And I was trying to, like, extend my style so it goes somewhere else by the end of the dance and people can see the new direction. I want to make a real dramatic effect, which I haven’t done before. Usually you don’t take those kind of chances at the Opera House. But if you’re going to do the Opera House, you might as well take your biggest chance. I mean, why mince it? It’s the big carrot.”
When Wiener started on the first section, which developed out of a dance she made for North Carolina Dance Theater, she had been working with Meredith Monk’s music. “Originally, I wanted her to do a new score, but her music comes so much out of her own visual/dramatic working that that really isn’t a good way to work with her. So I just picked things up that already existed.” For the second part, Wiener used Sergio Cervetti, with whom she’s worked several times, most recently in her 1983 extravaganza Wind Devil. “I just kind of tell him a concept or show him a little piece of material. Then he comes in the next day with a musical idea. He’s so good at establishing very moving, pictorial images. Or, you know, sometimes he’ll bring me a little idea. ‘What do you think of this?’ And that’ll clarify a bunch of stuff for me.
“Working in a collaborative way is perfectly suited to the way I work myself - establishing ‘core material,’ and doing problems on the material, and all these things where a lot of people really participate. Although I make the final decisions on the overall picture and stuff, I listen to what people have to say.” Wiener got Elliott Sharp to do the music for the third part. She wanted a different composer for each section because, “I really wanted a big shift...Elliott’s music is real physical. It’s very New Wave and has a kind of African underbeat and sounds where the instruments don’t even sound like themselves - they sound like lots of conversations happening."
“First, Elliott sent me a couple of cassettes with all his old music on them. And I just listened through and picked out the songs that I liked, so that we had a base to work on. Because we didn’t know each other at all. I had started making movement for the third section and I located it on types of material - just two or three samplings, not like 10 - and I related it to the other two sections of the dance. I showed him what happened before his music. And I said, “I want to make a real finale here."
“And then Elliott did something which is, like, completely out of my line of working. It makes me feel amorphic. Elliott wanted to do some improv stuff where we kind of danced around to his music. This makes me totally creeped out. I think about it and I just want to go ‘Oooh, ‘60s, oooh.’ ‘Cause I’m kind of like a child of the ‘60s; I hit New York when they were really into all that stuff. But I thought, all right, don’t be negative, ‘cause maybe he needs something from this. So why don’t you just do it?"
“So Elliott came in with his guitar with the two necks and his saxophone, and he played around and we danced around and while this was happening I started working with this really intense actions in the upper body, things that were not always so controlled. I was feeling very much like I wanted to break out. I didn’t want to be stuck in my concept of port de bras.” A complex use of the arms has always been a germinal element in her work. “I didn’t want to feel like, OK, this is what your dances are about now and forever. That’s what they're going to put on your gravestone."
“His music seemed to be about qualities and textures. He would play along, and I’d go, well, OK. I can’t relate to the saxophones. So he’d stop playing the saxophones. Then he’d try something else till we felt we’d come to a point where there was a connection. Then we threw all that away. But three days later we had a score."
“Elliott works by layering, like I do. He’ll layer something on, and then he’ll put on another concept, and then he’ll deal with some kind of structural thing n top of that. Then he pulls things out, so different things come to the forefront. So its not just 16 layers running across the screen. All my material is made before it’s located. It’s all made from ‘core phrases’ which have an emotional base having to do with the section or from ports de bras which have the specific gestures that are going to be used in the section. OK. So the material is all there and then it gets located and some of it gets shifted. And new stuff gets put in for the connections. So we had a similarity of working styles, which I think is one of the most important things when you’re doing a collaboration."
“I’m so up because it was a really productive day - not that I don’t have tons of work. I hate sloppy dancing, and I’m a very meticulous cleaner. And because my dance is so dense, if it’s not clean, you don’t see it. It’s really about shifting shapes and shifting textures and sculpturally manipulating the space, you know, plus all these emotional ideas. I mean, I’m happy with this idea for the end. Well, I have to think about it some more. Maybe it’s too tricky."
“When I got this wonderful opportunity to perform in the Opera House and to have this beautiful space, I though, “What I really want to deal with is scale. All right? Scale is very important in that space, unless you just want to run around dealing with that 50-by-50 floor all the time. So I thought, all right, I want someone who comes down in scale not someone who goes up in scale. And an architect was the most likely thing for that.”
About three years ago, Wiener’s brother Michael, a young architect, showed her magazine photos of work by Arquitectonica, and suggested that the well-known architectural firm do a design for her. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Dream on.” But the occasion arrived. “I just called Laurinda (Spear) on the telephone. She had been thinking about doing a set with a company in Miami but they didn’t really have the money or the space or whatever. I didn’t really have the money, but I had the space and the exposure. If she did a set for me, it would kind of...” Somebody would see it.
“The whole world would see it, because it’s going to tour all over as part of the Next Wave touring program. “Laurinda used a lot of buildings in her design because that’s how she thinks. She said her first idea was to use three oversize rooms. Then she thought the dance would look subservient to the set. So, I thought, well, that’s nice that she thinks about that. So, she decided on 15 buildings - some were real whimsical and different shapes. “When I looked at them they came into three groupings: the kind of buildings that were about different kinds of surface shapes. Then there’s this series of buildings - a lot of which got cut out because they were very expensive - that were kind of organic element buildings. One was shaped like a big round ball, you know, kind of the Earth. There was a building made out of leaves. And then there was one with lots of stones and steps. That building all by itself cost about $20,0000 so that was the first to go. I’m going on and on about the cost. But { } so money sits on my mind like a big rock. Then, this was my most favorite building in the world even though it was the most expensive. It’s call the cloud building, and it’s like a clear Plexiglas building, so it looks like windows, but inside is dry ice."
“We sent the whole 15 buildings out for bid with the specs and it took about a month to respond and the bid came back at $200,000. Right? And we had about $20,000 for the set. And I’d told Laurinda, like, Laurinda, we only have about $20,000. So when I came back at $200,000, I though, well, maybe I’ll kill her. But the good thing was she was really flexible. She said, well, use the buildings how you want to, we won’t use them all. So I said OK. “My style is very continuous, and I wanted to introduce some kind of rhythmic stops into the stuff. And my tendency is always to fill up the space. Like, I’m not a minimalist. So when I’m looking at something happening in the space I want to put more in. And more and more, and more and more and more. Until I have all the information I can process. So I thought, this is a good exercise for me. We’re going to try to make this simpler. And we’re going to try to hold the concept together through the whole three dances instead of making it like an emotional diary, which is what my work had been about, and I felt, all right, now I need new goals. Here I was having a mid-life crisis right in the middle of my BAM piece! You know? In the middle of the second section, I’m having a mid-life crisis!"
One of my friends said, ‘Here’s this book, Passages, why don’t you read this book? So I was on the airplane going to Holland and I started reading and I thought, hey, everybody goes through this this is OK. And I got really calm.
“One of the things about collaborations is, you have to collaborate with someone when there’s something at stake. Like my costume designer, Robin Klingensmith Now, this is a big thing for her, because if she comes through, this elevates her to another level, and she has the talent, the creativity to be at that level, but not the opportunity. So, just like Harvey [Lichtenstein, president of BAM] gave me an opportunity, I felt I could give her an opportunity D’you know what I mean? "
“The thing about collaboration is it’s bigger than any one person. It’s bigger than a single mind and that’s why it’s interesting. But, you know, one of the biggest problems is, in a lot of instances, people don’t really work together. One person goes off to their corner and does their thing, and then the choreographer doesn’t see it till the last minute. I totally insist on starting work at least a year in advance, which everybody thinks is completely insane. But, you know, if that person’s not going to work out for you, you have to know before they hand you the music and you have to put your dance on it. I mean you can’t just do that. And you have to leave enough time so that no one feels so pressured that they can’t rethink their ideas. If a collaboration is about a melding of the minds, you have to be together. That person has to be involved all the time for months and months and months. And that other stuff, those things that don’t work, it’s because those people didn’t interact their concepts and someone wasn’t willing to take control. I’m perfectly happy to take control. I mean, if it doesn’t work, hey, the darts come here. And if it works, great! gimme the roses. “There is one mind making the decisions, and all the other minds - although everyone is participating - are subservient to those decisions. That means people have to have very strong egos.” Strong enough to be able to yield...
“Strong enough to yield. It’s not that everything is subservient to the dance, it’s that everything is subservient to the whole image, and the whole image has to making a production, you’re not making a dance.