1985 CONTINUED
A Much Crumpled Thing
January 1, 1985
When Robert Kovich was dancing with Merce Cunningham's company from 1973 to 1980, he was a revelation in his roles, allowing all the implications of character that word carries. He seemed always able to find a thread to guide him unerringly through Cunningham's abstract mazes. His sense of how to shape the dynamics of his dancing was – and is – miraculous. What's more, he served as vehicle for the choreography in the most generous and professional way. That made his dancing luminous. Until recently, Kovich has been in Europe – mostly France – for teaching and making dances for a group of his own.
At the Paula Cooper Gallery, backed by an exhibition of Robert Wilson's drawings, he showed to pieces from 1982 and 1983, and a new solo. The first dances he did here, a few years ago, were pale echoes of Cunningham. These are quite different, although they sometimes bring to mind Cunningham's zany, anguished solos. Entering with Segolene Colin Poirier in a red cocktail dress, the ascetic-looking Kovich wears a conventional blue suit whose jacket seems overlarge on his lean frame. She sits motionless in a corner in what may be a borrowed Deco kitchen chair; he sometimes shifts her, tips her, turns her around, chair and all, during his solo from Faking House, while she remains implacably neutral. Alone, Kovich takes high, stalking steps with pointing feet that break into urgent taps. The oversize jacket, shrugging up as he dances, contrasted with the finesse of his sharp footwork, reminds me of the wonderful eccentric tapper Raymond Kaalund (who performed with the Hoofers), though Kovich is nothing like like him.
Actually, Kovich reminds me more this evening of Roberts Blossom's eviscerated old cranks. Dancing with incredibly lithe angularity, he chops his movement sharp and hard so we see it frame by frame. He perches tentatively, almost beady-eyed in his narrow focus. With Poirier turned to him and away from us, he places his hands on her shoulders and elaborately wiggles his eyebrows and twists his mouth into rococo snarls. Standing still, he rotates his hands, forearms, giving each phrase a terse, tight fillip at the end, Music of '50s Hollywood exotica (from The Ten Commandments, Land of the Pharaohs, and other Technicolor favorites), the orchestra swelling and booming and a chorus of multitudes going ahahaha, gives a popular complexion to Kovich's otherwise gnarled, determined works with their frequent undercurrent of distress. That music's perfectly apt, of course, when he's doing slinky, 2-D Egyptian silhouette parody, with his hands poking rhythmically front and back. Other times, it sweeps you away on a corny wave of feeling much less crabbed than what Kovich is up to, so you return grateful for the breather and the glimpse of more routinely heroic horizons.
This is nervous, intentionally erratic work, that ranges between the extravagance of closet fantasy and the exaggerated restraint of denial. Kovich creates an ambiguous, creepy allure to which self-deception seems to be essential. Watching him from up close, he's so terribly clear that any arbitrary or uncertain moment glares. His body slings into the slack curves we used to associate with high-fashion models. Both sexually taunting and desperately shy, symbolically exposing and covering his genitals with his hands, he seems to be wooing his captive but safely unresponsive audience, Poirier. He takes off the jacket, Poirier slips off her shoes, and they begin Pin-Up, swinging around and over each other and back into each other's arms and floppily descending to the floor. Later the swinging motif returns, with the reversing, half-turning, pull-and-release spirals that can ornament the Lindy.
I didn't grasp the shape of the dance – and Poirier's impassive presence flattened any resonance – but most of it is bluntly about support. They hold hands and walk forward slowly; his steps take a tangent and he has to lean heavily on her as his body angles toward the horizontal. When he's barely hanging on to her waist he's still backing away. She leans on him too, and slides inexorably down. The epic-movie music gives all this dependency a sardonic cast. Kovich's white shirt is by this time sweated into near-transparency.
Tarantula (with Tarantella) is the most tough-minded piece of the three, and I liked it best. Kovich uses regular patterns of variation very plainly here, and that formality gives Tarantula a structural rigor that can support his intensity. He is working with a fierce distortion: clawed hands that initially hang sullenly down and later curdle his ports de bras. He bounces, weighting the down accent, makes an abrupt, splattering gesture to a rhythmic rumble of Haitian drums. Pivoting on himself while essaying a routine of fast footwork and grunting along with taped groans, he slips into a fast, unaccented contraction, then he spins out of it, letting his free leg open wide and occasionally rap the floor. Suddenly he ducks as if he's been stung, wipes some contamination off his arm, rubs a foot against his ankle. Breathing in labored grunts – uuh, uuh, uuh – he pliés deeply in jerky stages, and continues to suffer stylized injuries. The low drumming beats rapidly, while Kovich moves with hulking stiffness. Then coming out of a tight spin, there's that stark contrast again of elegant legs and crippled arms. After a simple, gestural window of calm, Kovich is again leaning, falling, smacking himself; Poirier joins in – she bumps him and knocks him down. But they're mannerly together, though Kovich keeps slapping as he dances, whipping into a compact whirl of turning leaps. Both dancers crudely sing an appropriate tune as they spring into a brittlely balletic tar with a sneering, damaged edge. Maybe I've been looking at twisted tarantella fragments all along.
On the whole, I'm interested by the complex, eccentric circuitry of these pieces, and the emotion that keeps being exposed without being acknowledged. Kovich's dancing is astonishing as always; he can reveal the inherent music in the most confounding, helter-skelter movement sequences.
At Paula Cooper Gallery (December 12-15).
When Robert Kovich was dancing with Merce Cunningham's company from 1973 to 1980, he was a revelation in his roles, allowing all the implications of character that word carries. He seemed always able to find a thread to guide him unerringly through Cunningham's abstract mazes. His sense of how to shape the dynamics of his dancing was – and is – miraculous. What's more, he served as vehicle for the choreography in the most generous and professional way. That made his dancing luminous. Until recently, Kovich has been in Europe – mostly France – for teaching and making dances for a group of his own.
At the Paula Cooper Gallery, backed by an exhibition of Robert Wilson's drawings, he showed to pieces from 1982 and 1983, and a new solo. The first dances he did here, a few years ago, were pale echoes of Cunningham. These are quite different, although they sometimes bring to mind Cunningham's zany, anguished solos. Entering with Segolene Colin Poirier in a red cocktail dress, the ascetic-looking Kovich wears a conventional blue suit whose jacket seems overlarge on his lean frame. She sits motionless in a corner in what may be a borrowed Deco kitchen chair; he sometimes shifts her, tips her, turns her around, chair and all, during his solo from Faking House, while she remains implacably neutral. Alone, Kovich takes high, stalking steps with pointing feet that break into urgent taps. The oversize jacket, shrugging up as he dances, contrasted with the finesse of his sharp footwork, reminds me of the wonderful eccentric tapper Raymond Kaalund (who performed with the Hoofers), though Kovich is nothing like like him.
Actually, Kovich reminds me more this evening of Roberts Blossom's eviscerated old cranks. Dancing with incredibly lithe angularity, he chops his movement sharp and hard so we see it frame by frame. He perches tentatively, almost beady-eyed in his narrow focus. With Poirier turned to him and away from us, he places his hands on her shoulders and elaborately wiggles his eyebrows and twists his mouth into rococo snarls. Standing still, he rotates his hands, forearms, giving each phrase a terse, tight fillip at the end, Music of '50s Hollywood exotica (from The Ten Commandments, Land of the Pharaohs, and other Technicolor favorites), the orchestra swelling and booming and a chorus of multitudes going ahahaha, gives a popular complexion to Kovich's otherwise gnarled, determined works with their frequent undercurrent of distress. That music's perfectly apt, of course, when he's doing slinky, 2-D Egyptian silhouette parody, with his hands poking rhythmically front and back. Other times, it sweeps you away on a corny wave of feeling much less crabbed than what Kovich is up to, so you return grateful for the breather and the glimpse of more routinely heroic horizons.
This is nervous, intentionally erratic work, that ranges between the extravagance of closet fantasy and the exaggerated restraint of denial. Kovich creates an ambiguous, creepy allure to which self-deception seems to be essential. Watching him from up close, he's so terribly clear that any arbitrary or uncertain moment glares. His body slings into the slack curves we used to associate with high-fashion models. Both sexually taunting and desperately shy, symbolically exposing and covering his genitals with his hands, he seems to be wooing his captive but safely unresponsive audience, Poirier. He takes off the jacket, Poirier slips off her shoes, and they begin Pin-Up, swinging around and over each other and back into each other's arms and floppily descending to the floor. Later the swinging motif returns, with the reversing, half-turning, pull-and-release spirals that can ornament the Lindy.
I didn't grasp the shape of the dance – and Poirier's impassive presence flattened any resonance – but most of it is bluntly about support. They hold hands and walk forward slowly; his steps take a tangent and he has to lean heavily on her as his body angles toward the horizontal. When he's barely hanging on to her waist he's still backing away. She leans on him too, and slides inexorably down. The epic-movie music gives all this dependency a sardonic cast. Kovich's white shirt is by this time sweated into near-transparency.
Tarantula (with Tarantella) is the most tough-minded piece of the three, and I liked it best. Kovich uses regular patterns of variation very plainly here, and that formality gives Tarantula a structural rigor that can support his intensity. He is working with a fierce distortion: clawed hands that initially hang sullenly down and later curdle his ports de bras. He bounces, weighting the down accent, makes an abrupt, splattering gesture to a rhythmic rumble of Haitian drums. Pivoting on himself while essaying a routine of fast footwork and grunting along with taped groans, he slips into a fast, unaccented contraction, then he spins out of it, letting his free leg open wide and occasionally rap the floor. Suddenly he ducks as if he's been stung, wipes some contamination off his arm, rubs a foot against his ankle. Breathing in labored grunts – uuh, uuh, uuh – he pliés deeply in jerky stages, and continues to suffer stylized injuries. The low drumming beats rapidly, while Kovich moves with hulking stiffness. Then coming out of a tight spin, there's that stark contrast again of elegant legs and crippled arms. After a simple, gestural window of calm, Kovich is again leaning, falling, smacking himself; Poirier joins in – she bumps him and knocks him down. But they're mannerly together, though Kovich keeps slapping as he dances, whipping into a compact whirl of turning leaps. Both dancers crudely sing an appropriate tune as they spring into a brittlely balletic tar with a sneering, damaged edge. Maybe I've been looking at twisted tarantella fragments all along.
On the whole, I'm interested by the complex, eccentric circuitry of these pieces, and the emotion that keeps being exposed without being acknowledged. Kovich's dancing is astonishing as always; he can reveal the inherent music in the most confounding, helter-skelter movement sequences.
At Paula Cooper Gallery (December 12-15).
Dancing on the Moon
February 12
Even though the possibility that Harkness House might be sold has been in the air for years, the decision of the trustees of the Harkness Ballet Foundation to put it on the market comes as a shock. Within the past year, on a barebones budget, Liz Thompson (the foundation's planning and programming consultant, and artistic director of Jacob's Pillow) and general administrator Kathie DeShaw started programs that have been turning the place from a hulk into a lively dance center. Although the foundation is happy with what's been done at Harkness House, the trustees have decided, says DeShaw, that they're sitting on a multimillion-dollar asset that should be generating income. The four-story mansion on 75th Street just off Fifth Avenue has not yet been appraised, but Barry Kreisberg, president of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, feels sure that they can easily get upwards of $7 million for it. If they realize their expectations, the money will be invested to set up a fund for dance that could, thinking optimistically, amount to something in the vicinity of a million dollars a year for grants. (For comparison, NYSCA's approved allocation for dance for fiscal '84-85 comes to $3,050,000.) “You can't quarrel with that,” says Thompson.
But there is a down side to the picture of a future with more money to buoy the dance community. Part of it the loss of a center that was conceived in a large-minded, imaginative way. The first year was just an embryo; but there have been children's classes, ballet and ballroom dance classes, exercise classes, photography exhibitions, performance series, and the generous “land grant” program which alloted free studio workspace to a range of choreographers including Marta Renzi, Blondell Cummings, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Rosalind Newman, Donald Byrd, Dana Reitz, Stephanie Skura, Molissa Fenley, Bill Irwin, Mark Morris, Festival Dance Theater. One idea that isn't rolling yet is Thompson's ballet development project, a sensible scheme whereby 12 or 15 young dancers, chosen by audition, would be made available on a monthly basis to different young choreographers – particularly ballet dancers working in companies who have no opportunity to choreograph. But “classes have been growing, and it's been nicely textured,” says Thompson. “Ballroom dancers next to the new dance people and the neighborhood people coming in for exercise.” Still, come June, all school programs will end.
“The big sadness is space,” Thompson says. “It's pathetic. We're going to have to dance on the moon next year; there won't be any space in New York.” Finding decent studio space is one of the most pressing, depressing, and perennial problems of choreographers and dancers. Like small businesses in New York, artists are losing space left and right. Choreographers are particularly vulnerable in the real estate squeeze, because they need relatively large studios to work in.
Rebekah Harkness, in the early '60s, built three large dance studios and two smaller ones in this mansion, with the best sprung floors, mirrors, barres, locker rooms, showers – amenities rarely available in rental space. That's much more than decent space. It's cared for; it's heated. To the choreographers who benefited from the “land grant” program, news of the sale is dismaying for reasons that are not entirely financial. “When we first went in there it was dirty and decayed – haunted,” says Rosalind Newman. “Kathie and Liz put a lot of work into it, cleaned it up. To have the use of Studio B was a wonderful luxury. “Most of my time is spent trying to hustle space and trying to organize getting all the dancers into that space at the same time,” Newman explains. “Studio space is awful to find. There's nothing in Manhattan that's affordable. And that that space is going to go away is criminal.”
“No amount of money can replace studio time,” says Marta Renzi. “And there was the feeling of connection with the other people who were sharing the space, even if all you did was pass each other between rehearsals. I liked that there was no money exchanged. You need to be able to work? We'll make you able to work. I didn't have to worry that I was wasting time there; time was not money. The foundation says that they'll make more actual capital to give back to dancers by selling the building than by sitting on it, which may be so. But it will just be the usual grant-giving situation, which tends to separate dancers and choreographers. the space brought us together.”
The first day that Stephanie Skura started working at Harkness, this January, she heard that the building was to be sold. her second day, there was a meeting in which Kreisberg formally announced the trustees' plans. “I felt that the trustees didn't know much about the dance world, or what was needed, or even what they had already done,” she says. “I don't think they realized the weight of the work they had supported.” Everyone laughed when Skura mentioned having been there just one day, but she was moved to impassioned speech. “They're the most beautiful studios I've ever seen,” she says. “We'd joke about it being a palace, but everything was built so solid and so well, to make as good a place for dance as could be.” Choreographers and companies get free studio time during college or festival residencies, but the “land grant” was unique in New York. “Some places can give you money,” says Skura, “but no one gives you a place to work. There's something about knowing you have space to go where there are other people working and people who support your work – you can't put a value on it. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, better than any grant I ever got.”
Even though the possibility that Harkness House might be sold has been in the air for years, the decision of the trustees of the Harkness Ballet Foundation to put it on the market comes as a shock. Within the past year, on a barebones budget, Liz Thompson (the foundation's planning and programming consultant, and artistic director of Jacob's Pillow) and general administrator Kathie DeShaw started programs that have been turning the place from a hulk into a lively dance center. Although the foundation is happy with what's been done at Harkness House, the trustees have decided, says DeShaw, that they're sitting on a multimillion-dollar asset that should be generating income. The four-story mansion on 75th Street just off Fifth Avenue has not yet been appraised, but Barry Kreisberg, president of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, feels sure that they can easily get upwards of $7 million for it. If they realize their expectations, the money will be invested to set up a fund for dance that could, thinking optimistically, amount to something in the vicinity of a million dollars a year for grants. (For comparison, NYSCA's approved allocation for dance for fiscal '84-85 comes to $3,050,000.) “You can't quarrel with that,” says Thompson.
But there is a down side to the picture of a future with more money to buoy the dance community. Part of it the loss of a center that was conceived in a large-minded, imaginative way. The first year was just an embryo; but there have been children's classes, ballet and ballroom dance classes, exercise classes, photography exhibitions, performance series, and the generous “land grant” program which alloted free studio workspace to a range of choreographers including Marta Renzi, Blondell Cummings, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Rosalind Newman, Donald Byrd, Dana Reitz, Stephanie Skura, Molissa Fenley, Bill Irwin, Mark Morris, Festival Dance Theater. One idea that isn't rolling yet is Thompson's ballet development project, a sensible scheme whereby 12 or 15 young dancers, chosen by audition, would be made available on a monthly basis to different young choreographers – particularly ballet dancers working in companies who have no opportunity to choreograph. But “classes have been growing, and it's been nicely textured,” says Thompson. “Ballroom dancers next to the new dance people and the neighborhood people coming in for exercise.” Still, come June, all school programs will end.
“The big sadness is space,” Thompson says. “It's pathetic. We're going to have to dance on the moon next year; there won't be any space in New York.” Finding decent studio space is one of the most pressing, depressing, and perennial problems of choreographers and dancers. Like small businesses in New York, artists are losing space left and right. Choreographers are particularly vulnerable in the real estate squeeze, because they need relatively large studios to work in.
Rebekah Harkness, in the early '60s, built three large dance studios and two smaller ones in this mansion, with the best sprung floors, mirrors, barres, locker rooms, showers – amenities rarely available in rental space. That's much more than decent space. It's cared for; it's heated. To the choreographers who benefited from the “land grant” program, news of the sale is dismaying for reasons that are not entirely financial. “When we first went in there it was dirty and decayed – haunted,” says Rosalind Newman. “Kathie and Liz put a lot of work into it, cleaned it up. To have the use of Studio B was a wonderful luxury. “Most of my time is spent trying to hustle space and trying to organize getting all the dancers into that space at the same time,” Newman explains. “Studio space is awful to find. There's nothing in Manhattan that's affordable. And that that space is going to go away is criminal.”
“No amount of money can replace studio time,” says Marta Renzi. “And there was the feeling of connection with the other people who were sharing the space, even if all you did was pass each other between rehearsals. I liked that there was no money exchanged. You need to be able to work? We'll make you able to work. I didn't have to worry that I was wasting time there; time was not money. The foundation says that they'll make more actual capital to give back to dancers by selling the building than by sitting on it, which may be so. But it will just be the usual grant-giving situation, which tends to separate dancers and choreographers. the space brought us together.”
The first day that Stephanie Skura started working at Harkness, this January, she heard that the building was to be sold. her second day, there was a meeting in which Kreisberg formally announced the trustees' plans. “I felt that the trustees didn't know much about the dance world, or what was needed, or even what they had already done,” she says. “I don't think they realized the weight of the work they had supported.” Everyone laughed when Skura mentioned having been there just one day, but she was moved to impassioned speech. “They're the most beautiful studios I've ever seen,” she says. “We'd joke about it being a palace, but everything was built so solid and so well, to make as good a place for dance as could be.” Choreographers and companies get free studio time during college or festival residencies, but the “land grant” was unique in New York. “Some places can give you money,” says Skura, “but no one gives you a place to work. There's something about knowing you have space to go where there are other people working and people who support your work – you can't put a value on it. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, better than any grant I ever got.”
Easy Does It
April 9, 1985
First, my apologies for having wrongly identified choreographer Sally Silvers two weeks ago (in my review of Eagles Ate My Estrogen) as the young woman in yellow and blue. She was actually one of the improvisers drifting less prominently through the piece.
Garth Fagan's Rochester-based company has been happily getting booking inquiries like crazy since appearing recently on PBS's Dance Black America program doing the 1978 From Before, a recapitulation, celebration, and integration of Fagan's own (African, Caribbean, jazz, modern) dance ancestry that beautifully displays every company member as well. It also closed Bucket's first program at the Joyce.
The opening piece, Prelude (1981, revised 1983), subtitled “Discipline is Freedom,” exhibits the dancers in a similar way, and tames ecstasy to exactness according to the basic design of a modern dance class. It proceeds, like Harald Lander's Etudes, to intercutting lines of men and women whipping through tight reversing chains of turns, punching leaps, gnarled jumps. You might even think you see the flapping moves of African dancing translated into urgent flurries of rear attitudes. The dancers' unflagging speed and energy make it hard to believe they've got three more dances to go. Prelude's structure is effective for an audience pleaser – we're introduced to the dance currency of the choreographer and get a good look-see at the dancers before the tempos build and the dancers pile on in masses. The idea's a reasonably handy one, too: Martha Graham did a glossy piece in this genre, Robert Cohen made a snazzier and immensely popular one for London Contemporary. But Fagan isn't feelgood stuff about eroticizing or mythologizing the dancers. It is honestly about dancing.
Sojourn, from mid-1984, is visually electric, with the dancers bending and padding and softly jumping in brilliantly colored pop-astronaut outfits (by Fagan) – really, leotards and tights marked with bold, geometric blocks of flamboyant color, and fat cloth wristlets and anklets. In the first and last of four sections, those costumes are overlaid with transparent, but slightly clouding, jumpsuits – pale in the beginning, dark at the end. Sometimes the dancing is as pulled up and elegant, as detached and quirky as Merce Cunningham's can be. Sometimes there's a robot-like bobbing; sometimes there's just a fizz of limbs. The kaleidoscopic details escape me, but I was reminded later of those mesmerizing saloon beer signs in which colored blips of light bounce along endless, deeply looping sine curves. I guess the similarity is the purity and coolness of the visual impact. Fagan has a marvelous ability to pace a piece and give it a shining edge of definition without making it hard. What's most remarkable, to me, though, is not the way he and his dancers can build crescendos of speed and power with exquisite control and delicacy, but the way he can let things ease up momentarily and thoroughly relax. Like how Frances Hare (in Prelude) sinks from a tall stretch to a sitting position on the floor: her torso makes a smooth, steady drop, while her limbs, suddenly tangential, seem to rearrange themselves out of the way.
I can't think of anyone besides Fagan who provides such abrupt moments of deep, mysterious peacefulness. He's comfortable, too, letting you look at an easy pose for a long time. You feel the dancers don't need to push their presence at you, but you do feel them fully present. Steve Humphrey, Norwood Pennewell, Regina Smith, and Shelley Taplin, wearing grayish variations on a sweatsuit theme, are featured in Fagan's new Never Top 40 (Juke Box), in five parts, to an eclectic range of music from Jussi Bjoerling singing “Nessun dorma,” to the Melodians, to the Art Ensemble of Chicago – all pieces with special appeal to the choreographer. And the uncomplicated conviction of the dancers keeps this odd assortment from seeming a hodgepodge. The first quartet has a tight formality, almost a squareness, but its spirit quickens at the end when the dancers stretch their arms up to clutch hands, fall rigidly sideways, then quickly patter around against the triumphant lyricism of “Vincera, vincera.”
There's a sense of mental spaciousness in the second quartet, almost as beautifully transparent and feelingful as Keith Jarrett's solo piano rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” to which it's set. The dancers enter with airy, pedaling jumps that feel like prances. I remember twitters of little flexes through the torsos, stronger flexes breaking the waist, movements where the dancers seem all elbows. There are sudden, dipping spurts of miraculously fast movement; long meditative poses; the contrariness of the group stepping rapidly but moving quite gradually in a broad arc. Humphrey's solo to the Melodians’ reggae “Rivers of Babylon” continues the feeling. How beautifully he keeps the rhythms trembling through his torso! He breaks into crooked leaps, tumbles into soft dives and scrunched rolls. Once, stooped over, he crudely promenades with his hands patting the floor. He can seem stubby and jagged, all fists and knees, then, lazing on the floor he'll pump his body up on one arm to a dreamy slant. For a moment, life is perfect. Shelly Taplin is beautifully focused in a solo full of delicate hesitations. Even at the lowest energy, she can sustain a stretch eloquently, and when things get fiendishly fast you can still feel her sensitivity to the music. Pennewell and Smith are excellent too in the final duet, and the balloon of his jumps, the breadth of his movement, his casual poise, are especially appealing.
At the Joyce Theater (March 26 to 31).
First, my apologies for having wrongly identified choreographer Sally Silvers two weeks ago (in my review of Eagles Ate My Estrogen) as the young woman in yellow and blue. She was actually one of the improvisers drifting less prominently through the piece.
Garth Fagan's Rochester-based company has been happily getting booking inquiries like crazy since appearing recently on PBS's Dance Black America program doing the 1978 From Before, a recapitulation, celebration, and integration of Fagan's own (African, Caribbean, jazz, modern) dance ancestry that beautifully displays every company member as well. It also closed Bucket's first program at the Joyce.
The opening piece, Prelude (1981, revised 1983), subtitled “Discipline is Freedom,” exhibits the dancers in a similar way, and tames ecstasy to exactness according to the basic design of a modern dance class. It proceeds, like Harald Lander's Etudes, to intercutting lines of men and women whipping through tight reversing chains of turns, punching leaps, gnarled jumps. You might even think you see the flapping moves of African dancing translated into urgent flurries of rear attitudes. The dancers' unflagging speed and energy make it hard to believe they've got three more dances to go. Prelude's structure is effective for an audience pleaser – we're introduced to the dance currency of the choreographer and get a good look-see at the dancers before the tempos build and the dancers pile on in masses. The idea's a reasonably handy one, too: Martha Graham did a glossy piece in this genre, Robert Cohen made a snazzier and immensely popular one for London Contemporary. But Fagan isn't feelgood stuff about eroticizing or mythologizing the dancers. It is honestly about dancing.
Sojourn, from mid-1984, is visually electric, with the dancers bending and padding and softly jumping in brilliantly colored pop-astronaut outfits (by Fagan) – really, leotards and tights marked with bold, geometric blocks of flamboyant color, and fat cloth wristlets and anklets. In the first and last of four sections, those costumes are overlaid with transparent, but slightly clouding, jumpsuits – pale in the beginning, dark at the end. Sometimes the dancing is as pulled up and elegant, as detached and quirky as Merce Cunningham's can be. Sometimes there's a robot-like bobbing; sometimes there's just a fizz of limbs. The kaleidoscopic details escape me, but I was reminded later of those mesmerizing saloon beer signs in which colored blips of light bounce along endless, deeply looping sine curves. I guess the similarity is the purity and coolness of the visual impact. Fagan has a marvelous ability to pace a piece and give it a shining edge of definition without making it hard. What's most remarkable, to me, though, is not the way he and his dancers can build crescendos of speed and power with exquisite control and delicacy, but the way he can let things ease up momentarily and thoroughly relax. Like how Frances Hare (in Prelude) sinks from a tall stretch to a sitting position on the floor: her torso makes a smooth, steady drop, while her limbs, suddenly tangential, seem to rearrange themselves out of the way.
I can't think of anyone besides Fagan who provides such abrupt moments of deep, mysterious peacefulness. He's comfortable, too, letting you look at an easy pose for a long time. You feel the dancers don't need to push their presence at you, but you do feel them fully present. Steve Humphrey, Norwood Pennewell, Regina Smith, and Shelley Taplin, wearing grayish variations on a sweatsuit theme, are featured in Fagan's new Never Top 40 (Juke Box), in five parts, to an eclectic range of music from Jussi Bjoerling singing “Nessun dorma,” to the Melodians, to the Art Ensemble of Chicago – all pieces with special appeal to the choreographer. And the uncomplicated conviction of the dancers keeps this odd assortment from seeming a hodgepodge. The first quartet has a tight formality, almost a squareness, but its spirit quickens at the end when the dancers stretch their arms up to clutch hands, fall rigidly sideways, then quickly patter around against the triumphant lyricism of “Vincera, vincera.”
There's a sense of mental spaciousness in the second quartet, almost as beautifully transparent and feelingful as Keith Jarrett's solo piano rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” to which it's set. The dancers enter with airy, pedaling jumps that feel like prances. I remember twitters of little flexes through the torsos, stronger flexes breaking the waist, movements where the dancers seem all elbows. There are sudden, dipping spurts of miraculously fast movement; long meditative poses; the contrariness of the group stepping rapidly but moving quite gradually in a broad arc. Humphrey's solo to the Melodians’ reggae “Rivers of Babylon” continues the feeling. How beautifully he keeps the rhythms trembling through his torso! He breaks into crooked leaps, tumbles into soft dives and scrunched rolls. Once, stooped over, he crudely promenades with his hands patting the floor. He can seem stubby and jagged, all fists and knees, then, lazing on the floor he'll pump his body up on one arm to a dreamy slant. For a moment, life is perfect. Shelly Taplin is beautifully focused in a solo full of delicate hesitations. Even at the lowest energy, she can sustain a stretch eloquently, and when things get fiendishly fast you can still feel her sensitivity to the music. Pennewell and Smith are excellent too in the final duet, and the balloon of his jumps, the breadth of his movement, his casual poise, are especially appealing.
At the Joyce Theater (March 26 to 31).
Irish Stories and Eskimo Songs
March 5
Brian Moran, who has worked with Yoshiko Chuma's School of Hard Knocks, presented a discontinuous, wild-ass duet with Daniel McIntosh, a few tape recorders, and a couple of films (by Richard Kern). Two cassette tapes crash off the balcony at St. Mark's, and Moran fusses with them, playing a bit of one or the and wriggling into a fast, springing solo, that quiets down just as quickly. when he sprawls atop one of the recorders afterwards, the machine yowls.
We're Trying to Tell You is a fragmented, straight-faced, but emotional saga from which narrative has been mostly excised: only the facts are missing. Seated on the altar, Moran and McIntosh drop cassette tapes from their mouths, like the generic dog delivering the master's paper. And as the piece goes on, harsh humor comes out of touchy, sketchy situations. For a while, audio tapes seem to dictate the rules. Moran runs to the sound of a racing auto engine. Something blows up when he throws the recorder to McIntosh. Moran regularly bumps the recorder against McIntosh's head to the sound of a jackhammer. In one film, the guys are also seated, without expression, and then they go wild and shaky, and finally peel rubbery skin off their faces. The suddenness of the gag part is funny – maybe.
A later film, black and white, shows Moran, baseball bat in hand, following McIntosh who's strolling with his tape recorder past the “pride” site where gays were bashed by bat-wielding teenagers. Moran pursues him over some bleachers into a warehouse-like space. They fight on film, throw the recorder through the air, while live, they're rolling, falling, skidding. The whole business of this relationship is ticklish. We've already seen McIntosh dead on the floor earlier, no, crawling slowly as Moran examined his progress with a utility lamp. We've seen McIntosh hunkering in pain, and the pair of them facing each other in mock battle, tumbling and kicking. McIntosh had a solo too, moving stiff-backed and skewed, with a twist to his limbs as if the joints of his shoulders and hips were naturally unhinged.
When Moran and McIntosh dance simultaneously, the radical differences in their flinging and dislocated styles are tantalizing. They definitely hear different drummers. Moran takes care of the dead recorders scattered around the space, McIntosh skims the empty plastic cases across the floor to him. Both of them bellywhomp to service the machines, and turn them on and off. I liked the distortion and vaguely biographical scope of Moran's piece, if not the way it sometimes lost impetus and floundered. I didn't care for its occasional blank task-oriented realism, the dull attendance to the needs of the recorders, but I was intrigued by the way acrid passions and humor kept hooking up.
Performance artist John Kelly's Long Live the Knife is an elegantly presented silent (except for a sound score and some falsetto singing) melodrama with projected intertitles, a story of (sob) an impoverished mother of nine who allows her son to be castrated for the pope's choir in the hope that he'll have a better life. In the event, it all seems silly rather than terrible. He finds success, like Stella Dallas's beloved daughter Laurel, but mamma, like Stella, is left out in the cold. One image, though, penetrated beneath the piece's stylistic veneer: Kelly, as a child, in a white shirt, rolls the length of St. Mark's, yawns, and lays his head on his mother's shoulder to doze for a second before being led away by a nun to have his balls buzz-sawed.
I don't understand what's in Tere O'Connor's mind, but I want to. In Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby, a dance in four sections with Nancy Coenen, O'Connor wears a dark shirt with big red buttons, wide pants chopped at the calf, and looks like some clown/child who's sentimental mother made him dress like this. He seems like someone who'd be out of place anywhere, but his demeanor is very serious, formal, insistent. There's an astonishing, fierce prissiness to the character, as dainty as a Doberman. A brilliant dancer, with exquisite footwork, in his first solo he advances determinedly on a zigzag, but stumbles, perhaps startled by his shadow looming huge behind him. He jumps back and takes softly plodding steps in place. A beautiful, ill-fated sweep into attitude crashes. His jumping is tight, constricted; then becomes straddling and grotesque. Nancy Coenen's solo is like his but softer, with more hopping and more action in the wrists and fingers. She's dressed like him too, but in muted gray and green, and her hair is styled boyishly. An almost ceiling-high picture of a giant as a child might draw him (or perhaps it's a giant child) unrolls, and O'Connor and Coenen dance in unison, with a sense of absolute ritual necessity. In a final solo, O'Connor turns with hard intensity, jamming his elbows to power and compress his spins; he falls and convulses with incomprehensible terror and pain, and wrenches from under his shirt a tiny baby doll. A compelling notion drives O'Connor's piece, and the force of his commitment to it is undeniable, but Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby is also so chary of clues as to be private. The audience responds to its hardness and force, to the bluntness of its overall design, to the fierce clarity of the performances. But not, I think, with much grasp of what's happening in O'Connor's closed, traumatic world.
At Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery (February 14-17).
DTW was packed for its Inuit program by Eskimo performers from opposite sides of the Hudson Bay in northern Quebec and the Northwest territories. Two elderly sisters in glasses and fur, Alasi Alasuak and Nellie Nungak, sang “throat songs” they learned when they were young, and one of them played haunting marvels on the mouth harp. Donald and Alice Suluk (she was bedecked in leather and beads; but he'd abandoned his caribou in Toronto because it was too hot) performed drum dances accompanied on a large, flat, tambourine-like drum that is rotated on a handle when the rhythms rev up.
Charlie Adams, also from northern Quebec, translated the performers' staggeringly plain introductions between songs. The ladies stood face-to-face in profile, just a few inches apart to produce (sort of, but not really) dry growling, panting, grating, humming, twanging melodic and guttural chants based largely on the imitation of environmental sounds. At times they invoked a mild version of the detached, demonic voices that speak out of the mouths of possessed little girls. Barely moving their mouths, getting the sounds resonating in the head and throat, the singers rolled their necks, touching bodies slightly side-to-side, in an intimacy of breath and rhythm that challenges endurance and sometimes ends in giggles. Intermittently, Alasi Alasuak played songs on the mouth harp, which were originally played on a goose feather. Delicate, floating melodies of overtones hovered behind her rhythmic plucking, becoming more elaborately filigreed with each number. The drum dance songs (or pissirq) played by Donald and Alice Suluk are often about hunting subjects and are, in part, a traditional way of teaching. The couple traded off the drumming (Donald Suluk said it's harder than it looks), smacking the drumhead with a short club, and sometimes rocked slightly as they treaded the perimeter of a circle. The vigorous last song got Donald stooping and bouncing. Throughout, the minimal physicality of all the performers, their utter lack of any kind of pretension, their unassuming slackness, made me somewhat abashed. No one had taught them to push at us with their energy. No sense of theater intervened between us.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 14 to 17).
Brian Moran, who has worked with Yoshiko Chuma's School of Hard Knocks, presented a discontinuous, wild-ass duet with Daniel McIntosh, a few tape recorders, and a couple of films (by Richard Kern). Two cassette tapes crash off the balcony at St. Mark's, and Moran fusses with them, playing a bit of one or the and wriggling into a fast, springing solo, that quiets down just as quickly. when he sprawls atop one of the recorders afterwards, the machine yowls.
We're Trying to Tell You is a fragmented, straight-faced, but emotional saga from which narrative has been mostly excised: only the facts are missing. Seated on the altar, Moran and McIntosh drop cassette tapes from their mouths, like the generic dog delivering the master's paper. And as the piece goes on, harsh humor comes out of touchy, sketchy situations. For a while, audio tapes seem to dictate the rules. Moran runs to the sound of a racing auto engine. Something blows up when he throws the recorder to McIntosh. Moran regularly bumps the recorder against McIntosh's head to the sound of a jackhammer. In one film, the guys are also seated, without expression, and then they go wild and shaky, and finally peel rubbery skin off their faces. The suddenness of the gag part is funny – maybe.
A later film, black and white, shows Moran, baseball bat in hand, following McIntosh who's strolling with his tape recorder past the “pride” site where gays were bashed by bat-wielding teenagers. Moran pursues him over some bleachers into a warehouse-like space. They fight on film, throw the recorder through the air, while live, they're rolling, falling, skidding. The whole business of this relationship is ticklish. We've already seen McIntosh dead on the floor earlier, no, crawling slowly as Moran examined his progress with a utility lamp. We've seen McIntosh hunkering in pain, and the pair of them facing each other in mock battle, tumbling and kicking. McIntosh had a solo too, moving stiff-backed and skewed, with a twist to his limbs as if the joints of his shoulders and hips were naturally unhinged.
When Moran and McIntosh dance simultaneously, the radical differences in their flinging and dislocated styles are tantalizing. They definitely hear different drummers. Moran takes care of the dead recorders scattered around the space, McIntosh skims the empty plastic cases across the floor to him. Both of them bellywhomp to service the machines, and turn them on and off. I liked the distortion and vaguely biographical scope of Moran's piece, if not the way it sometimes lost impetus and floundered. I didn't care for its occasional blank task-oriented realism, the dull attendance to the needs of the recorders, but I was intrigued by the way acrid passions and humor kept hooking up.
Performance artist John Kelly's Long Live the Knife is an elegantly presented silent (except for a sound score and some falsetto singing) melodrama with projected intertitles, a story of (sob) an impoverished mother of nine who allows her son to be castrated for the pope's choir in the hope that he'll have a better life. In the event, it all seems silly rather than terrible. He finds success, like Stella Dallas's beloved daughter Laurel, but mamma, like Stella, is left out in the cold. One image, though, penetrated beneath the piece's stylistic veneer: Kelly, as a child, in a white shirt, rolls the length of St. Mark's, yawns, and lays his head on his mother's shoulder to doze for a second before being led away by a nun to have his balls buzz-sawed.
I don't understand what's in Tere O'Connor's mind, but I want to. In Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby, a dance in four sections with Nancy Coenen, O'Connor wears a dark shirt with big red buttons, wide pants chopped at the calf, and looks like some clown/child who's sentimental mother made him dress like this. He seems like someone who'd be out of place anywhere, but his demeanor is very serious, formal, insistent. There's an astonishing, fierce prissiness to the character, as dainty as a Doberman. A brilliant dancer, with exquisite footwork, in his first solo he advances determinedly on a zigzag, but stumbles, perhaps startled by his shadow looming huge behind him. He jumps back and takes softly plodding steps in place. A beautiful, ill-fated sweep into attitude crashes. His jumping is tight, constricted; then becomes straddling and grotesque. Nancy Coenen's solo is like his but softer, with more hopping and more action in the wrists and fingers. She's dressed like him too, but in muted gray and green, and her hair is styled boyishly. An almost ceiling-high picture of a giant as a child might draw him (or perhaps it's a giant child) unrolls, and O'Connor and Coenen dance in unison, with a sense of absolute ritual necessity. In a final solo, O'Connor turns with hard intensity, jamming his elbows to power and compress his spins; he falls and convulses with incomprehensible terror and pain, and wrenches from under his shirt a tiny baby doll. A compelling notion drives O'Connor's piece, and the force of his commitment to it is undeniable, but Boy, Boy, Giant, Baby is also so chary of clues as to be private. The audience responds to its hardness and force, to the bluntness of its overall design, to the fierce clarity of the performances. But not, I think, with much grasp of what's happening in O'Connor's closed, traumatic world.
At Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery (February 14-17).
DTW was packed for its Inuit program by Eskimo performers from opposite sides of the Hudson Bay in northern Quebec and the Northwest territories. Two elderly sisters in glasses and fur, Alasi Alasuak and Nellie Nungak, sang “throat songs” they learned when they were young, and one of them played haunting marvels on the mouth harp. Donald and Alice Suluk (she was bedecked in leather and beads; but he'd abandoned his caribou in Toronto because it was too hot) performed drum dances accompanied on a large, flat, tambourine-like drum that is rotated on a handle when the rhythms rev up.
Charlie Adams, also from northern Quebec, translated the performers' staggeringly plain introductions between songs. The ladies stood face-to-face in profile, just a few inches apart to produce (sort of, but not really) dry growling, panting, grating, humming, twanging melodic and guttural chants based largely on the imitation of environmental sounds. At times they invoked a mild version of the detached, demonic voices that speak out of the mouths of possessed little girls. Barely moving their mouths, getting the sounds resonating in the head and throat, the singers rolled their necks, touching bodies slightly side-to-side, in an intimacy of breath and rhythm that challenges endurance and sometimes ends in giggles. Intermittently, Alasi Alasuak played songs on the mouth harp, which were originally played on a goose feather. Delicate, floating melodies of overtones hovered behind her rhythmic plucking, becoming more elaborately filigreed with each number. The drum dance songs (or pissirq) played by Donald and Alice Suluk are often about hunting subjects and are, in part, a traditional way of teaching. The couple traded off the drumming (Donald Suluk said it's harder than it looks), smacking the drumhead with a short club, and sometimes rocked slightly as they treaded the perimeter of a circle. The vigorous last song got Donald stooping and bouncing. Throughout, the minimal physicality of all the performers, their utter lack of any kind of pretension, their unassuming slackness, made me somewhat abashed. No one had taught them to push at us with their energy. No sense of theater intervened between us.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 14 to 17).
New Guy on the Block
April 4
Joffrey dancer Philip Jerry's Hexameron, having it's New York premiere, is an able, novice work with a number of bright spots and a not unpleasant predictability. Set to Hexameron: Grandes Variations sur la Marche des Puritains de Bellini, by half a dozen pianist-composers, most notably Liszt, it features big opening and closing sections which the Joffrey dancers handle graciously, and seven mostly dashing variations.
Jerry abates the formality of his most symmetrical designs – at the beginning, for example, when the main couple (James Canfield and Denise Jackson) is attended by six other couples – by keeping them mildly busy around the edges. But, particularly in the larger group sections, and where the music is most emphatic, he treats the music stiffly, systematically phrasing the movement with it and never riding across the beat. So the lyrical bent of the dancing seems thwarted, unintentionally boxed in. This is most obviously so, I think, in the final section, when the women's grands battements regularly hit the musical accents too roundly.
Some variations, like the fourth, with Jodie Gates and Tom Mossbrucker, had a particular gaiety and charm: here she teases him, with bright, escaping jumps and impetuous flurries of kicks that suggest a bird furiously shaking itself out after a splash in a puddle. Five guys flying rapidly through in the fifth variation would have been the Prince's Friends, if this had been a ballet with a prince. In the the official pas de deux, running big searching loops, Canfield scatters six girls – a trio, a pair, and a single one – before Jackson shoots, nearly upside down, into his arms from the wing the last one vanished into. There's a lit of swanny lifting here and I liked seeing jackson splayed flat open against him, spinning. She was bright and technically right, not as briskly schoolmarmish as she can sometimes be, and Canfield danced with a noble confidence and warmth. All in all, Hexameron represents a pretty felicitous try on everyone's part.
liked the quick-switching energies of William Forsythe's misogynistic/manhating Love Songs (1979), which the Joffrey premiered in this country in 1983. To recordings by Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, with its pent-up soloists spotlit in the nowhere of dark stage, Love Songs is irrevocably rude and sleazy. In solos and duets, the dancers fling their bodies in disgust and rage, break and collapse, throw themselves around, work themselves into fits and let their movements dribble away. The dancing fluctuates wildly between high pitch but controlled, articulate moves, and abandoned “ordinary” movements – drastic in its rough intensity, losing its balance, suddenly pooping out. And within the darkness of the stage, there's usually one or two idle, slouching watchers, usually men. What I disliked about Love Songs was not its ugly view of man-woman relationships, but that it didn't dig more deeply into them.
Fact is, audiences love love, and they love watching men and women treat each other rotten. I like it myself. And Forsythe treats us royally to nasty behavior and ambivalence. But I felt like one of his hovering voyeurs – too uninvolved. I was reminded of Twyla Tharp's much harsher Short Stories, where the dancers treat each other even worse – but Short Stories insinuates itself into you and is ultimately terrifying. The first time I saw it, a woman in front of me broke into gasping hysterics – an extreme but appropriate response – and I wasn't too far from that myself. Love Songs is merely clinical. The dancers give everything to it; they're very hot: Leslie Carothers, Deborah Dawn, Charlene Gehm and James Canfield, Jodie Gates, Beatriz Rodriguez and Philip Jerry, and Luis Perez.
At New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, 870-5570 (March 6 to 31).
Joffrey dancer Philip Jerry's Hexameron, having it's New York premiere, is an able, novice work with a number of bright spots and a not unpleasant predictability. Set to Hexameron: Grandes Variations sur la Marche des Puritains de Bellini, by half a dozen pianist-composers, most notably Liszt, it features big opening and closing sections which the Joffrey dancers handle graciously, and seven mostly dashing variations.
Jerry abates the formality of his most symmetrical designs – at the beginning, for example, when the main couple (James Canfield and Denise Jackson) is attended by six other couples – by keeping them mildly busy around the edges. But, particularly in the larger group sections, and where the music is most emphatic, he treats the music stiffly, systematically phrasing the movement with it and never riding across the beat. So the lyrical bent of the dancing seems thwarted, unintentionally boxed in. This is most obviously so, I think, in the final section, when the women's grands battements regularly hit the musical accents too roundly.
Some variations, like the fourth, with Jodie Gates and Tom Mossbrucker, had a particular gaiety and charm: here she teases him, with bright, escaping jumps and impetuous flurries of kicks that suggest a bird furiously shaking itself out after a splash in a puddle. Five guys flying rapidly through in the fifth variation would have been the Prince's Friends, if this had been a ballet with a prince. In the the official pas de deux, running big searching loops, Canfield scatters six girls – a trio, a pair, and a single one – before Jackson shoots, nearly upside down, into his arms from the wing the last one vanished into. There's a lit of swanny lifting here and I liked seeing jackson splayed flat open against him, spinning. She was bright and technically right, not as briskly schoolmarmish as she can sometimes be, and Canfield danced with a noble confidence and warmth. All in all, Hexameron represents a pretty felicitous try on everyone's part.
liked the quick-switching energies of William Forsythe's misogynistic/manhating Love Songs (1979), which the Joffrey premiered in this country in 1983. To recordings by Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, with its pent-up soloists spotlit in the nowhere of dark stage, Love Songs is irrevocably rude and sleazy. In solos and duets, the dancers fling their bodies in disgust and rage, break and collapse, throw themselves around, work themselves into fits and let their movements dribble away. The dancing fluctuates wildly between high pitch but controlled, articulate moves, and abandoned “ordinary” movements – drastic in its rough intensity, losing its balance, suddenly pooping out. And within the darkness of the stage, there's usually one or two idle, slouching watchers, usually men. What I disliked about Love Songs was not its ugly view of man-woman relationships, but that it didn't dig more deeply into them.
Fact is, audiences love love, and they love watching men and women treat each other rotten. I like it myself. And Forsythe treats us royally to nasty behavior and ambivalence. But I felt like one of his hovering voyeurs – too uninvolved. I was reminded of Twyla Tharp's much harsher Short Stories, where the dancers treat each other even worse – but Short Stories insinuates itself into you and is ultimately terrifying. The first time I saw it, a woman in front of me broke into gasping hysterics – an extreme but appropriate response – and I wasn't too far from that myself. Love Songs is merely clinical. The dancers give everything to it; they're very hot: Leslie Carothers, Deborah Dawn, Charlene Gehm and James Canfield, Jodie Gates, Beatriz Rodriguez and Philip Jerry, and Luis Perez.
At New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, 870-5570 (March 6 to 31).
On the Bright Side
January 22
Let me break with custom and, before anything else, name the excellent dancers who made
Susan Marshall's concert at DTW such a special pleasure: Guillermo Resto, Beatrice Bogorad, Kathy Casey, Arthur Armijo, David Landis, Jackie Goodrich, David Dorfman, Lauren Dong, and Marshall herself. But don't think they outclassed the choreography. In a concert of five works, made since 1982, Marshall demonstrated that the quality of her work is consistent. Four works were strong and sharp and very different in flavor; the fifth, Fault Line, was more routine in its development and too long, but even it was respectable. It was also the earliest piece of the five, and that makes a serious argument for (gulp) optimism.
The new piece, Opening Gambits, last on the program, was a wise paean to the rough-and-tumble clumsiness and oblique behavior that can make the transition from childhood to puberty thoroughly goofy when it's not painfully embarrassing. But there's no shameful consciousness, no teenage agony in Marshall's charming piece. The three dancers, the brother, Kathy Casey as his sister, and Beatrice Bogorad as her preoccupied, perhaps slightly older pal. They could almost make you willing to go through adolescence again. Resto is funny, shy, coyly bullying, and irresistible, and, without any inconsistency, seems to swing wildly between the ages of eight and 15. He and Casey swing and bounce in play, but he shows an edge in muscular strength and can't resist regularly wrestling her to the floor – which she doesn't mind a bit. Bogorad quietly slouches around on her own, subtly introspective, her belly button peeping out between her waistband and her shirt. Sometimes she and Casey just mosey along together. Sometimes she just turns slowly with her belly curving out, looking like some contemplative Flemish Virgin. Resto's awkward urges prompt him to oafish, off-the-wall impulses. He demonstrates his burgeoning power – energy that exceeds any coherent purposes he might put to it – in wonderfully inappropriate ways: grabbing the foot of his forward leg with both hands as he descends from a leap, or, in the same vein, jumping and holding onto his shoes as he comes down, nearly thunking on his hands. Meanwhile, he gradually works toward Bogorad in a roundabout way – playing up to her, using Casey as a happily willing go-between. He quivers moonily, snaps up Casey into a rambunctious, spastic tango that wilts into hangdog interludes. Like the wolf in sheep's clothing, he almost wears her as a disguise, getting Casey to pick up on his movement and draw Bogorad into imitation of the patterns.
What's extraordinary in this piece, besides its combination of giddy improbability and truthfulness, is also remarkable in Marshall's other works. The most complex and delicate feelings are fully expressed through movement – not just in the climactic shapes and gestures in which choreographers usually convey life's big dramas, but in the flexible, spontaneous play of attack and timing. This is most evident, perhaps, in the second section of her 1983 Ward, where the dancers are trapped side-by-side in chairs and the focus is therefore very tight. Jackie Goodrich and David Landis illuminate their complex relationship – he was once responsible for her care, now he's incapacitated – through the restricted flings of his gnarled hands, through the small turns and anglings of their heads, through the way he'll brusquely pluck her comforting hand off his thigh, or place it there if she doesn't. Their gestures are sparing in number, but infinitely various in effect as rivalry, reined-in anger, need for control, tenderness, feelings of obligation, stubbornness, resentment, flicker in ephemeral combinations. The dancers play out this intricate, restrained game not only impeccably but with an alertness, energy, and split-second timing that gives the episode a biting, cruel spontaneity.
Routine and Variations is a very funny take-off on gymnastic floor routines, for Marshall and Casey in dark gymsuits and knee pads. They open with what look like Dorothy Hamill hair-bouncing exercises, and breeze dippily through a surprising series of bright-eyed feats and pseudo-feats – like a brief pose in which they lie, bellies pressed together, waving their hands through the opening in a diamond they form with their legs. The jokes are rarely the obvious ones, except for a bit off show-off jealousy. Fault Line is a two-against-one trio for Marshall, Lauren Dong, and David Dorfman switching through episodes of hysteria, comfort, and aggression. But Fault Line becomes routine and the interactions smudge as the format keeps repeating, the dancers repel each other more fiercely, Rob Kaplan's music grows more tumultuous, and the violence accelerates. Arthur Armijo displays a rich strength and eloquence as the central figure in the opening work, Trio in Four Parts, from 1983. In the first section, he's paired with Resto in an impulsive, copycat duet in which they follow each other – swinging, crouching, lunging, jiggling shoulders. Their movement is satisfyingly full and succulent, smoothly articulate when it's not abrupt, and there's a quality of harmonizing together as well as challenging each other in a friendly way. Then, alone, Armijo's solo develops out of an exclamatory Wait! gesture, like hailing a taxi, that then falters. He's gradually assailed from every which way and his movement becomes more urgently flung, more circular and wheeling. Big, soft whirling steps arch his body and sweep him to the floor.
The third part is a snappy, hunkering, competitive trio for the two men plus Casey, and it's interesting to contrast her coolness, the way her gestures direct you away from the body, to the way the men hook you in to their physical beings. In the last section, Armijo's got Casey, almost. He whirls around her peripherally, and she merely smiles. Beside her, he raises his arm in that hailing gesture, but she takes charge and brings his hand down. Attraction vies with a sense of the other's intrusiveness: he shoves her off when she wants him, but he drops right over her, envelops her, when he's in the mood. Finally, they stand side by side, transmuting their personal interplay into an elaborate, imitative pattern of swiftly looping, slicing, dovetailing arm gestures that she begins. They etch that risky pattern on the air, where it seems to become a thoroughly abstract, insistent emblem balancing independence and interdependence.
Luis Resto's music for Trio – also his exhilarating, thumping score for Opening Gambits, which I liked even better – is very fine. Linda Fisher's score for Ward, too, is economical and beautifully apt. And the uncredited costumes for the whole program were simple and right.
At Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Schönburg Theater (January 3-6).
Let me break with custom and, before anything else, name the excellent dancers who made
Susan Marshall's concert at DTW such a special pleasure: Guillermo Resto, Beatrice Bogorad, Kathy Casey, Arthur Armijo, David Landis, Jackie Goodrich, David Dorfman, Lauren Dong, and Marshall herself. But don't think they outclassed the choreography. In a concert of five works, made since 1982, Marshall demonstrated that the quality of her work is consistent. Four works were strong and sharp and very different in flavor; the fifth, Fault Line, was more routine in its development and too long, but even it was respectable. It was also the earliest piece of the five, and that makes a serious argument for (gulp) optimism.
The new piece, Opening Gambits, last on the program, was a wise paean to the rough-and-tumble clumsiness and oblique behavior that can make the transition from childhood to puberty thoroughly goofy when it's not painfully embarrassing. But there's no shameful consciousness, no teenage agony in Marshall's charming piece. The three dancers, the brother, Kathy Casey as his sister, and Beatrice Bogorad as her preoccupied, perhaps slightly older pal. They could almost make you willing to go through adolescence again. Resto is funny, shy, coyly bullying, and irresistible, and, without any inconsistency, seems to swing wildly between the ages of eight and 15. He and Casey swing and bounce in play, but he shows an edge in muscular strength and can't resist regularly wrestling her to the floor – which she doesn't mind a bit. Bogorad quietly slouches around on her own, subtly introspective, her belly button peeping out between her waistband and her shirt. Sometimes she and Casey just mosey along together. Sometimes she just turns slowly with her belly curving out, looking like some contemplative Flemish Virgin. Resto's awkward urges prompt him to oafish, off-the-wall impulses. He demonstrates his burgeoning power – energy that exceeds any coherent purposes he might put to it – in wonderfully inappropriate ways: grabbing the foot of his forward leg with both hands as he descends from a leap, or, in the same vein, jumping and holding onto his shoes as he comes down, nearly thunking on his hands. Meanwhile, he gradually works toward Bogorad in a roundabout way – playing up to her, using Casey as a happily willing go-between. He quivers moonily, snaps up Casey into a rambunctious, spastic tango that wilts into hangdog interludes. Like the wolf in sheep's clothing, he almost wears her as a disguise, getting Casey to pick up on his movement and draw Bogorad into imitation of the patterns.
What's extraordinary in this piece, besides its combination of giddy improbability and truthfulness, is also remarkable in Marshall's other works. The most complex and delicate feelings are fully expressed through movement – not just in the climactic shapes and gestures in which choreographers usually convey life's big dramas, but in the flexible, spontaneous play of attack and timing. This is most evident, perhaps, in the second section of her 1983 Ward, where the dancers are trapped side-by-side in chairs and the focus is therefore very tight. Jackie Goodrich and David Landis illuminate their complex relationship – he was once responsible for her care, now he's incapacitated – through the restricted flings of his gnarled hands, through the small turns and anglings of their heads, through the way he'll brusquely pluck her comforting hand off his thigh, or place it there if she doesn't. Their gestures are sparing in number, but infinitely various in effect as rivalry, reined-in anger, need for control, tenderness, feelings of obligation, stubbornness, resentment, flicker in ephemeral combinations. The dancers play out this intricate, restrained game not only impeccably but with an alertness, energy, and split-second timing that gives the episode a biting, cruel spontaneity.
Routine and Variations is a very funny take-off on gymnastic floor routines, for Marshall and Casey in dark gymsuits and knee pads. They open with what look like Dorothy Hamill hair-bouncing exercises, and breeze dippily through a surprising series of bright-eyed feats and pseudo-feats – like a brief pose in which they lie, bellies pressed together, waving their hands through the opening in a diamond they form with their legs. The jokes are rarely the obvious ones, except for a bit off show-off jealousy. Fault Line is a two-against-one trio for Marshall, Lauren Dong, and David Dorfman switching through episodes of hysteria, comfort, and aggression. But Fault Line becomes routine and the interactions smudge as the format keeps repeating, the dancers repel each other more fiercely, Rob Kaplan's music grows more tumultuous, and the violence accelerates. Arthur Armijo displays a rich strength and eloquence as the central figure in the opening work, Trio in Four Parts, from 1983. In the first section, he's paired with Resto in an impulsive, copycat duet in which they follow each other – swinging, crouching, lunging, jiggling shoulders. Their movement is satisfyingly full and succulent, smoothly articulate when it's not abrupt, and there's a quality of harmonizing together as well as challenging each other in a friendly way. Then, alone, Armijo's solo develops out of an exclamatory Wait! gesture, like hailing a taxi, that then falters. He's gradually assailed from every which way and his movement becomes more urgently flung, more circular and wheeling. Big, soft whirling steps arch his body and sweep him to the floor.
The third part is a snappy, hunkering, competitive trio for the two men plus Casey, and it's interesting to contrast her coolness, the way her gestures direct you away from the body, to the way the men hook you in to their physical beings. In the last section, Armijo's got Casey, almost. He whirls around her peripherally, and she merely smiles. Beside her, he raises his arm in that hailing gesture, but she takes charge and brings his hand down. Attraction vies with a sense of the other's intrusiveness: he shoves her off when she wants him, but he drops right over her, envelops her, when he's in the mood. Finally, they stand side by side, transmuting their personal interplay into an elaborate, imitative pattern of swiftly looping, slicing, dovetailing arm gestures that she begins. They etch that risky pattern on the air, where it seems to become a thoroughly abstract, insistent emblem balancing independence and interdependence.
Luis Resto's music for Trio – also his exhilarating, thumping score for Opening Gambits, which I liked even better – is very fine. Linda Fisher's score for Ward, too, is economical and beautifully apt. And the uncredited costumes for the whole program were simple and right.
At Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Schönburg Theater (January 3-6).
Puttin' on the Glitz
January 8
Does “entertainment” have to be dumb? I think the answer is yes. Ann Reinking's slick and glossy show at the Joyce, which managed a few snazzy moments along the way, had an irritating pretentiousness that came mostly from its phonied-up format. Even before it started, there was the open curtain, two workmanlike bars of stage lights, members of the band tuning up and noodling around. One dancer comes out to stretch; eventually there are, I think, five. As if there were no room backstage at the Joyce to warm up. So we know we're in for a little dose of A Chorus Line. We're supposed to feel like insiders. What does this have to do with the show that follows? Mostly zilch. It's the usual song-and-dance revue in which you never can forget who's supposed to be the star, though it annoyed me a lot less than Shirley MacLaine's unctuous show – staged by the same Alan Johnson – earlier this year. At least we were spared hearing the star tout her accomplishments, though we did get True Confessions (“I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to be pink.”)
The opening number is a lumpy song, “Music Moves Me,” presenting some choreographic ABCs in the ACL tradition (“Every movement leads to another...”). Then, whammo, somebody's silhouetted, spotlighted up behind the band. It's Linda Carter! No! Is it Ann-Margret? No. Is it...? Can it be? It is...SHE! The lighting is having dramatic conniptions. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying all that artifice. But finding myself already buried in bullshit complicated things. Reinking's an attractive package. She's an effective dancer and she can get by with her singing. I guess she falls into the “song stylist” category, because even when she belts them out in her husky voice, what you're listening to are the attention-getting flourishes and odd ritards. Not the sense and not the tune but the impenetrable polyurethane finish of generalized sentiment and inflated drama. The focus of the dancing too is on climactic gestures and rhythmic punctuation. She can certainly wiggle those hips and shimmy those shoulders. All spice and nothing to eat. The second number also is a turkey, one of those cynical, nasty, romantic duets with quarreling and making up and wedding bells at the end even while Reinking and her partner, Michael Kubala, are making eyes at members of the audience. In retrospect, though, maybe it made good sense to get the worst material over with right away. Almost everything else is better.
The dancers are fine (they sing too, but usually together) – Gary Chryst, Reed Jones, Kubala, Rob Marshall, Sara Miles, Christina Saffran. Chryst, formerly of the Joffrey Ballet, is a brilliant performer in his own right, and revealing in this context. He does the same gestures as everyone else, but those gestures aren't just emphatic physical designs – they're expressions of character. His performance has a degree of detail that makes it fascinating without mitigating any of its punch. I like Marshall's abandon, and Saffran's frothiness. Miles can sing, and when she whomps into “Wild Women Don't Get the Blues,” the audience flips. The best material, to my mind, is the greedily practical humorous sleaze, which Reinking et al. bring off with some class, and the dancing that's wriggly, twitchy, highly energized, and percussive like a Motown medley or the snappy “Satin Doll,” “Stompin' at the Savoy,” “Hit Me with a Hot Note” set. I welcomed AR hanging on the proscenium in hot pink and black marabou mentioning in her pussycat voice that “I did a little shopping during the intermission.” And in “Baby Won't You Please Come Home,” strutting and tartly complaining, “I'm lonely and I'm hungry and I'm eatin' hash. I need some lovin' and I need some cash.” Reinking's not unsympathetic but she's stiff. Of course, she can sling her body around, but she can only flip through about half a dozen facial expressions. Her stage personality has no surprises in it. In the course of the evening Reinking manages to persuade us that she's all surface, right down to the bone. And I'm not sure that's what she intends.
At the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, 242-0800 (December 20 to January 6). Directed and choreographed by Alan Johnson, musical supervision, original material, and vocal arrangements by Larry Grossman, musical direction and dance arrangements by Ronald Melrose, lighting by Ken Billington, costumes by Albert Wolsky.
New Yorkers usually must go out of town to see the kind of supper club review Cafe Versailles mounts. I wasn't sure if French style meant tits, but it does. The show on the little proscenium stage that opens into the overdressed dining room starts off Frenchy with “The Song from Moulin Rouge,” a Toulouse-Lautrecky curtain, somebody whirling Loie Fuller veils, and showgirls in red with hats whose décolletage is busting out all over. That is, their delectable bosoms ride on beds of fluffy red ruffles like choice little hors d'oeuvres on lettuce leaves. Bouncy tushies are also on the menu. There are two guys for the girls to waltz around with, and they get to bare their chests from time to time later on. One of the girls has a slightly pouty, wonderfully wet-looking lower lip highlighted by the merest drift of glitter. I fell in love with that lip. The show must be a killer to do: one number begins almost before the previous one is over. The costumes are responsible for the suspense – you never have any idea what combination of sequins and feathers and diamonds and shmatas and bare skin will next appear - even if the basic style is 40 or 80 years old. I imagine that backstage for the costume changes is really the place to be but if those changes weren't down to a routine everything would be a mess. The music is canned but only some of the singing is lip-synch.
A tall, gorgeous black dancer – really a man, according to the waiter, but you'd never know – doing Josephine Baker – in her famous banana outfit is a definite surprise, but less so than the two guys who pop in to partner her: they're mostly wearing skin, with two complementing bandanas, attached to the waistbands of their bikinis, that jerk and flop with every bump. The French theme gradually dissipates. There's Los Super Gauchos (this must be what happened to the Ed Sullivan Show), a trio stamping in rose-colored outfits and capes before resorting to serious bongos for enthusiastic variations on ka-boom-boom, and finally rhythmic bolo twirling that may have been really difficult and tricky but that reminded me of playing with crepe paper lariats as a kid. Mirrors. Tassels, Rhinestone Garter straps that dangle from the waist down to frilled cuffs that trail into long ruffles that the dancers hold with their fingertips while they sashay around the stage. These girls' mothers must stay home sewing their costumes through the long nights. Trouble is, it's hard to disconnect your brain for a whole hour. Maybe I didn't drink enough. “Where is Women Against Pornography when you need them,” my “date” muttered. But her remark was out of line. There wasn't any bondage.
Revue at Cafe Versailles, 151 East 50th Street, 753-3471.
Does “entertainment” have to be dumb? I think the answer is yes. Ann Reinking's slick and glossy show at the Joyce, which managed a few snazzy moments along the way, had an irritating pretentiousness that came mostly from its phonied-up format. Even before it started, there was the open curtain, two workmanlike bars of stage lights, members of the band tuning up and noodling around. One dancer comes out to stretch; eventually there are, I think, five. As if there were no room backstage at the Joyce to warm up. So we know we're in for a little dose of A Chorus Line. We're supposed to feel like insiders. What does this have to do with the show that follows? Mostly zilch. It's the usual song-and-dance revue in which you never can forget who's supposed to be the star, though it annoyed me a lot less than Shirley MacLaine's unctuous show – staged by the same Alan Johnson – earlier this year. At least we were spared hearing the star tout her accomplishments, though we did get True Confessions (“I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to be pink.”)
The opening number is a lumpy song, “Music Moves Me,” presenting some choreographic ABCs in the ACL tradition (“Every movement leads to another...”). Then, whammo, somebody's silhouetted, spotlighted up behind the band. It's Linda Carter! No! Is it Ann-Margret? No. Is it...? Can it be? It is...SHE! The lighting is having dramatic conniptions. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying all that artifice. But finding myself already buried in bullshit complicated things. Reinking's an attractive package. She's an effective dancer and she can get by with her singing. I guess she falls into the “song stylist” category, because even when she belts them out in her husky voice, what you're listening to are the attention-getting flourishes and odd ritards. Not the sense and not the tune but the impenetrable polyurethane finish of generalized sentiment and inflated drama. The focus of the dancing too is on climactic gestures and rhythmic punctuation. She can certainly wiggle those hips and shimmy those shoulders. All spice and nothing to eat. The second number also is a turkey, one of those cynical, nasty, romantic duets with quarreling and making up and wedding bells at the end even while Reinking and her partner, Michael Kubala, are making eyes at members of the audience. In retrospect, though, maybe it made good sense to get the worst material over with right away. Almost everything else is better.
The dancers are fine (they sing too, but usually together) – Gary Chryst, Reed Jones, Kubala, Rob Marshall, Sara Miles, Christina Saffran. Chryst, formerly of the Joffrey Ballet, is a brilliant performer in his own right, and revealing in this context. He does the same gestures as everyone else, but those gestures aren't just emphatic physical designs – they're expressions of character. His performance has a degree of detail that makes it fascinating without mitigating any of its punch. I like Marshall's abandon, and Saffran's frothiness. Miles can sing, and when she whomps into “Wild Women Don't Get the Blues,” the audience flips. The best material, to my mind, is the greedily practical humorous sleaze, which Reinking et al. bring off with some class, and the dancing that's wriggly, twitchy, highly energized, and percussive like a Motown medley or the snappy “Satin Doll,” “Stompin' at the Savoy,” “Hit Me with a Hot Note” set. I welcomed AR hanging on the proscenium in hot pink and black marabou mentioning in her pussycat voice that “I did a little shopping during the intermission.” And in “Baby Won't You Please Come Home,” strutting and tartly complaining, “I'm lonely and I'm hungry and I'm eatin' hash. I need some lovin' and I need some cash.” Reinking's not unsympathetic but she's stiff. Of course, she can sling her body around, but she can only flip through about half a dozen facial expressions. Her stage personality has no surprises in it. In the course of the evening Reinking manages to persuade us that she's all surface, right down to the bone. And I'm not sure that's what she intends.
At the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, 242-0800 (December 20 to January 6). Directed and choreographed by Alan Johnson, musical supervision, original material, and vocal arrangements by Larry Grossman, musical direction and dance arrangements by Ronald Melrose, lighting by Ken Billington, costumes by Albert Wolsky.
New Yorkers usually must go out of town to see the kind of supper club review Cafe Versailles mounts. I wasn't sure if French style meant tits, but it does. The show on the little proscenium stage that opens into the overdressed dining room starts off Frenchy with “The Song from Moulin Rouge,” a Toulouse-Lautrecky curtain, somebody whirling Loie Fuller veils, and showgirls in red with hats whose décolletage is busting out all over. That is, their delectable bosoms ride on beds of fluffy red ruffles like choice little hors d'oeuvres on lettuce leaves. Bouncy tushies are also on the menu. There are two guys for the girls to waltz around with, and they get to bare their chests from time to time later on. One of the girls has a slightly pouty, wonderfully wet-looking lower lip highlighted by the merest drift of glitter. I fell in love with that lip. The show must be a killer to do: one number begins almost before the previous one is over. The costumes are responsible for the suspense – you never have any idea what combination of sequins and feathers and diamonds and shmatas and bare skin will next appear - even if the basic style is 40 or 80 years old. I imagine that backstage for the costume changes is really the place to be but if those changes weren't down to a routine everything would be a mess. The music is canned but only some of the singing is lip-synch.
A tall, gorgeous black dancer – really a man, according to the waiter, but you'd never know – doing Josephine Baker – in her famous banana outfit is a definite surprise, but less so than the two guys who pop in to partner her: they're mostly wearing skin, with two complementing bandanas, attached to the waistbands of their bikinis, that jerk and flop with every bump. The French theme gradually dissipates. There's Los Super Gauchos (this must be what happened to the Ed Sullivan Show), a trio stamping in rose-colored outfits and capes before resorting to serious bongos for enthusiastic variations on ka-boom-boom, and finally rhythmic bolo twirling that may have been really difficult and tricky but that reminded me of playing with crepe paper lariats as a kid. Mirrors. Tassels, Rhinestone Garter straps that dangle from the waist down to frilled cuffs that trail into long ruffles that the dancers hold with their fingertips while they sashay around the stage. These girls' mothers must stay home sewing their costumes through the long nights. Trouble is, it's hard to disconnect your brain for a whole hour. Maybe I didn't drink enough. “Where is Women Against Pornography when you need them,” my “date” muttered. But her remark was out of line. There wasn't any bondage.
Revue at Cafe Versailles, 151 East 50th Street, 753-3471.
Roughnecks
March 12
John Bernd seems to be busy all the time, trying out small, sketchy ideas in between grander schemes. He may seem somewhat flustered by where dancing and choreographing carries him, but he puts himself and his work on the line with incorrigible conviction. So, sometimes he's sharp and determined with an edge of bitter humor, sometimes he seems docile and a little lost, sometimes he's playing with a nervous-making subject, sometimes he hangs on the sidelines like he's the maid who's just here to clean up.
For Be Good to Me, Bernd arranged P.S. 122's “auditorium” more beautifully than I've ever seen it, with the audience stretched along one side and colored spotlights illuminating its small alcoves and moldings. Black mats were scattered across the floor, with a few pairs of well-used shitkicker boots parked here and there, several red chairs isolated in squares of light. A man (Youngblood Emanuel) lay on his side in the dim, far side of the space. Two still figures were framed in light (lighting design by Carol McDowell) – one in the doorway to the back room, the second, visible only from shoulder to hip, in that room's service window. Some foreign languages were being spoken on tape – one may have been Swedish. And there was a tocking rhythm of, possibly, pistol shots and finger-snapping. In Be Good to Me, an elegant, rather pure vision of the geometry of the room keeps the space lively all the way to its edges. Within that highly composed area, geometrically designed movement patterns that activate the whole space butt on schmoozy wind downs and pacific rests, and on rough, helter-skelter duet and solo improvisations that generate an interestingly messy excitement. The four dancers don't bother to hold themselves in a dancerly manner. They dress down, too, in an ordinary, workmanlike way (except Bernd, who wears a checkered skirt over black pants and undershirt). But they don't move ordinary. Particularly, in improvised sections, they show an unusual volubility and wildness of spirit. Sturdy Jennifer Monson's first solo starts quiet and scrunched in her curling toes and fingers, and grows hectic and flinging, with strange lightness and speed when real, earthbound weight is released. You can barely follow the body's nervy instinct in this kind of thing. Taller, dark-haired Annie Iobst, in loose pink bloomers, whirls and slides over Monson's back (or maybe the other way around), and joins her in a rough, wriggling tag. There's an impulsive recklessness to the dancers' games, often a quality of teasing or surprise. Sometimes the wildness is cut off, like when Monson and Iobst fall and Bernd comes in “unobtrusively” to collect the mats from the floor.
But sometimes it's raised to another level of giddiness and exaltation, Like when all four dancers, in duo teams, successively jump and dive through a kind of floating parallelogram. Or when Bernd and Iobst push and clutch and bite ferociously at each other. Or when the women scoot and shuffle and race around and one tosses a mat at the other. A few minutes later, they're provoking each other into a kind of crude bullfight, with one whipping a mat around and the other banging and sliding and throwing her chair. Or when all of them stomp and hop through the room in a vigorous pattern of thumping rhythms. The dreamier side of the piece, in vivid fragments, has its own fascinations. Like Emanuel sitting center stage, beginning to smile and turn his gaze upwards, letting his expressions slowly change, becoming graver. Or Bernd, as if behind a glass in the corner, jagging his tense hands in the air like a desperate window washer. The high pitch of that moment is unusual though; more often, I think I remember people going off to sleep and being interrupted, gently hauled back into the fray by a persistent urge for contact. Like Emanuel, who seemed to be dozing, getting up to pull the mat Bernd's lying on and roll him off. Then Bernd, roused, creeping behind him, piling on him, and softly knocking him down. In Be Good to Me, human contact is full of flavor and variety, full of the small dangers of individuality. But those perils aren't seriously threatening; they're the particular behavioral hooks that turn us on to each other.
At P.S. 122 (February 24 and 25).
John Bernd seems to be busy all the time, trying out small, sketchy ideas in between grander schemes. He may seem somewhat flustered by where dancing and choreographing carries him, but he puts himself and his work on the line with incorrigible conviction. So, sometimes he's sharp and determined with an edge of bitter humor, sometimes he seems docile and a little lost, sometimes he's playing with a nervous-making subject, sometimes he hangs on the sidelines like he's the maid who's just here to clean up.
For Be Good to Me, Bernd arranged P.S. 122's “auditorium” more beautifully than I've ever seen it, with the audience stretched along one side and colored spotlights illuminating its small alcoves and moldings. Black mats were scattered across the floor, with a few pairs of well-used shitkicker boots parked here and there, several red chairs isolated in squares of light. A man (Youngblood Emanuel) lay on his side in the dim, far side of the space. Two still figures were framed in light (lighting design by Carol McDowell) – one in the doorway to the back room, the second, visible only from shoulder to hip, in that room's service window. Some foreign languages were being spoken on tape – one may have been Swedish. And there was a tocking rhythm of, possibly, pistol shots and finger-snapping. In Be Good to Me, an elegant, rather pure vision of the geometry of the room keeps the space lively all the way to its edges. Within that highly composed area, geometrically designed movement patterns that activate the whole space butt on schmoozy wind downs and pacific rests, and on rough, helter-skelter duet and solo improvisations that generate an interestingly messy excitement. The four dancers don't bother to hold themselves in a dancerly manner. They dress down, too, in an ordinary, workmanlike way (except Bernd, who wears a checkered skirt over black pants and undershirt). But they don't move ordinary. Particularly, in improvised sections, they show an unusual volubility and wildness of spirit. Sturdy Jennifer Monson's first solo starts quiet and scrunched in her curling toes and fingers, and grows hectic and flinging, with strange lightness and speed when real, earthbound weight is released. You can barely follow the body's nervy instinct in this kind of thing. Taller, dark-haired Annie Iobst, in loose pink bloomers, whirls and slides over Monson's back (or maybe the other way around), and joins her in a rough, wriggling tag. There's an impulsive recklessness to the dancers' games, often a quality of teasing or surprise. Sometimes the wildness is cut off, like when Monson and Iobst fall and Bernd comes in “unobtrusively” to collect the mats from the floor.
But sometimes it's raised to another level of giddiness and exaltation, Like when all four dancers, in duo teams, successively jump and dive through a kind of floating parallelogram. Or when Bernd and Iobst push and clutch and bite ferociously at each other. Or when the women scoot and shuffle and race around and one tosses a mat at the other. A few minutes later, they're provoking each other into a kind of crude bullfight, with one whipping a mat around and the other banging and sliding and throwing her chair. Or when all of them stomp and hop through the room in a vigorous pattern of thumping rhythms. The dreamier side of the piece, in vivid fragments, has its own fascinations. Like Emanuel sitting center stage, beginning to smile and turn his gaze upwards, letting his expressions slowly change, becoming graver. Or Bernd, as if behind a glass in the corner, jagging his tense hands in the air like a desperate window washer. The high pitch of that moment is unusual though; more often, I think I remember people going off to sleep and being interrupted, gently hauled back into the fray by a persistent urge for contact. Like Emanuel, who seemed to be dozing, getting up to pull the mat Bernd's lying on and roll him off. Then Bernd, roused, creeping behind him, piling on him, and softly knocking him down. In Be Good to Me, human contact is full of flavor and variety, full of the small dangers of individuality. But those perils aren't seriously threatening; they're the particular behavioral hooks that turn us on to each other.
At P.S. 122 (February 24 and 25).
Sex Pack
March 26
Choreographer Sally Silvers and writer-musician Burt Andrews showed their organizing skills by assembling over 60 performers for Eagles Ate My Estrogen. Too bad the event was such garbage; the title should have clued me. Anything so extravagant and so bad should at least be fun. But it was thoroughly ill-natured; exactly like Silvers, who cued the show like a sullen, muttering heckler. Wearing a frail yellow and blue-blotched wrap and a headband set with peacock feathers, her cute face spoiled by expressions of superiority and annoyance, she was persistently sour. At least until the intermission, when I made my escape. Silvers runs an intimidating publicity machine and produces press releases of impressive intellectual pretension. “An experimental, political performance event on gender politics,” claimed the announcement. “Metatheater, political propaganda and wacky diagrammatic reality...with sudden changes and interruption and a maximum density of highly exaggerated actions and events – the live production of a political, critical, and utopian meaning, within the tradition of radical theater. All that plus entertainment." A tall order. Only a very rare artist might get that on stage with any coherence.
I wouldn't have been amazed if the Silvers/Andrews promotion proved to be grandiose; but I was unprepared for the extravagance and ugliness of the botch. Sixty-odd actors, dancers, painters, and musicians, many of whom spent the time waiting to go on boxed in a compound like steers in a holding pen, gave three nights of their time, plus rehearsals, I assume, to appear in this circus, and they deserved better. I, at least, could leave, and I only had to turn up once.
When ideas aren't translated into theatrical metaphors onstage, when the artist can't give them body, they're worthless. Ambitious intentions excuse shoddy work; too frequently they become ploys for acquiring a superior edge, a measure of credit and respect, without obliging the artist to come up with the goods. In Eagles, Silvers and Andrews's grand scheme was entirely and only in their heads. Only raw, unassimilated elements got on the stage. Within a crude “revue” structure, Silvers and Andrews simply committed the offenses of “gender politics.” Provocative exclamations like, “Cocksucker, sling your sword in my bloody gap,” spoken by the Princess to the slurping exemplar of Youth Culture, set the literary tone. And saying penis, suck, pussy, nipple was still, apparently, a revolutionary thrill. Eagles became a puerile nightmare of every kind of bad acting. What can you expect in a context without integrity?
In it, the performers, some in pseudo-Japanese getup and fascinating makeup, enacted 20 clumsily written scenes (I saw 11) with titles like “Vulgarity,” “Consumerism,” “Manners.” But old-fashioned, approximate Japanese drag isn't quite Kabuki. Nor are howling and whining vocalizations, or stilted speech. About 10 musicians sat in three groups around the performing area. More than a dozen dancers and choreographers drifted in and out, performing in individual, low-key ways and largely working around, if not sagely ignoring, the other occupants of the space. Those who were most interesting were most completely introspective and self-reliant, like Simone Forti – who at first seemed to regard the proceedings with some consternation – on her knees, sending shuddering ripples through her arms and torso, or jumping softly with her shoulders loose and hands dangling. Two dozen other “eventers” came in and out as various characters, like a line of six or eight “models” in what appeared to be a fashion show of war casualties and bondage aficionados. Carolee Schneemann painted an attractive abstract mural on the sidelines, responding to something, I guess, that was being piped into her ears. Many of the performers took turns sitting in the audience where they argued with each other, commented rudely on the performers, and were generally disagreeable. I hated the pointless nastiness of Eagles even more than its ineptness or freak chic vacuity. Dumping the unconsidered debris of an artistic brainstorm on stage should be criminal.
At P.S. 122 (March 1-3).
John Neumeier's 10-year-old, intermissionless Mahler's Third Symphony, only one of his many treatments of Mahler works, is the kind of behemoth that only someone convinced of his own genius would mount. The most staggering quality of Neumeier's choreography is that it treats the music as competition that must be destroyed. And, in this, it's successful. It's so unmusical and visually clunky that it chops the Mahler into senseless fragments, smashes its coherence, and makes it impossible to hear as music. Mutter, mutter, BOOM!, BOOM!, goes the canned orchestra, and an army of straining, manly bodies obediently copycats every effect. But I don't want to knock the men, they're fine, if sharp and tense. The women too, are nice. It's Neumeier's approach that's idiotic, swamping everything in overblown, huffing and puffing dramatic generalities: big, sculptural designs, pseudomilitary hoohah, emotional soupiness. “The worst are full of passionate intensity,” wrote Yeats, and he could have been thinking of Neumeier, of this ballet. I'm looking forward with particular eagerness to avoiding Neumeier's version of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, touted as Neumeier's masterpiece, March 21 and 24. Bach's masterwork really needs Neumeier's two cents, you betcha!
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (March 12 to 24).
Choreographer Sally Silvers and writer-musician Burt Andrews showed their organizing skills by assembling over 60 performers for Eagles Ate My Estrogen. Too bad the event was such garbage; the title should have clued me. Anything so extravagant and so bad should at least be fun. But it was thoroughly ill-natured; exactly like Silvers, who cued the show like a sullen, muttering heckler. Wearing a frail yellow and blue-blotched wrap and a headband set with peacock feathers, her cute face spoiled by expressions of superiority and annoyance, she was persistently sour. At least until the intermission, when I made my escape. Silvers runs an intimidating publicity machine and produces press releases of impressive intellectual pretension. “An experimental, political performance event on gender politics,” claimed the announcement. “Metatheater, political propaganda and wacky diagrammatic reality...with sudden changes and interruption and a maximum density of highly exaggerated actions and events – the live production of a political, critical, and utopian meaning, within the tradition of radical theater. All that plus entertainment." A tall order. Only a very rare artist might get that on stage with any coherence.
I wouldn't have been amazed if the Silvers/Andrews promotion proved to be grandiose; but I was unprepared for the extravagance and ugliness of the botch. Sixty-odd actors, dancers, painters, and musicians, many of whom spent the time waiting to go on boxed in a compound like steers in a holding pen, gave three nights of their time, plus rehearsals, I assume, to appear in this circus, and they deserved better. I, at least, could leave, and I only had to turn up once.
When ideas aren't translated into theatrical metaphors onstage, when the artist can't give them body, they're worthless. Ambitious intentions excuse shoddy work; too frequently they become ploys for acquiring a superior edge, a measure of credit and respect, without obliging the artist to come up with the goods. In Eagles, Silvers and Andrews's grand scheme was entirely and only in their heads. Only raw, unassimilated elements got on the stage. Within a crude “revue” structure, Silvers and Andrews simply committed the offenses of “gender politics.” Provocative exclamations like, “Cocksucker, sling your sword in my bloody gap,” spoken by the Princess to the slurping exemplar of Youth Culture, set the literary tone. And saying penis, suck, pussy, nipple was still, apparently, a revolutionary thrill. Eagles became a puerile nightmare of every kind of bad acting. What can you expect in a context without integrity?
In it, the performers, some in pseudo-Japanese getup and fascinating makeup, enacted 20 clumsily written scenes (I saw 11) with titles like “Vulgarity,” “Consumerism,” “Manners.” But old-fashioned, approximate Japanese drag isn't quite Kabuki. Nor are howling and whining vocalizations, or stilted speech. About 10 musicians sat in three groups around the performing area. More than a dozen dancers and choreographers drifted in and out, performing in individual, low-key ways and largely working around, if not sagely ignoring, the other occupants of the space. Those who were most interesting were most completely introspective and self-reliant, like Simone Forti – who at first seemed to regard the proceedings with some consternation – on her knees, sending shuddering ripples through her arms and torso, or jumping softly with her shoulders loose and hands dangling. Two dozen other “eventers” came in and out as various characters, like a line of six or eight “models” in what appeared to be a fashion show of war casualties and bondage aficionados. Carolee Schneemann painted an attractive abstract mural on the sidelines, responding to something, I guess, that was being piped into her ears. Many of the performers took turns sitting in the audience where they argued with each other, commented rudely on the performers, and were generally disagreeable. I hated the pointless nastiness of Eagles even more than its ineptness or freak chic vacuity. Dumping the unconsidered debris of an artistic brainstorm on stage should be criminal.
At P.S. 122 (March 1-3).
John Neumeier's 10-year-old, intermissionless Mahler's Third Symphony, only one of his many treatments of Mahler works, is the kind of behemoth that only someone convinced of his own genius would mount. The most staggering quality of Neumeier's choreography is that it treats the music as competition that must be destroyed. And, in this, it's successful. It's so unmusical and visually clunky that it chops the Mahler into senseless fragments, smashes its coherence, and makes it impossible to hear as music. Mutter, mutter, BOOM!, BOOM!, goes the canned orchestra, and an army of straining, manly bodies obediently copycats every effect. But I don't want to knock the men, they're fine, if sharp and tense. The women too, are nice. It's Neumeier's approach that's idiotic, swamping everything in overblown, huffing and puffing dramatic generalities: big, sculptural designs, pseudomilitary hoohah, emotional soupiness. “The worst are full of passionate intensity,” wrote Yeats, and he could have been thinking of Neumeier, of this ballet. I'm looking forward with particular eagerness to avoiding Neumeier's version of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, touted as Neumeier's masterpiece, March 21 and 24. Bach's masterwork really needs Neumeier's two cents, you betcha!
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (March 12 to 24).
The Evil that Men Do
February 19
The play of illusion in the work of Pilobolus stays amazing because our vision keeps shifting focus, presenting us with a fantastic image one second, confirming what we know to be the actual configuration of bodies the next. The dancers do marvelous cantilevering gymnastics, but equally striking are tamer oddnesses like a lineup of six dancers seated on each other's laps as is in chairs (in Day Two). But the last person sits on nothing at all. Doesn't matter that we know the weight on his knees holds him up; we still see him impossibly buoyant.
Much of their group movement suggests that of slow, rhythmically moving subaqueous creatures, or creatures that hardly budge, then strike quick as a lizard's tongue. When couples lay back in symmetrical pairs, one body cupped in the other (in Moses Pendleton's Bonsai), they're like a double flower seen in cross section. But when the women, who've been standing on the shoulders of their partners, slide down their fronts, they seem as modern as the scenic elevator at the Peachtree. The heteromorphic processes of Pilobolus's dances carry along a flood of incidental images, some clever or comic, many sexual or organic in the way they ripple and surge, some astonishing in the way they meld organic forms and subconscious terrors with wit. Like (again in Bonsai) the way the group of four cluster as an anemone-like form; their hands move quickly, shoot out like branches, then make an undulating ruff of cilia. Out of this womblike form, a head pees, and then withdraws, like an infant taking one look at the world, and deciding, “Nope.”
Nothing much is usually made of individual incidents and images; curiously unempathic, they submerge in the flow of transformations. In the same way, these group pieces have an apparently casual structure; wherever everybody has agreed that's enough, I guess, they stop. When the material has more psychological substance, the choreography ambles in a similar dreamlike way. Sometimes this kind of format makes the work a chamber of extraordinary resonance, other times it can deprive it of focus and bite.
In his brilliant 1980 solo, Momix, Pendleton is dapper and zany, an elastic hybrid of Maurice Chavalier and Buddy Hackett, bobbing and flopping, boosting himself blithely over his cane. His white suit flashes like a strobe as it rumples. For the effect, the lighting is crucial. Usually Pilobolus requires the dramatic half-light in which its physical conundrums read most ambiguously. (Neil Peter Jampolis, David M. Chapman, and Mark D. Malamud are the lighting designers.” The same year's Day Two (directed by Pendleton, with choreography credited to eight dancers), is one of Pilobolus's sexier gymnastic circuses, partly because of its naked- look costumes (flesh colored G- strings) and those bouncing breasts and buttocks, its tribal frolicking, and a kind of teenage, friendly gawkiness. The memorable moment, though, is the curtain call, after the six dancers (four Tarzans, two Janes), crawling and heaving under a ground cloth of rubber, burst newborn through a gaping slash. The stage is greased with water, and they whiz smoothly and splashily across it.
The erotic tone of much of Pilobolus's work is balanced by a comforting quality. The dancers don't merely touch or press against each other, they're usually being each other, physically part of the same conglomerate beast. It takes at least two halves to make a whole in this world (even one person sometimes starts looking like two people looking like just one); but any partner will do. There's no romance, no anxiety, no disappointment. And because the physical contact is so necessary and firm, so much an aspect of team effort, it's immensely soothing.
Of two new-to-New York pieces, Pendleton's 1983 Stabat Mater is a sly, one-joke/one-image dance linking fervent religious feeling with sexual desire. A hooded nunlike figure in a scarlet robe (Jude Sante) sits under an arch (casting a shadow like a gothic window), but the arch is made by the nine-foot stilts and legs of Josh Perl, whose buttocks form the keystone. He's leaning away, resting on a long pole (his third leg, as it were), his bare torso at first invisible. When the “nun” pulls herself up, holding onto the peak of the arch, for all we know she may be sucking his cock.
Based on a gruesome story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robby Barnett and Alison Chase's Return to Maria la Baja (made in collaboration with Robert Faust and Lisa Giobbi) was commissioned for last summer's American Dance Festival. It opens with a series of snapshot poses of four white-clad travelers, first formal and then seen chatting, resting. Faust dances for moment with the small Giobbi standing on his shoes, and tilts her high. Barnett, in a tighter, tangolike embrace with Carolyn Minor, holds her waist, enabling her torso to float out in a shallow arc. She does the same for him. Then these introductory characters vanish permanently. Bent over a wooden trunk, Faust puts on what looks like shabby priestly velvet, Giobbi a brown traveling suit. She struggles softly as he lifts her and fixes a white mask to her face. And donning a long gray wig and a mask while obscured by the lid, he becomes her grandmother. Enthroned in a wicker chair, he reaches behind and lifts Giobbi overhead, onto his lap. Then, he lets her body arch away, as if in suspension.
The mix of compelling manipulation and dreamy escape drive the piece; but the manipulation grows brutal, and escape hopeless. Something terrible happens – there are flames, screams. Faust throws the girl off. From behind a screen, Barnett jumps out – jerking, quivering, grabbing his crotch. Faust kicks Giobbi, slings her to Barnett, then sinks sluggishly back in his chair, raising his feet salaciously. Barnett slams his arm into Giobbi's crotch as he hauls her aloft and we hear glass shattering. Hanging in his stiff arms, she shakes and shakes. This is only the first of many brutal humiliations for the girl, who is intermittently, and very briefly, nursed between bouts, just enough to keep the merchandise in usable condition. Next stop is two hicks in Hawaiian shirts, who dive on the girl in recurring waves again and again as the grandmother drags her backwards. Think of grandma as Kenneth Macmillan's Baron Harkonnen in Dune and you're close to the mark. Three heavily swathed, hunched, and wormlike ladies (their white-mask faces are on the tops of the performers' forward-tipped heads) investigate. Skull-like faces atop smooth, columnar bodies (Faust's upstretched legs) seem like evil gossips and sway like cobras. The girl tries to escape with a tender lover who sleeps wrapped over her, but they run, run, run and still the grandmother snatches the girl away, holds her up, stiff as a windup doll, while her feet keep running and kicking mechanically in the air.
I liked the unfaltering vicious power of Return to Maria la Baja, although I'm not sure it has “redeeming social value.” Barnett and Chase adapt Pilobolus's usual kind of movement patterns to a direct narrative purpose – like the cantilevered floating that relieves the atmosphere, or the way a pair of good guys enter like Siamese twins, their legs crisscrossing each other, or the way a three-man battle rolls and crunches in a snarl of flailing limbs. The brutality is horrendous, and beautifully done. But however aesthetic, it's never alluring. The evil generated is absolute; one can only be fascinated and appalled; even pity is purged.
At the Joyce Theater (season February 5 to March 3).
The play of illusion in the work of Pilobolus stays amazing because our vision keeps shifting focus, presenting us with a fantastic image one second, confirming what we know to be the actual configuration of bodies the next. The dancers do marvelous cantilevering gymnastics, but equally striking are tamer oddnesses like a lineup of six dancers seated on each other's laps as is in chairs (in Day Two). But the last person sits on nothing at all. Doesn't matter that we know the weight on his knees holds him up; we still see him impossibly buoyant.
Much of their group movement suggests that of slow, rhythmically moving subaqueous creatures, or creatures that hardly budge, then strike quick as a lizard's tongue. When couples lay back in symmetrical pairs, one body cupped in the other (in Moses Pendleton's Bonsai), they're like a double flower seen in cross section. But when the women, who've been standing on the shoulders of their partners, slide down their fronts, they seem as modern as the scenic elevator at the Peachtree. The heteromorphic processes of Pilobolus's dances carry along a flood of incidental images, some clever or comic, many sexual or organic in the way they ripple and surge, some astonishing in the way they meld organic forms and subconscious terrors with wit. Like (again in Bonsai) the way the group of four cluster as an anemone-like form; their hands move quickly, shoot out like branches, then make an undulating ruff of cilia. Out of this womblike form, a head pees, and then withdraws, like an infant taking one look at the world, and deciding, “Nope.”
Nothing much is usually made of individual incidents and images; curiously unempathic, they submerge in the flow of transformations. In the same way, these group pieces have an apparently casual structure; wherever everybody has agreed that's enough, I guess, they stop. When the material has more psychological substance, the choreography ambles in a similar dreamlike way. Sometimes this kind of format makes the work a chamber of extraordinary resonance, other times it can deprive it of focus and bite.
In his brilliant 1980 solo, Momix, Pendleton is dapper and zany, an elastic hybrid of Maurice Chavalier and Buddy Hackett, bobbing and flopping, boosting himself blithely over his cane. His white suit flashes like a strobe as it rumples. For the effect, the lighting is crucial. Usually Pilobolus requires the dramatic half-light in which its physical conundrums read most ambiguously. (Neil Peter Jampolis, David M. Chapman, and Mark D. Malamud are the lighting designers.” The same year's Day Two (directed by Pendleton, with choreography credited to eight dancers), is one of Pilobolus's sexier gymnastic circuses, partly because of its naked- look costumes (flesh colored G- strings) and those bouncing breasts and buttocks, its tribal frolicking, and a kind of teenage, friendly gawkiness. The memorable moment, though, is the curtain call, after the six dancers (four Tarzans, two Janes), crawling and heaving under a ground cloth of rubber, burst newborn through a gaping slash. The stage is greased with water, and they whiz smoothly and splashily across it.
The erotic tone of much of Pilobolus's work is balanced by a comforting quality. The dancers don't merely touch or press against each other, they're usually being each other, physically part of the same conglomerate beast. It takes at least two halves to make a whole in this world (even one person sometimes starts looking like two people looking like just one); but any partner will do. There's no romance, no anxiety, no disappointment. And because the physical contact is so necessary and firm, so much an aspect of team effort, it's immensely soothing.
Of two new-to-New York pieces, Pendleton's 1983 Stabat Mater is a sly, one-joke/one-image dance linking fervent religious feeling with sexual desire. A hooded nunlike figure in a scarlet robe (Jude Sante) sits under an arch (casting a shadow like a gothic window), but the arch is made by the nine-foot stilts and legs of Josh Perl, whose buttocks form the keystone. He's leaning away, resting on a long pole (his third leg, as it were), his bare torso at first invisible. When the “nun” pulls herself up, holding onto the peak of the arch, for all we know she may be sucking his cock.
Based on a gruesome story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robby Barnett and Alison Chase's Return to Maria la Baja (made in collaboration with Robert Faust and Lisa Giobbi) was commissioned for last summer's American Dance Festival. It opens with a series of snapshot poses of four white-clad travelers, first formal and then seen chatting, resting. Faust dances for moment with the small Giobbi standing on his shoes, and tilts her high. Barnett, in a tighter, tangolike embrace with Carolyn Minor, holds her waist, enabling her torso to float out in a shallow arc. She does the same for him. Then these introductory characters vanish permanently. Bent over a wooden trunk, Faust puts on what looks like shabby priestly velvet, Giobbi a brown traveling suit. She struggles softly as he lifts her and fixes a white mask to her face. And donning a long gray wig and a mask while obscured by the lid, he becomes her grandmother. Enthroned in a wicker chair, he reaches behind and lifts Giobbi overhead, onto his lap. Then, he lets her body arch away, as if in suspension.
The mix of compelling manipulation and dreamy escape drive the piece; but the manipulation grows brutal, and escape hopeless. Something terrible happens – there are flames, screams. Faust throws the girl off. From behind a screen, Barnett jumps out – jerking, quivering, grabbing his crotch. Faust kicks Giobbi, slings her to Barnett, then sinks sluggishly back in his chair, raising his feet salaciously. Barnett slams his arm into Giobbi's crotch as he hauls her aloft and we hear glass shattering. Hanging in his stiff arms, she shakes and shakes. This is only the first of many brutal humiliations for the girl, who is intermittently, and very briefly, nursed between bouts, just enough to keep the merchandise in usable condition. Next stop is two hicks in Hawaiian shirts, who dive on the girl in recurring waves again and again as the grandmother drags her backwards. Think of grandma as Kenneth Macmillan's Baron Harkonnen in Dune and you're close to the mark. Three heavily swathed, hunched, and wormlike ladies (their white-mask faces are on the tops of the performers' forward-tipped heads) investigate. Skull-like faces atop smooth, columnar bodies (Faust's upstretched legs) seem like evil gossips and sway like cobras. The girl tries to escape with a tender lover who sleeps wrapped over her, but they run, run, run and still the grandmother snatches the girl away, holds her up, stiff as a windup doll, while her feet keep running and kicking mechanically in the air.
I liked the unfaltering vicious power of Return to Maria la Baja, although I'm not sure it has “redeeming social value.” Barnett and Chase adapt Pilobolus's usual kind of movement patterns to a direct narrative purpose – like the cantilevered floating that relieves the atmosphere, or the way a pair of good guys enter like Siamese twins, their legs crisscrossing each other, or the way a three-man battle rolls and crunches in a snarl of flailing limbs. The brutality is horrendous, and beautifully done. But however aesthetic, it's never alluring. The evil generated is absolute; one can only be fascinated and appalled; even pity is purged.
At the Joyce Theater (season February 5 to March 3).
Up Against the Wall
January 29
Nancy Zendora's three dances at Kiva always had a spare pictorial elegance, but too often they had a kind of lassitude, a thinness of substance. Her sparse choice of visual elements suggested very careful selection, and their arrangement showed a refined balance. But the flow of energy in some sections went disappointingly slack. It was like being at a proper dinner, with an array of china and silver, and being served, quite graciously, a boiled potato. White Density and the second part of Caught in the Fringe both struck me this way.
In White, three dancers work with large and small pieces of white paper. One slides step-by-step across the floor on letter-size sheets, and we listen to the regular slash of that interrupted glide. Another woman stands wrapped in a single large sheet of paper; when she opens her arms, we hear it crinkle and observe her shadow through it; when she drops it, an edge hits the floor with a terrible crack. It's ripped in thirds, and crudely reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Then someone runs through it with an urgency that carries her right into the wall. The women roll their paper into tubes that become telescopes and canes; bringing the tubes into line in the air, they then raise and lower sections at varying speeds. They whip around open sheets that snap and crackle with the movement. But there's something tentative and overcautious in the handling of the paper and in the movement, something disturbingly unsensual. Which is odd, because the reasons for manipulating the paper to explore its qualities of sound and shape have much to do with awakening the senses. The sounds of paper slowly torn or brushed against, sharply rattled or crumpled, are particularly evocative and rich in texture. So the restraint of the dancers with respect to their materials seems peculiarly, inappropriately arid.
In Red Density, which toured as part of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament's 1983 tour of New York State, there was also some manipulation of paper, but much more dynamism and brilliance. Zendora – in red, seated on a red stool – reads, be means of a red flashlight, excerpts from Mme. Curie's writings on the properties of radium, the element which she and her husband isolated and which eventually poisoned them both. Three dancers (Eva Gasteazoro, Tom Keegan, Carolyn Rosenfield) in red shoot their arms up against the wall like candidates for execution, and slide them down. Crouched on the floor, they rat-a-tat it briskly with their hands. Singly, they drift to the side wall, eventually all leaning their heads on each other's shoulders. A sometime chorus, they're as uniform in action as the peons in a Mexican mural. They beat their feet on the floor, rush sideways, flood into a corner; running from one spot to another against the walls, they rip paper, fall in a heap. The stark designs of their movement patterns and their precise, rhythmic fury, alternating with wearier interludes, fiercely contrast with Zendora's quiet manner and reinforce the ominous implications of her scientific observations.
Zendora herself was striking in part one of Caught in the Fringe, where she works at the perimeter of the space, defined in part by the rolling of a white square of oilcloth. Actually, most of what she does happens along the side wall, and it's in her contact with that wall that her feeling for and use of materials comes most alive. She walks and leans against that wall; slides along it, brushes it. Solemnly, she places her palms against it, leans her forehead on it. Her feeling flows into it; perhaps strength flows into her. In her passes along the wall, she works her way down, eventually rolling along the wall on her rump, and moving perpendicular to it, prostrate, barely reaching it with her fingers. Only because of her conviction, I think, does the sparse, fumbly sound environment (clunks, taps, gushing water, a plucked string, etc.) by Yasunao Tone and Dave Meschiter seem so intimately – if indecipherably – wed to what she's doing though there is almost no coincidence of sound and action. She smacks, flails at the wall, twists from it. It's not something blank and neutral, a mere physical object; the past – maybe the future too – is locked into it. Zendora imbues it with the ability to comfort her, finds in it something to protest against, makes it her Wailing Wall. She touches the surface of her body with delicate care, almost as if examining it, checking if it's really there. She tensely places her hands on another wall, and brings them swiftly, ferociously down, away from it, as if recoiling from an unspeakable offense.
These are the kind of moments that are most full of life and mystery. A few exquisite visual images, like the space empty of people, with a pair of red shoes placed neatly together and a few rectangular red swatches lying on the gray, reverse side of the oilcloth, have a similar import and aura. But most of the second part, in which four dancers expand on the movement vocabulary Zendora laid out, and move into the central space she largely ignored, seemed mildly dutiful, merely formal.
At Kiva loft (January 16 to 18).
Nancy Zendora's three dances at Kiva always had a spare pictorial elegance, but too often they had a kind of lassitude, a thinness of substance. Her sparse choice of visual elements suggested very careful selection, and their arrangement showed a refined balance. But the flow of energy in some sections went disappointingly slack. It was like being at a proper dinner, with an array of china and silver, and being served, quite graciously, a boiled potato. White Density and the second part of Caught in the Fringe both struck me this way.
In White, three dancers work with large and small pieces of white paper. One slides step-by-step across the floor on letter-size sheets, and we listen to the regular slash of that interrupted glide. Another woman stands wrapped in a single large sheet of paper; when she opens her arms, we hear it crinkle and observe her shadow through it; when she drops it, an edge hits the floor with a terrible crack. It's ripped in thirds, and crudely reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Then someone runs through it with an urgency that carries her right into the wall. The women roll their paper into tubes that become telescopes and canes; bringing the tubes into line in the air, they then raise and lower sections at varying speeds. They whip around open sheets that snap and crackle with the movement. But there's something tentative and overcautious in the handling of the paper and in the movement, something disturbingly unsensual. Which is odd, because the reasons for manipulating the paper to explore its qualities of sound and shape have much to do with awakening the senses. The sounds of paper slowly torn or brushed against, sharply rattled or crumpled, are particularly evocative and rich in texture. So the restraint of the dancers with respect to their materials seems peculiarly, inappropriately arid.
In Red Density, which toured as part of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament's 1983 tour of New York State, there was also some manipulation of paper, but much more dynamism and brilliance. Zendora – in red, seated on a red stool – reads, be means of a red flashlight, excerpts from Mme. Curie's writings on the properties of radium, the element which she and her husband isolated and which eventually poisoned them both. Three dancers (Eva Gasteazoro, Tom Keegan, Carolyn Rosenfield) in red shoot their arms up against the wall like candidates for execution, and slide them down. Crouched on the floor, they rat-a-tat it briskly with their hands. Singly, they drift to the side wall, eventually all leaning their heads on each other's shoulders. A sometime chorus, they're as uniform in action as the peons in a Mexican mural. They beat their feet on the floor, rush sideways, flood into a corner; running from one spot to another against the walls, they rip paper, fall in a heap. The stark designs of their movement patterns and their precise, rhythmic fury, alternating with wearier interludes, fiercely contrast with Zendora's quiet manner and reinforce the ominous implications of her scientific observations.
Zendora herself was striking in part one of Caught in the Fringe, where she works at the perimeter of the space, defined in part by the rolling of a white square of oilcloth. Actually, most of what she does happens along the side wall, and it's in her contact with that wall that her feeling for and use of materials comes most alive. She walks and leans against that wall; slides along it, brushes it. Solemnly, she places her palms against it, leans her forehead on it. Her feeling flows into it; perhaps strength flows into her. In her passes along the wall, she works her way down, eventually rolling along the wall on her rump, and moving perpendicular to it, prostrate, barely reaching it with her fingers. Only because of her conviction, I think, does the sparse, fumbly sound environment (clunks, taps, gushing water, a plucked string, etc.) by Yasunao Tone and Dave Meschiter seem so intimately – if indecipherably – wed to what she's doing though there is almost no coincidence of sound and action. She smacks, flails at the wall, twists from it. It's not something blank and neutral, a mere physical object; the past – maybe the future too – is locked into it. Zendora imbues it with the ability to comfort her, finds in it something to protest against, makes it her Wailing Wall. She touches the surface of her body with delicate care, almost as if examining it, checking if it's really there. She tensely places her hands on another wall, and brings them swiftly, ferociously down, away from it, as if recoiling from an unspeakable offense.
These are the kind of moments that are most full of life and mystery. A few exquisite visual images, like the space empty of people, with a pair of red shoes placed neatly together and a few rectangular red swatches lying on the gray, reverse side of the oilcloth, have a similar import and aura. But most of the second part, in which four dancers expand on the movement vocabulary Zendora laid out, and move into the central space she largely ignored, seemed mildly dutiful, merely formal.
At Kiva loft (January 16 to 18).
A Subtle Fabric
June 11
Why Susan Rethorst's new Sons of Famous Men, in which there are no men at all, is particularly pleasurable, I don't know. It's mostly a rather whimsical duet in five “scenes” for Rethorst and Susan Braham, dressed in baggy, printed pants and halter tops they might wear coming home from the beach, with intermittent cameo appearances by the swankier and more ladylike Vicky Schick, Wendy Perron, and Adrienne Altenhouse (who become a low-key chorus in the final scene). Rethorst creates a lively, eccentric fabric of movement whose texture has a perplexing character and integrity.
In the past, I've felt that Rethorst's dances seem to invoke a peculiar but oddly familiar world, but separated us from direct information about it. Like, perhaps, a manuscript from which everything has been deleted except proofreader's marks and editorial comments. Sons of Famous Men strikes me differently. It seems, in a way, more purely textural, more lighthearted and less mysterious. Like a subtle weaving whose open spaces and more densely beaten patches, rough and smooth portions, color relationships, change as you pass it through your hands, as you inspect it casually or closely.
Perhaps I've just become accustomed to Rethorst's work, but I no longer suspect a hidden text. I'm sufficiently fascinated by the nubbly surface of the dancing. Rethorst employs a liberal vocabulary of smallish movements whose influences ripple illogically, mixing apparent spontaneity with calculation. Keeping in tune, Braham and Rethorst gently bump or tap each other. Wriggling, skipping, nuzzling movements suddenly evaporate, slide in new directions. The body partly skews, partly collapses; then the arms smooth everything out. In a kind of dubious democracy, any part of the body can pipe up, but the effect is never quarrelsome. One of Rethorst's long-term interests is in how information is altered and interpreted in being received, passed on, and restated. The constant rehandling of material is partly what gives her work its delicate variety as well as a measure of its coherence. Rethorst and Braham are clean, Gene, but even so they're as devious as a couple of three-card monte dealers. They weasel around, engaging in a cozy, rough-edged swinging interplay; adjusting and impatiently cuing each other; tagging, meshing, and copycatting material. The three long-limbed lovelies, in long silk dresses, breeze in from time to time (and don't stay long), beginning in the second section, and bring a mild breath of old Hollywood's genteel glamour, of endless staircases and glassy floors. Their moves are more stretched out, and plainer in line.
There's an overall sense of balance in Sons of Famous Men – maybe the sags and swings even out – and a kind of babyish, superficial wooziness that suggests a deeper security. At the end, the dancing of Rethorst and Braham reflects in the trio behind them. The last thing I remember – not the last moment of the dance – is each of the Susans touching a finger to the back of one hand. Then Rethorst's hand curling, and the impulse of that curl rippling slyly back to her shoulder blade, and uncoiling upwards to slightly wobble the base of the skull. Like “telephone,” - you whisper “curl,” what gets to me is “wobble.”
At P.S. 122, May 24 to 26.
Why Susan Rethorst's new Sons of Famous Men, in which there are no men at all, is particularly pleasurable, I don't know. It's mostly a rather whimsical duet in five “scenes” for Rethorst and Susan Braham, dressed in baggy, printed pants and halter tops they might wear coming home from the beach, with intermittent cameo appearances by the swankier and more ladylike Vicky Schick, Wendy Perron, and Adrienne Altenhouse (who become a low-key chorus in the final scene). Rethorst creates a lively, eccentric fabric of movement whose texture has a perplexing character and integrity.
In the past, I've felt that Rethorst's dances seem to invoke a peculiar but oddly familiar world, but separated us from direct information about it. Like, perhaps, a manuscript from which everything has been deleted except proofreader's marks and editorial comments. Sons of Famous Men strikes me differently. It seems, in a way, more purely textural, more lighthearted and less mysterious. Like a subtle weaving whose open spaces and more densely beaten patches, rough and smooth portions, color relationships, change as you pass it through your hands, as you inspect it casually or closely.
Perhaps I've just become accustomed to Rethorst's work, but I no longer suspect a hidden text. I'm sufficiently fascinated by the nubbly surface of the dancing. Rethorst employs a liberal vocabulary of smallish movements whose influences ripple illogically, mixing apparent spontaneity with calculation. Keeping in tune, Braham and Rethorst gently bump or tap each other. Wriggling, skipping, nuzzling movements suddenly evaporate, slide in new directions. The body partly skews, partly collapses; then the arms smooth everything out. In a kind of dubious democracy, any part of the body can pipe up, but the effect is never quarrelsome. One of Rethorst's long-term interests is in how information is altered and interpreted in being received, passed on, and restated. The constant rehandling of material is partly what gives her work its delicate variety as well as a measure of its coherence. Rethorst and Braham are clean, Gene, but even so they're as devious as a couple of three-card monte dealers. They weasel around, engaging in a cozy, rough-edged swinging interplay; adjusting and impatiently cuing each other; tagging, meshing, and copycatting material. The three long-limbed lovelies, in long silk dresses, breeze in from time to time (and don't stay long), beginning in the second section, and bring a mild breath of old Hollywood's genteel glamour, of endless staircases and glassy floors. Their moves are more stretched out, and plainer in line.
There's an overall sense of balance in Sons of Famous Men – maybe the sags and swings even out – and a kind of babyish, superficial wooziness that suggests a deeper security. At the end, the dancing of Rethorst and Braham reflects in the trio behind them. The last thing I remember – not the last moment of the dance – is each of the Susans touching a finger to the back of one hand. Then Rethorst's hand curling, and the impulse of that curl rippling slyly back to her shoulder blade, and uncoiling upwards to slightly wobble the base of the skull. Like “telephone,” - you whisper “curl,” what gets to me is “wobble.”
At P.S. 122, May 24 to 26.
An Ill Wind
April 16
Marleen Pennison seems to have an affinity for life's clumsy moments, when relationships are coming apart but not yet irrevocably torn, when disaster is in the air, when people have the ill judgement to render a mismatch permanent. Her dances, set in the '50s in the small town, semi-rural south, have a naturalistic and compassionate tone and are rooted in keen observation of the varieties of awkwardness. The pieces come into focus gradually, through a sort of wearing of their fabric; they're like private people who don't reveal their qualities until they're pressed.
The three idle youngsters of her 1977 River Road Sweet are oafish, coy, uncomfortable caricatures; in their teasing mimicry, exaggerated posturing, and blurting energy, the performers seem to be trying too hard to squash children's rampant energy and errant imagination into their stiffer adult bodies. Maybe the conception is too external to work, the view of children too sentimental. The young boys in the beginning of Freeway (1981) brrroooomming their cardboard carton race cars, seem similarly unconvincing, despite their winning enthusiasm. But when Pennison's characters are a little older, they begin to come through truthfully.
In Freeway, two couples meet as teenagers; the guys are pushy, one girl is more pursued, the other suffers jealousy and the pain of being ignored. Later, one couple has broken up; the other's still together: she's pregnant with their second child, he's obsessed with his car. The way the volatile feelings and hot tempers of the young couples erode into a pervasive stupor of dissatisfaction is very touching. Pennison doesn't get at this through an elaborate or eloquent use of dance movement per se, but rather through building an atmosphere. Her characters dance when they can't stand to stand or sit or walk; they stop when their feelings won't lift. The movement starts and stops in blocks; its impact is in appropriate mimetic gestures, in poses and shifting stances. Sometimes, there's text, like the reading of a letter in Freeway or a final sad reminiscence in Hurricane, but in both cases it seems unnecessary, too conclusive.
In Hurricane, a commission last summer from the American Dance Festival, Pennison also brings two couples together, just before Hurricane Audrey strikes the Louisiana coast in 1957. Thomas Wilkinson is taping across the window frames of of the wooden flats that stand as walls, to prevent the glass from spraying if it shatters. We hear the wind in the background. Another couple arrives, with groceries. The movement is ordinary, a little restless and vague. The women rock their hips side to side, face to face in wide plié and smile at each other, keeping their minds off the wind. It's a beautifully smooth, grounding metaphor for security and flexibility.
There are little niceties, extravagances: a birthday cake and the usual embarrassment. As the wind rises, the couples swing their partners together and nearly drown it out with spirited turning, hopping, stomping. The men jump together, bumping chests. But the storm hisses and rumbles through in the moments when the dancing lapses. The lights flash for a moment, the music wavers, then things are okay again. And there's more dancing: a brisk country two-step maybe, with the twining armloops of a ländler, a skipping folky trio for Wilkinson and the women. But more and more nervous eyeings and incidents occur: Pennison kneels to pray while a radio gives the storm report and fizzles. In one of those well-meant jokes that never work, Peter Bass puts on a monster mask and startles the women. The lights go. We hear rumbling, booming, glass breaking, a shutter banging somewhere. With flashlights only, in a watery darkness, the men check for damage. The flashlights make crazy shadows of the webs of tape on the “windows.” The women cling together when they can, but the terror and danger and shock to the house begin to overwhelm them. Pennison falls backward, one of the men sickles to the ground, Cynthia Bonnett rolls on the floor. We hear the house creak and yawn. A tree whose branches we have barely noticed falls in, knocking the side wall down; the gusting impact makes the dancers somersault simultaneously with the crash. The men haul on the back wall, dragging it over on themselves as they try to keep it up. When the sounds die, we see one of the women alone, stranded on the roof crest of the submerged house, struggling to balance and hail rescue.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (March 21 to 31).
Marleen Pennison seems to have an affinity for life's clumsy moments, when relationships are coming apart but not yet irrevocably torn, when disaster is in the air, when people have the ill judgement to render a mismatch permanent. Her dances, set in the '50s in the small town, semi-rural south, have a naturalistic and compassionate tone and are rooted in keen observation of the varieties of awkwardness. The pieces come into focus gradually, through a sort of wearing of their fabric; they're like private people who don't reveal their qualities until they're pressed.
The three idle youngsters of her 1977 River Road Sweet are oafish, coy, uncomfortable caricatures; in their teasing mimicry, exaggerated posturing, and blurting energy, the performers seem to be trying too hard to squash children's rampant energy and errant imagination into their stiffer adult bodies. Maybe the conception is too external to work, the view of children too sentimental. The young boys in the beginning of Freeway (1981) brrroooomming their cardboard carton race cars, seem similarly unconvincing, despite their winning enthusiasm. But when Pennison's characters are a little older, they begin to come through truthfully.
In Freeway, two couples meet as teenagers; the guys are pushy, one girl is more pursued, the other suffers jealousy and the pain of being ignored. Later, one couple has broken up; the other's still together: she's pregnant with their second child, he's obsessed with his car. The way the volatile feelings and hot tempers of the young couples erode into a pervasive stupor of dissatisfaction is very touching. Pennison doesn't get at this through an elaborate or eloquent use of dance movement per se, but rather through building an atmosphere. Her characters dance when they can't stand to stand or sit or walk; they stop when their feelings won't lift. The movement starts and stops in blocks; its impact is in appropriate mimetic gestures, in poses and shifting stances. Sometimes, there's text, like the reading of a letter in Freeway or a final sad reminiscence in Hurricane, but in both cases it seems unnecessary, too conclusive.
In Hurricane, a commission last summer from the American Dance Festival, Pennison also brings two couples together, just before Hurricane Audrey strikes the Louisiana coast in 1957. Thomas Wilkinson is taping across the window frames of of the wooden flats that stand as walls, to prevent the glass from spraying if it shatters. We hear the wind in the background. Another couple arrives, with groceries. The movement is ordinary, a little restless and vague. The women rock their hips side to side, face to face in wide plié and smile at each other, keeping their minds off the wind. It's a beautifully smooth, grounding metaphor for security and flexibility.
There are little niceties, extravagances: a birthday cake and the usual embarrassment. As the wind rises, the couples swing their partners together and nearly drown it out with spirited turning, hopping, stomping. The men jump together, bumping chests. But the storm hisses and rumbles through in the moments when the dancing lapses. The lights flash for a moment, the music wavers, then things are okay again. And there's more dancing: a brisk country two-step maybe, with the twining armloops of a ländler, a skipping folky trio for Wilkinson and the women. But more and more nervous eyeings and incidents occur: Pennison kneels to pray while a radio gives the storm report and fizzles. In one of those well-meant jokes that never work, Peter Bass puts on a monster mask and startles the women. The lights go. We hear rumbling, booming, glass breaking, a shutter banging somewhere. With flashlights only, in a watery darkness, the men check for damage. The flashlights make crazy shadows of the webs of tape on the “windows.” The women cling together when they can, but the terror and danger and shock to the house begin to overwhelm them. Pennison falls backward, one of the men sickles to the ground, Cynthia Bonnett rolls on the floor. We hear the house creak and yawn. A tree whose branches we have barely noticed falls in, knocking the side wall down; the gusting impact makes the dancers somersault simultaneously with the crash. The men haul on the back wall, dragging it over on themselves as they try to keep it up. When the sounds die, we see one of the women alone, stranded on the roof crest of the submerged house, struggling to balance and hail rescue.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (March 21 to 31).
Caged
June 4
Margaret Leng Tan's impressive playing of John Cages Four Walls, using the white keys of the piano only, was the bone and sinew of Sin Cha Hong's solo performance of the piece composed 40 years ago for two act “dance play” by Merce Cunningham. The cast of that original performance at the Perry-Mansfield Workshop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, included Julie Harris, Leora Dana, and Patricia Birch, with co-direction and design by Arch Lauteren.
Hong's choreography for Four Walls is new, and often composed of slowly moving, strongly drawn images that she carves ever more deeply. She shows us someone nearly frozen in distress, inconsolable, without options. As the piano quietly grumbles awake, then, still sparse in sound, becomes slightly shrill, Hong stands, back to us, in a wrinkled white dress. Her head turns just barely, then more. Her face is in shadow and implacable stern. She raises her arms, crossing them at the wrist as if cuffed before the lights black out. She's a woman of stone. It's easy to feel the sculptural power of a dancer who moves so selectively. But there can be a lack of risk in the blunt statements of congealed images, and we can walk too safely around those spare images in our minds. However suddenly a new pose is struck, we're rarely surprised. The piano drives and rumbles, bursts into fierce interjections. Hong presses hand to eye, hand to mouth, covers her ears, opens her mouth in silent scream, falls and lurches out flat on the floor.
Her expressions aren't novel or particular, but with her absolute commitment they seem to force themselves through a body unwilling to give way to them. I think of stoniness in regard to how Hong withholds herself: in the way her body physically resists and in the way nothing personal is ever betrayed. She evokes for me, too, those huge Olmec or Easter Island heads whose fascination is partly in their secret blurred histories. With Hong, it's what's behind her scowl that's buried. There's an economy to Hong's movement, yet there seems to be no similar economy in respect to time. Her choreography is chained to the course of the music, but the music ranges through a much wider landscape of feeling: from chiming repetitions to sudden slams and crises, from stillness to strangely tinny lushness. The sense of timelessness, or stagnancy in time, comes partly from the fact that Hong's neither coming nor going emotionally; she's displaying the aspects of her plight, but she is always a hard nut of anger, and her actions come from the same psychological place whatever their mood. She bathes her face in light, lets her head loll back like a puppet whose strings have gone slack, or stretches her hands with a peaceful curling motion. She smooths out the space around her, touches her belly and chest, affirming, “I am all here.” Rotating her hands, walking slowly or quickly, hobbling or lurching back and forth, she reels and unreels an imaginary line like a fisherman embracing the soothing but futile mechanics of the trade with no hope of a catch. Crouching, she moves her outstretched arms close to the floor like the ticking hands of a clock. She rubs her head, twists, and pulls at her hair in a fury. Bent over, she claps her hands over her rectum: every orifice is a danger zone. She rips her hands away from her neck as if to tear her own head off. So many different things – yet none of them casts light into the darkness of her situation.
There's an objectlike quality to this kind of performance that makes me discontented. There's an impossible conflict in its transitory character. I feel wrong, situated in an auditorium, watching a stage. Ideally, perhaps, this piece should take place in an infinity of time, as a sort of permanent installation, in disregard of any audience. It would appeal to me to stumble through the jungles of Tabasco about two centuries from now and come upon Hong doing Four Walls.
At Asia Society, May 17.
Margaret Leng Tan's impressive playing of John Cages Four Walls, using the white keys of the piano only, was the bone and sinew of Sin Cha Hong's solo performance of the piece composed 40 years ago for two act “dance play” by Merce Cunningham. The cast of that original performance at the Perry-Mansfield Workshop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, included Julie Harris, Leora Dana, and Patricia Birch, with co-direction and design by Arch Lauteren.
Hong's choreography for Four Walls is new, and often composed of slowly moving, strongly drawn images that she carves ever more deeply. She shows us someone nearly frozen in distress, inconsolable, without options. As the piano quietly grumbles awake, then, still sparse in sound, becomes slightly shrill, Hong stands, back to us, in a wrinkled white dress. Her head turns just barely, then more. Her face is in shadow and implacable stern. She raises her arms, crossing them at the wrist as if cuffed before the lights black out. She's a woman of stone. It's easy to feel the sculptural power of a dancer who moves so selectively. But there can be a lack of risk in the blunt statements of congealed images, and we can walk too safely around those spare images in our minds. However suddenly a new pose is struck, we're rarely surprised. The piano drives and rumbles, bursts into fierce interjections. Hong presses hand to eye, hand to mouth, covers her ears, opens her mouth in silent scream, falls and lurches out flat on the floor.
Her expressions aren't novel or particular, but with her absolute commitment they seem to force themselves through a body unwilling to give way to them. I think of stoniness in regard to how Hong withholds herself: in the way her body physically resists and in the way nothing personal is ever betrayed. She evokes for me, too, those huge Olmec or Easter Island heads whose fascination is partly in their secret blurred histories. With Hong, it's what's behind her scowl that's buried. There's an economy to Hong's movement, yet there seems to be no similar economy in respect to time. Her choreography is chained to the course of the music, but the music ranges through a much wider landscape of feeling: from chiming repetitions to sudden slams and crises, from stillness to strangely tinny lushness. The sense of timelessness, or stagnancy in time, comes partly from the fact that Hong's neither coming nor going emotionally; she's displaying the aspects of her plight, but she is always a hard nut of anger, and her actions come from the same psychological place whatever their mood. She bathes her face in light, lets her head loll back like a puppet whose strings have gone slack, or stretches her hands with a peaceful curling motion. She smooths out the space around her, touches her belly and chest, affirming, “I am all here.” Rotating her hands, walking slowly or quickly, hobbling or lurching back and forth, she reels and unreels an imaginary line like a fisherman embracing the soothing but futile mechanics of the trade with no hope of a catch. Crouching, she moves her outstretched arms close to the floor like the ticking hands of a clock. She rubs her head, twists, and pulls at her hair in a fury. Bent over, she claps her hands over her rectum: every orifice is a danger zone. She rips her hands away from her neck as if to tear her own head off. So many different things – yet none of them casts light into the darkness of her situation.
There's an objectlike quality to this kind of performance that makes me discontented. There's an impossible conflict in its transitory character. I feel wrong, situated in an auditorium, watching a stage. Ideally, perhaps, this piece should take place in an infinity of time, as a sort of permanent installation, in disregard of any audience. It would appeal to me to stumble through the jungles of Tabasco about two centuries from now and come upon Hong doing Four Walls.
At Asia Society, May 17.
Out of This World
May 31
I kept thinking that the dancers in Andrew Jannetti's pieces were somehow marching into the sunset or toward the dawn of a new day. A joyful conviction and hopefulness seemed to be the dominant feeling, or rather attitude. I was perversely reminded of Our President's rosy confidence (even though nothing could be more untouched by the modern world than Jannetti's dances). Of the eagerness of a Jehovah's Witness selling me the kingdom of heaven along with a copy of Awake!.
Jannetti's dances seem unattached to anything particular, unmotivated by any but the most general ideas. No actual experience in living, no range of feeling, seems to inform them. He painstakingly elaborates his ideas in section after section without ever getting past the obvious. These are not long dances, but they're too long because their development is so routine. They inhabit a closed, self-absorbed world – like that of a political or religious fanatic – where knowledge pretends to be complete. They're astonishingly traditional in their sense of uplift and formal design. If this were the '30s, I'd sometimes wonder if I were watching the stiff exultation of a Hymn to the Workers; if the '60s, maybe a tribute to the vision of the Great Society. We're usually seeing cooperation – two people working near each other in harmonious unison, or responding with a sort of sequential symmetry, or echoing each other in very close canon. But there's no social consciousness in this work; it merely has an expressive kinship with figurative public sculpture. The dancers seem enthused with their mission as priests and priestesses in the temple of Art.
Work as ivory tower as this demands some kind of intoxication – but it gives me the willies. I don't question Jannetti's sincerity, but there's no solid ground under his inspirational rhetoric, nothing substantial behind his dances' emphatic, reaching gestures and broad, plain shapes. Whatever the subject, what comes through is always sort of the same, sort of mild and stuffy. There's little breath in the movement, except what's measured – although Jannetti is challenged by guest Cathy Ward in two duets, and their second one, Once, Just Once does get some air and swing into it. The gestures – most of the action is in the arms and upper torso – habitually push at the space from some position well planted on the floor. They're so unspecific that some of the time they seem almost ludicrous, though one isn't tempted to laugh because the whole enterprise is so solemn and well meant. I see someone clapping a hand to her forehead, and I can't avoid the translation, “Woe is me!” What this woe is supposed to be about, I dunno.
At Vital Arts Center, May 16-19.
I kept thinking that the dancers in Andrew Jannetti's pieces were somehow marching into the sunset or toward the dawn of a new day. A joyful conviction and hopefulness seemed to be the dominant feeling, or rather attitude. I was perversely reminded of Our President's rosy confidence (even though nothing could be more untouched by the modern world than Jannetti's dances). Of the eagerness of a Jehovah's Witness selling me the kingdom of heaven along with a copy of Awake!.
Jannetti's dances seem unattached to anything particular, unmotivated by any but the most general ideas. No actual experience in living, no range of feeling, seems to inform them. He painstakingly elaborates his ideas in section after section without ever getting past the obvious. These are not long dances, but they're too long because their development is so routine. They inhabit a closed, self-absorbed world – like that of a political or religious fanatic – where knowledge pretends to be complete. They're astonishingly traditional in their sense of uplift and formal design. If this were the '30s, I'd sometimes wonder if I were watching the stiff exultation of a Hymn to the Workers; if the '60s, maybe a tribute to the vision of the Great Society. We're usually seeing cooperation – two people working near each other in harmonious unison, or responding with a sort of sequential symmetry, or echoing each other in very close canon. But there's no social consciousness in this work; it merely has an expressive kinship with figurative public sculpture. The dancers seem enthused with their mission as priests and priestesses in the temple of Art.
Work as ivory tower as this demands some kind of intoxication – but it gives me the willies. I don't question Jannetti's sincerity, but there's no solid ground under his inspirational rhetoric, nothing substantial behind his dances' emphatic, reaching gestures and broad, plain shapes. Whatever the subject, what comes through is always sort of the same, sort of mild and stuffy. There's little breath in the movement, except what's measured – although Jannetti is challenged by guest Cathy Ward in two duets, and their second one, Once, Just Once does get some air and swing into it. The gestures – most of the action is in the arms and upper torso – habitually push at the space from some position well planted on the floor. They're so unspecific that some of the time they seem almost ludicrous, though one isn't tempted to laugh because the whole enterprise is so solemn and well meant. I see someone clapping a hand to her forehead, and I can't avoid the translation, “Woe is me!” What this woe is supposed to be about, I dunno.
At Vital Arts Center, May 16-19.
Power to Spare
April 30
There's something “not modern” about Ann Papoulis's dancing that's refreshing and rather astonishing. It's in her kind of heft and sturdiness, the assertiveness of her attack. Most dancers let you feel their speed, but they've learned to make their movement seem nearly weightless and effort-free as possible. Papoulis makes you feel the weight that gives her force as well as speed. Beneath the direct power of her movement, you sense great reserves. Like a Rolls Royce engine in a Mazda. If you wound her up and set her loose, she could smash everything in sight. If she were dancing on of Martha Graham's great old traumatizing heroines, she'd scare the life out of you. Partly because she'd be sure to get to the heart of the matter. She knows how to use her weight and force with dramatic sense, and she wouldn't pussyfoot around on the clean gestural edges of the role.
Both pieces she showed at the Cunningham studio deal with inner fantasy. In The Tragedy of Hilda and Hedrick, she explored the history of the relationship of a woman and her imaginary companion. There's intermittent text, which seems a little clumsy and unconvincing when Papoulis is narrating – a proper distance is hard to find – but has pathos and humor when Papoulis/Hilda addresses Hedrick directly. The dance has an urgency of impulsion, broken by suddenly retracted gestures. And Hilda listening to the weakening signal of Hedrick's fading presence pulls her postures slightly awry. Her perplexities are elucidated not through vagaries that leave us free to think anything we please, but through strong, declarative moments that contrast in intention. Papoulis moves with a dense elasticity. When her shoulders shrug and push a slow, snaky convulsion through symmetrical arms, it's an act of effort and will. When she swings her leg, it's with the force of a baseball bat and the directness of a horse's kick. In both pieces, what impressed me most was Papoulis's stable power, clarity, and control. The use of text filled in a background, but seemed thin and unresonant compared to the meatiness of Papoulis's dancing.
In The Opera Singer, Irene Papoulis's text (spoken by her on stage) lets us know that the Opera Singer is making a regular escape from whatever her ordinary life might be into her special room, her special world. Previewing the behavior of the women doing her toilette – putting on a slip, hauling on a girdle, whacking on face powder, spritzing on hair spray, smearing on full red lips – the narration, also makes those actions sympathetically funny instead of merely common or silly or slightly grotesque. But, at intervals, the Opera Singer separates herself (in the later stages of dress, stepping out of her shoes), moving away from the cluttered dressing table and clothes rack. In a remote part of the space, she dances and poses – swirling her arms, waggling her hips, pressing her palms together – with monumental conviction and sensuality. Eventually, Papoulis weans herself from words altogether. In the long, compulsive solo dance that the piece becomes, she radiates intermingling signals of satisfaction and distress. She lashes her arms, but protects her throat with a tender hand. She uses her lower body with the aggressiveness of absolute belief. Those legs slice like the blades of a very dangerous machine.
At the Cunningham Studio (April 15).
There's something “not modern” about Ann Papoulis's dancing that's refreshing and rather astonishing. It's in her kind of heft and sturdiness, the assertiveness of her attack. Most dancers let you feel their speed, but they've learned to make their movement seem nearly weightless and effort-free as possible. Papoulis makes you feel the weight that gives her force as well as speed. Beneath the direct power of her movement, you sense great reserves. Like a Rolls Royce engine in a Mazda. If you wound her up and set her loose, she could smash everything in sight. If she were dancing on of Martha Graham's great old traumatizing heroines, she'd scare the life out of you. Partly because she'd be sure to get to the heart of the matter. She knows how to use her weight and force with dramatic sense, and she wouldn't pussyfoot around on the clean gestural edges of the role.
Both pieces she showed at the Cunningham studio deal with inner fantasy. In The Tragedy of Hilda and Hedrick, she explored the history of the relationship of a woman and her imaginary companion. There's intermittent text, which seems a little clumsy and unconvincing when Papoulis is narrating – a proper distance is hard to find – but has pathos and humor when Papoulis/Hilda addresses Hedrick directly. The dance has an urgency of impulsion, broken by suddenly retracted gestures. And Hilda listening to the weakening signal of Hedrick's fading presence pulls her postures slightly awry. Her perplexities are elucidated not through vagaries that leave us free to think anything we please, but through strong, declarative moments that contrast in intention. Papoulis moves with a dense elasticity. When her shoulders shrug and push a slow, snaky convulsion through symmetrical arms, it's an act of effort and will. When she swings her leg, it's with the force of a baseball bat and the directness of a horse's kick. In both pieces, what impressed me most was Papoulis's stable power, clarity, and control. The use of text filled in a background, but seemed thin and unresonant compared to the meatiness of Papoulis's dancing.
In The Opera Singer, Irene Papoulis's text (spoken by her on stage) lets us know that the Opera Singer is making a regular escape from whatever her ordinary life might be into her special room, her special world. Previewing the behavior of the women doing her toilette – putting on a slip, hauling on a girdle, whacking on face powder, spritzing on hair spray, smearing on full red lips – the narration, also makes those actions sympathetically funny instead of merely common or silly or slightly grotesque. But, at intervals, the Opera Singer separates herself (in the later stages of dress, stepping out of her shoes), moving away from the cluttered dressing table and clothes rack. In a remote part of the space, she dances and poses – swirling her arms, waggling her hips, pressing her palms together – with monumental conviction and sensuality. Eventually, Papoulis weans herself from words altogether. In the long, compulsive solo dance that the piece becomes, she radiates intermingling signals of satisfaction and distress. She lashes her arms, but protects her throat with a tender hand. She uses her lower body with the aggressiveness of absolute belief. Those legs slice like the blades of a very dangerous machine.
At the Cunningham Studio (April 15).
Something Dire
May 7
Both homey and ghoulish, proper and perverse, The Dark Ride – choreographed by Kinematic's
Robin Klingensmith, Tamar Kotoske, Maria Lakis, and Mary Richter – views a collection of Victorian cranks and curiosities from the weird and quaint perspectives of such as Christopher Lee and Edward Gorey. Elegantly costumed by Klingensmith, and accompanied by gruesome otherworldly howlings and scratchings, Dark Ride is brightened by a live pianist, Joel Mitchell, playing things like the “Moonlight” Sonata without ever taking his foot off the pedal, and the occasional rendition of a sentimental song like “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” by a hefty Governess, Carlos Arevelo, in a sweet tenor.
The plot, if there is one, and not just a potpourri of linked incidents that slip around in time, is obscure. But the behavior of the seven characters never demands explanations; we take the soothing routines, the frequent exclamations of distress, the erotic interplay (like Thom Fogarty wiggling his tongue with pleasure when Richter slaps his hand), the strange visitations all at face value. There's a kind of glaring, self-conscious definition of the characters, which makes some sense in view of the thorough socialization of Victorian society. The world is largely one of women: the pianist is as peripheral to the family as a drawing master might be. Thom Fogarty may be something of an interloper, a disreputable cousin, a pirate disguised as a gentleman, with designs on adolescent Sabina (Richter), who looks a bit like Tenniel's Alice, with frizzed-out blond hair, sedately sitting or romping in white, smock-like undergarments. Urania (Tamar Kotoske), in a black gown with a yoke of peacock-feather eyes, is given to psychic visions, sitting in a painted “Egyptian” chair, posing in Egyptian profiles, and speaking in harsh or squeaking alien voices. Lavinia (Klingensmith), the other older sister, I imagine, also in black, shares her drastic intensity and intermittent composure.
But my favorites were the Governess, a comfortable element in a world of nervous and unstable phenomena, and The Ghost of Baby Mudge (Lakis), whom I first mistook for Baby Snooks. Sometimes I thought she was alive, sometimes she was certainly dead, and she was definitely dead when she first bourréed out from behind a chair with a sheet over her head during a swoony family séance. In white, with a tight white bonnet, her eyes seem bruised with sleeplessness and her expression glitters with, perhaps, a touch of madness and mischief. The piece is vividly pictorial, like an old album, but there's not much forward thrust. Some of the most pleasing moments, however, are precisely about freezing the action – like a swollen mound of the five women precision-stitching their imaginary embroidery, or the “living pictures” we are shown as a frieze across the back. The dancing usually matches the movement to the actions of the music in a way that also seems to fix the action in a static moment.
I didn't care much for the expressive generalities of the sharp staccato dance solos of Klingensmith and Kotoske, because they only engraved more deeply what I already knew about their characters. But I did like the ecstatic karate of their fierce delivery. Sometimes, between the sentimentality of the piano and the weird creakings and whistlings, the owls and, possibly, werewolves of the soundtrack, I wished Dark Ride were a radio play. Other times, during the little song-and-dance renditions, like a neat, double duet of skipping, rocking, and foot rubbing, I wished the piece were even more of a musicale, on the order of Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree” in Meet Me in St. Louis. Of course it was both.
At Danspace Project, St. Mark's in-the-Bowery (April 24 to 28).
Both homey and ghoulish, proper and perverse, The Dark Ride – choreographed by Kinematic's
Robin Klingensmith, Tamar Kotoske, Maria Lakis, and Mary Richter – views a collection of Victorian cranks and curiosities from the weird and quaint perspectives of such as Christopher Lee and Edward Gorey. Elegantly costumed by Klingensmith, and accompanied by gruesome otherworldly howlings and scratchings, Dark Ride is brightened by a live pianist, Joel Mitchell, playing things like the “Moonlight” Sonata without ever taking his foot off the pedal, and the occasional rendition of a sentimental song like “I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls” by a hefty Governess, Carlos Arevelo, in a sweet tenor.
The plot, if there is one, and not just a potpourri of linked incidents that slip around in time, is obscure. But the behavior of the seven characters never demands explanations; we take the soothing routines, the frequent exclamations of distress, the erotic interplay (like Thom Fogarty wiggling his tongue with pleasure when Richter slaps his hand), the strange visitations all at face value. There's a kind of glaring, self-conscious definition of the characters, which makes some sense in view of the thorough socialization of Victorian society. The world is largely one of women: the pianist is as peripheral to the family as a drawing master might be. Thom Fogarty may be something of an interloper, a disreputable cousin, a pirate disguised as a gentleman, with designs on adolescent Sabina (Richter), who looks a bit like Tenniel's Alice, with frizzed-out blond hair, sedately sitting or romping in white, smock-like undergarments. Urania (Tamar Kotoske), in a black gown with a yoke of peacock-feather eyes, is given to psychic visions, sitting in a painted “Egyptian” chair, posing in Egyptian profiles, and speaking in harsh or squeaking alien voices. Lavinia (Klingensmith), the other older sister, I imagine, also in black, shares her drastic intensity and intermittent composure.
But my favorites were the Governess, a comfortable element in a world of nervous and unstable phenomena, and The Ghost of Baby Mudge (Lakis), whom I first mistook for Baby Snooks. Sometimes I thought she was alive, sometimes she was certainly dead, and she was definitely dead when she first bourréed out from behind a chair with a sheet over her head during a swoony family séance. In white, with a tight white bonnet, her eyes seem bruised with sleeplessness and her expression glitters with, perhaps, a touch of madness and mischief. The piece is vividly pictorial, like an old album, but there's not much forward thrust. Some of the most pleasing moments, however, are precisely about freezing the action – like a swollen mound of the five women precision-stitching their imaginary embroidery, or the “living pictures” we are shown as a frieze across the back. The dancing usually matches the movement to the actions of the music in a way that also seems to fix the action in a static moment.
I didn't care much for the expressive generalities of the sharp staccato dance solos of Klingensmith and Kotoske, because they only engraved more deeply what I already knew about their characters. But I did like the ecstatic karate of their fierce delivery. Sometimes, between the sentimentality of the piano and the weird creakings and whistlings, the owls and, possibly, werewolves of the soundtrack, I wished Dark Ride were a radio play. Other times, during the little song-and-dance renditions, like a neat, double duet of skipping, rocking, and foot rubbing, I wished the piece were even more of a musicale, on the order of Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree” in Meet Me in St. Louis. Of course it was both.
At Danspace Project, St. Mark's in-the-Bowery (April 24 to 28).
David Gordon Lights Up Your Mind
Suddenly David Gordon is making dances everywhere from Staten Island to Paris, which is a fine thing. American Ballet Theater is currently doing his Field, Chair, and Mountain, and his own PickUp Company is at the Joyce this week. The company was always intended to be exactly that, a pickup group pulled together for a particular project and then disbanded, but never was, because, for example, Margaret Hoeffel and Susan Eschelbach came early and stayed five or six years. Keith Marshall, a PickUp veteran of five years, and Dean Moss, who joined last year, stay on. And Valda Setterfield, Gordon's wife, who perfectly inflects every word and gesture and gauges every move with an immaculate sense of proportion and wit, is a permanent special guest star. It feels a little like members of the family have left home, because in Gordon's work we got to know Margaret and Susan in a way that felt personal, though it wasn't really. (Except maybe it was. You never can tell.)
Partly because dancers often address each other by name in Gordon's pieces and we're made privy, blow-by-blow, to their coolly jostling rearrangements. Gordon's never absolutely serious, but, always sort of serious. He speaks not with a forked tongue, but he usually is of two minds. He keeps fiddling the context, changing your relationship to whatever he's presenting, keeping you on your toes. Games permute into emotional wranglings of great delicacy, and little dramas are teased, step-by-step, and partially exposed as clever games. At any given moment, you daren't trust him, because in another minute he'll peel off another layer or turn another facet, and transform the dimensions, the quality, of whatever you've been looking at. Gordon started dancing with James Waring, was a member of the Judson Dance Theater , worked with Yvonne Rainer and then with the improvisational Grand Union that grew out of that company, before forming his own company about seven years ago. From his earliest work, there has always been a sense of intimacy with the audience, partly because he has assumed that we're as smart as he is, partly because he has sometimes tuned us in to emotion so distilled and unstressed, so tender and modest, that it leaves us breathless. As in Close Up where he and Setterfield alternately slipped out of each other's arms, from a series of frozen embraces, leaving the embrace, holding air. It was just like unsnarling yourself from your bed partner without waking him or her. That measure of care.
But Gordon's known as a joker, a a clever guy with words. And his economical verbal play is enough to make anyone giddy. He, however, has thought of that element only as a ribbon running through the physical material. The visual elements of his dances are always clearly focused and framed, so you know you're being shown something from a different angle, a fractionally changed perspective – and that knowledge is a delight. But what has endeared his work to me is its tactile substance, its measured weight and surreptitious bounce, the way people customarily handle each other with a matter-of- factness that's never cold. Gordon knows that, secretly, they bruise easily. Underpinning the delirium of repetitions and variations, of juxtapositions and overlaps, is a canny wisdom about the necessary foolishness of notions of fixity and attachment in a mutable world.
How come every place you look there's a David Gordon making a dance? Part of the explanation is a change in attitude. “One of the things I did ordinarily was say no to everything,” says Gordon. “Even if I was waiting around to be asked, if I was asked first I said no so people would have to ask me again. So I could be sure that they meant it. In realizing that, I began to think that it was time to try yes. So I started saying yes to everybody."
“Last year, everybody asked me and I said yes because 50 to 60 per cent always fall out, like the no-shows on your reservations list. Everybody applied for grants, everybody got them, nothing fell out, everything I said yes to happened, and I'm busy and crazy. I wound up making 10 pieces this year.” The 10th piece is one he's working on now and that will be premiered in Paris in June. But it all started last August, in London with a piece for Extemporary Dance Theatre. Then he came back to start the ABT piece and two pieces for his company, and almost simultaneously started to work with Dance Theater of Harlem. Then, in January, he went to Paris to make a piece for the Groupe de Recherche Choreographique (GRCOP), came back, picked up the threads, made a piece for 11 graduating students at NYU, a piece for Clive Thompson's company, and now he's finishing off the third and fourth pieces for his own company.
“Because we have to have two programs in Paris which is what we agreed to do. And because I don't ordinarily have something called repertory. I have to make two programs in order to have two programs.” “The most amazing thing about all this is, when I used to do work every two years or so, I sincerely thought that when you did something you got empty, and then you had to wait around to get full again, so that you could do something else, I now see {{ }} on to the next doing, and you have all the residue of the last doing to carry in with you and there's a kind of momentum. But this is a little overdoing it.”
“I always feel I am somewhere in between knowing exactly what it is I do and knowing nothing at all about what I do,” says Gordon. “It's like walking some line between your sophistication, which is the result of your experience, and your innocence, which, as a result of your sophistication, you know you must hold on to. “So the work that I'm now involved with pursues, perhaps, the more formal aspects of things.” Suddenly he's rapping at triple speed. “I mean, one of the things that's happening is that I'm getting more and more interested in mechanics of movement and possible relationships of movement to music. I'm very much less interested, at the moment, in talking and/or writing the material that goes into a talking performance. I'm tired of listening to everybody's true confessions. I've decided it's time to shut up. And in shutting up, I have looked for what it is that's going to make any piece of mine different from any other piece of mine. “Not simply its costuming, which, mostly, I do. Mostly it's all variations on the same stuff, which is a lot of clothes. Everybody just wears a lot of clothes."
So, how's the movement of the piece going to be different from one piece to the other, and how is its relationship to the sound going to be different? How do you make a whole really different-feeling thing? “I like working with a very few people a lot of the time, and I don't like working with a lot of people a little amount of time. The option, which has become sort for sponsors, of pursuing collaborations between various artists for performances is just not an option that interests me very much. It's like Seventh Avenue fashion. St. Laurent's sailor collar is going very well and so is Geoffrey Beene's peasant dress, so let's make a peasant dress with a sailor collar! I'm not interested in getting involved in this process."
“What do you get involved with? And how do you move on? When I got about halfway through the making of Framework, last year's full length piece, I said to my pal Bruce Hoover as we were talking in the street late at night after rehearsal, the problem with Framework is I'm halfway through it and I know I know how to make it. And it's the third or fourth full-length piece in four years, and I know what I'm doing. I even know how much editing I'm going to do at the end. I know too much about this piece. And I'm not interested in doing this again. I want to do something else. And the something else I want to do is really idiotic, because it's what everybody else has been doing all along. And it's called, make three pieces in an evening and find out if you can make them different from each other. “I start working over here, making this something. And then I start working over here, making this something else. And without my really being very aware of it, these two things start growing together. That's how the full-length pieces started to happen in the first place. I started making this piece and I started making that piece and halfway through I said, what's the difference between this piece and that piece and why shouldn't they all be part of one piece? Well, now what I'm trying to do is keep those pieces separate and find out if I know how to do that. “I told Baryshnikov in our first meeting, if you're interested in some downtown work of mine transplanted on to your company, I'm not interested. The reason I want to do this is I never did it before. You have a ballet company; I want to try to make a ballet. The schizophrenic part is that all the while you're working on it, you're saying, I want to make a ballet, but I want to make my ballet. Somehow or other I want not to erase myself. So I keep looking at it and I say, well, that looks like mine, that looks like a ballet, that looks like mine. And I just went ahead. Sometimes I wasn't sure it looked either like a ballet or like my work or like anything at all.”
“But,” I start to sputter, “you were dealing with something much more elaborate in scale and design, with a whole army of people...”
“That was pure idiocy. It never occurred to me to say, I mean, it never occurred to me to say, 'Hey, I think I ought to start with maybe six people.' They said, 'Martine van Hamel said she wanted to be in it.' I was thrilled. Martine van Hamel wants to be in it? Are you kidding? 'Here she is. She wants to meet you and be in it. She's been to see your work, she's seen Framework, and she wants to be in it.' Oh! Well, okay, swell. “Well that means Martine has to have a partner and then there has to be this second cast and then soloists. 'Now, shall we say six soloists?' 'Oh, yeah. What are soloists? Oh, I see. And the corps.' 'The corps?' And it never occurred to me to say, 'Oh, wait a minute. I think that's too many people.' I just said yes.”
“One of the questions that gets asked when you do interviews or answer audience questions is people keep wanting to know what your feelings are about the audience. The answer is I'm my audience. I watch this stuff day in day out, day in day out; if I put something in that I loved to pieces on Monday, and three Mondays later I don't want it there anymore, it doesn't matter that I once loved it – it's out. If I put something in that I loved to pieces all the way through the Mondays, if the piece has grown someplace else without it, I toss it out."
“There is stuff that gets done in my work for the audience. But it is not the stuff of condescension. It is not my world made simpler. It is the ordinary stuff of theater; it is: your arm is in front of your face; we want to see you; move it. It is: You're going to have to be louder there. It's about performance and about certain theatrical conventions which are expedient to keep hold of. Others I have thrown out because they're not necessary for my work. But nothing about the content, which includes the physical content or the verbal content, or the possibly conceptual or ideological content. If I can understand what's going on, I make the assumption that the audience is composed of at least a few people like me. If I don't understand it, who am I making it for?” In a studio rehearsal, the dancers are working on one of the pieces for Paris in June. They're jumping on and rolling off folding chairs – to which Gordon has shown an intermittent addiction for many years – swinging them around, sliding a seated parter around on them. There's a bumpiness to the action that really digs into the spirit of the music, Western swing. Next on the menu is a circusy part of My Folks, to klezmer music, in which the dancers tumble and cartwheel, and wield red and black zebra-striped cloths they partially wrap up and lean in or are heaved out of, or use to frame or chop off part of the action. In a section where the music seems especially melancholy, they saunter and swim, with lazy and gently twisting motion in the upper body. The humble material is exquisite here, but Gordon has lifted it from Offenbach Suite, another piece on the program.
Propitiously, Setterfield pops in with shopping bags to make a timely cameo appearance before zipping off for class or something. In a white jumpsuit and black belt, with a bandana around her swirly silver cap of hair and cheapo black-and-white running shoes, she gets a “public” crack at a solo she's been mostly working on by herself. She whips lightly across the space, hands on hips, with little Jewish-Russky patty-cake feet and soft leaps. As a trumpet's blatting, the movement eases into grand brushes and more drawn up steps that pause briefly in passé. I'm loving the combination of her elegance, those fat shoes, and the way they squeak. Gordon's pieces can be as full of reflection as a funhouse hall of mirrors. They're assembled of surprisingly unextraordinary elements. The dancers, for example, don't have to bust their balls every minute doing amazing feats. But Gordon gets a pinball game going where the balls never stop banging around and lighting things up in your brain, making connections.
“Most of the time I don't have to think about what the implication of the connection is,” he says, “as long as I feel things connecting. Those connections are frequently what I want. If I'm in a never-ending sentence, I what to at least know that's what I'm in. That it all has to add up to the Gettysburg Address, I'm not interested.” “In writing material for the verbal pieces, I gave myself freedom to use language the way I use it ordinarily. Which is, I don't use a lot of very big words and I don't make great complex sentences, and in the stage work that seemed perfect. And even when a three-syllable word would say exactly what I needed, I would turn it into five one-syllable words. “Once I was asked to write something for the Drama Review about what I'd done. It was appalling. It sounded like kiddie talk. I finally called Yvonne [Rainer] and I brought it all to her house, and she sat and read it all. And the first thing she said to me was, 'Don't you remember what you did? You are belittling everything.' “When I went back home and started taking out the parts where I said, 'And this wasn't very important,' I found out certain things I didn't know. There was a piece called Random Breakfast. And I wrote a sentence and the sentence said, this piece was 80 per cent improvisation. This was astonishing to me. I didn't realize that this piece was 80 per cent improvisation, number one. Number two, the story I have been telling for years to everybody who asked about the Grand Union was that when the Grand Union started, the all wanted to improvise. I didn't know anything about improvisation and I had never improvised. I didn't know what they were talking about and I thought they were crazy and I went into all the performances with Yvonne Rainer's material which I did while they were improvising up the kazoo."
“And now I write this sentence that says, in fact, that eight years before I made a piece that was 80 per cent improvisation. Now what is it I'm talking about? What is it I think I did or think I do or think I know? “When the article was finally written, I thought this still sounds like baby talk. It's positive baby talk instead of negative baby talk. They seemed very happy with it. But I'm not the person who can ever love the writing of that person. I do it because it's what I seem to do or know how to do, and when I try to push it in another direction I just start sounding exceedingly pretentious. And that sounds worse to me than the baby talk. But I read Annette Michelson and I think, 'Oh!' I don't really understand it entirely, but I'm in awe of it. It's my idea of being an intellectual."
“You see, I wanted to be the others. I wanted to be Trisha [Brown] or Steve [Paxton]. I wanted to be making brilliant innovative work, and I was making show business. “And I was dealt with in that way. I was the comedy. And it continues to be hard to be in that position. Trisha Brown, whose work I admire more than anybody's, gets half the contemporary art world to come to her performances. I don't. And I'm never going to get those people. My work isn't art enough to get the art world, and it's not entertainment enough to wind up on Broadway. Frequently it hasn't been dancy enough to get the dance world in. I don't exactly understand it all. I don't have a lot of choice. I couldn't figure out how to suddenly be that thing the art world might be interested in, nor do I know how to turn into something called pure entertainment. “I value very much the fact that I'm still investigating. I feel amused that somebody can refer to something I've done as a seminal piece, because, for me, it was just another piece in a series of pieces in the midst of a particular investigation. At the moment it was made it was not important. “I've arrived at 48 and I know there's still an enormous amount of things I don't know anything about and can investigate. I don't have to spend the next 20 years making TV Reel, my big hit of 1983 or whenever the hell it was. I don't have to do it again. They can't force me to do it again. And I don't have to make the same bloody piece with another name for the next 12 years. That feels like something terrific.”
Partly because dancers often address each other by name in Gordon's pieces and we're made privy, blow-by-blow, to their coolly jostling rearrangements. Gordon's never absolutely serious, but, always sort of serious. He speaks not with a forked tongue, but he usually is of two minds. He keeps fiddling the context, changing your relationship to whatever he's presenting, keeping you on your toes. Games permute into emotional wranglings of great delicacy, and little dramas are teased, step-by-step, and partially exposed as clever games. At any given moment, you daren't trust him, because in another minute he'll peel off another layer or turn another facet, and transform the dimensions, the quality, of whatever you've been looking at. Gordon started dancing with James Waring, was a member of the Judson Dance Theater , worked with Yvonne Rainer and then with the improvisational Grand Union that grew out of that company, before forming his own company about seven years ago. From his earliest work, there has always been a sense of intimacy with the audience, partly because he has assumed that we're as smart as he is, partly because he has sometimes tuned us in to emotion so distilled and unstressed, so tender and modest, that it leaves us breathless. As in Close Up where he and Setterfield alternately slipped out of each other's arms, from a series of frozen embraces, leaving the embrace, holding air. It was just like unsnarling yourself from your bed partner without waking him or her. That measure of care.
But Gordon's known as a joker, a a clever guy with words. And his economical verbal play is enough to make anyone giddy. He, however, has thought of that element only as a ribbon running through the physical material. The visual elements of his dances are always clearly focused and framed, so you know you're being shown something from a different angle, a fractionally changed perspective – and that knowledge is a delight. But what has endeared his work to me is its tactile substance, its measured weight and surreptitious bounce, the way people customarily handle each other with a matter-of- factness that's never cold. Gordon knows that, secretly, they bruise easily. Underpinning the delirium of repetitions and variations, of juxtapositions and overlaps, is a canny wisdom about the necessary foolishness of notions of fixity and attachment in a mutable world.
How come every place you look there's a David Gordon making a dance? Part of the explanation is a change in attitude. “One of the things I did ordinarily was say no to everything,” says Gordon. “Even if I was waiting around to be asked, if I was asked first I said no so people would have to ask me again. So I could be sure that they meant it. In realizing that, I began to think that it was time to try yes. So I started saying yes to everybody."
“Last year, everybody asked me and I said yes because 50 to 60 per cent always fall out, like the no-shows on your reservations list. Everybody applied for grants, everybody got them, nothing fell out, everything I said yes to happened, and I'm busy and crazy. I wound up making 10 pieces this year.” The 10th piece is one he's working on now and that will be premiered in Paris in June. But it all started last August, in London with a piece for Extemporary Dance Theatre. Then he came back to start the ABT piece and two pieces for his company, and almost simultaneously started to work with Dance Theater of Harlem. Then, in January, he went to Paris to make a piece for the Groupe de Recherche Choreographique (GRCOP), came back, picked up the threads, made a piece for 11 graduating students at NYU, a piece for Clive Thompson's company, and now he's finishing off the third and fourth pieces for his own company.
“Because we have to have two programs in Paris which is what we agreed to do. And because I don't ordinarily have something called repertory. I have to make two programs in order to have two programs.” “The most amazing thing about all this is, when I used to do work every two years or so, I sincerely thought that when you did something you got empty, and then you had to wait around to get full again, so that you could do something else, I now see {{ }} on to the next doing, and you have all the residue of the last doing to carry in with you and there's a kind of momentum. But this is a little overdoing it.”
“I always feel I am somewhere in between knowing exactly what it is I do and knowing nothing at all about what I do,” says Gordon. “It's like walking some line between your sophistication, which is the result of your experience, and your innocence, which, as a result of your sophistication, you know you must hold on to. “So the work that I'm now involved with pursues, perhaps, the more formal aspects of things.” Suddenly he's rapping at triple speed. “I mean, one of the things that's happening is that I'm getting more and more interested in mechanics of movement and possible relationships of movement to music. I'm very much less interested, at the moment, in talking and/or writing the material that goes into a talking performance. I'm tired of listening to everybody's true confessions. I've decided it's time to shut up. And in shutting up, I have looked for what it is that's going to make any piece of mine different from any other piece of mine. “Not simply its costuming, which, mostly, I do. Mostly it's all variations on the same stuff, which is a lot of clothes. Everybody just wears a lot of clothes."
So, how's the movement of the piece going to be different from one piece to the other, and how is its relationship to the sound going to be different? How do you make a whole really different-feeling thing? “I like working with a very few people a lot of the time, and I don't like working with a lot of people a little amount of time. The option, which has become sort for sponsors, of pursuing collaborations between various artists for performances is just not an option that interests me very much. It's like Seventh Avenue fashion. St. Laurent's sailor collar is going very well and so is Geoffrey Beene's peasant dress, so let's make a peasant dress with a sailor collar! I'm not interested in getting involved in this process."
“What do you get involved with? And how do you move on? When I got about halfway through the making of Framework, last year's full length piece, I said to my pal Bruce Hoover as we were talking in the street late at night after rehearsal, the problem with Framework is I'm halfway through it and I know I know how to make it. And it's the third or fourth full-length piece in four years, and I know what I'm doing. I even know how much editing I'm going to do at the end. I know too much about this piece. And I'm not interested in doing this again. I want to do something else. And the something else I want to do is really idiotic, because it's what everybody else has been doing all along. And it's called, make three pieces in an evening and find out if you can make them different from each other. “I start working over here, making this something. And then I start working over here, making this something else. And without my really being very aware of it, these two things start growing together. That's how the full-length pieces started to happen in the first place. I started making this piece and I started making that piece and halfway through I said, what's the difference between this piece and that piece and why shouldn't they all be part of one piece? Well, now what I'm trying to do is keep those pieces separate and find out if I know how to do that. “I told Baryshnikov in our first meeting, if you're interested in some downtown work of mine transplanted on to your company, I'm not interested. The reason I want to do this is I never did it before. You have a ballet company; I want to try to make a ballet. The schizophrenic part is that all the while you're working on it, you're saying, I want to make a ballet, but I want to make my ballet. Somehow or other I want not to erase myself. So I keep looking at it and I say, well, that looks like mine, that looks like a ballet, that looks like mine. And I just went ahead. Sometimes I wasn't sure it looked either like a ballet or like my work or like anything at all.”
“But,” I start to sputter, “you were dealing with something much more elaborate in scale and design, with a whole army of people...”
“That was pure idiocy. It never occurred to me to say, I mean, it never occurred to me to say, 'Hey, I think I ought to start with maybe six people.' They said, 'Martine van Hamel said she wanted to be in it.' I was thrilled. Martine van Hamel wants to be in it? Are you kidding? 'Here she is. She wants to meet you and be in it. She's been to see your work, she's seen Framework, and she wants to be in it.' Oh! Well, okay, swell. “Well that means Martine has to have a partner and then there has to be this second cast and then soloists. 'Now, shall we say six soloists?' 'Oh, yeah. What are soloists? Oh, I see. And the corps.' 'The corps?' And it never occurred to me to say, 'Oh, wait a minute. I think that's too many people.' I just said yes.”
“One of the questions that gets asked when you do interviews or answer audience questions is people keep wanting to know what your feelings are about the audience. The answer is I'm my audience. I watch this stuff day in day out, day in day out; if I put something in that I loved to pieces on Monday, and three Mondays later I don't want it there anymore, it doesn't matter that I once loved it – it's out. If I put something in that I loved to pieces all the way through the Mondays, if the piece has grown someplace else without it, I toss it out."
“There is stuff that gets done in my work for the audience. But it is not the stuff of condescension. It is not my world made simpler. It is the ordinary stuff of theater; it is: your arm is in front of your face; we want to see you; move it. It is: You're going to have to be louder there. It's about performance and about certain theatrical conventions which are expedient to keep hold of. Others I have thrown out because they're not necessary for my work. But nothing about the content, which includes the physical content or the verbal content, or the possibly conceptual or ideological content. If I can understand what's going on, I make the assumption that the audience is composed of at least a few people like me. If I don't understand it, who am I making it for?” In a studio rehearsal, the dancers are working on one of the pieces for Paris in June. They're jumping on and rolling off folding chairs – to which Gordon has shown an intermittent addiction for many years – swinging them around, sliding a seated parter around on them. There's a bumpiness to the action that really digs into the spirit of the music, Western swing. Next on the menu is a circusy part of My Folks, to klezmer music, in which the dancers tumble and cartwheel, and wield red and black zebra-striped cloths they partially wrap up and lean in or are heaved out of, or use to frame or chop off part of the action. In a section where the music seems especially melancholy, they saunter and swim, with lazy and gently twisting motion in the upper body. The humble material is exquisite here, but Gordon has lifted it from Offenbach Suite, another piece on the program.
Propitiously, Setterfield pops in with shopping bags to make a timely cameo appearance before zipping off for class or something. In a white jumpsuit and black belt, with a bandana around her swirly silver cap of hair and cheapo black-and-white running shoes, she gets a “public” crack at a solo she's been mostly working on by herself. She whips lightly across the space, hands on hips, with little Jewish-Russky patty-cake feet and soft leaps. As a trumpet's blatting, the movement eases into grand brushes and more drawn up steps that pause briefly in passé. I'm loving the combination of her elegance, those fat shoes, and the way they squeak. Gordon's pieces can be as full of reflection as a funhouse hall of mirrors. They're assembled of surprisingly unextraordinary elements. The dancers, for example, don't have to bust their balls every minute doing amazing feats. But Gordon gets a pinball game going where the balls never stop banging around and lighting things up in your brain, making connections.
“Most of the time I don't have to think about what the implication of the connection is,” he says, “as long as I feel things connecting. Those connections are frequently what I want. If I'm in a never-ending sentence, I what to at least know that's what I'm in. That it all has to add up to the Gettysburg Address, I'm not interested.” “In writing material for the verbal pieces, I gave myself freedom to use language the way I use it ordinarily. Which is, I don't use a lot of very big words and I don't make great complex sentences, and in the stage work that seemed perfect. And even when a three-syllable word would say exactly what I needed, I would turn it into five one-syllable words. “Once I was asked to write something for the Drama Review about what I'd done. It was appalling. It sounded like kiddie talk. I finally called Yvonne [Rainer] and I brought it all to her house, and she sat and read it all. And the first thing she said to me was, 'Don't you remember what you did? You are belittling everything.' “When I went back home and started taking out the parts where I said, 'And this wasn't very important,' I found out certain things I didn't know. There was a piece called Random Breakfast. And I wrote a sentence and the sentence said, this piece was 80 per cent improvisation. This was astonishing to me. I didn't realize that this piece was 80 per cent improvisation, number one. Number two, the story I have been telling for years to everybody who asked about the Grand Union was that when the Grand Union started, the all wanted to improvise. I didn't know anything about improvisation and I had never improvised. I didn't know what they were talking about and I thought they were crazy and I went into all the performances with Yvonne Rainer's material which I did while they were improvising up the kazoo."
“And now I write this sentence that says, in fact, that eight years before I made a piece that was 80 per cent improvisation. Now what is it I'm talking about? What is it I think I did or think I do or think I know? “When the article was finally written, I thought this still sounds like baby talk. It's positive baby talk instead of negative baby talk. They seemed very happy with it. But I'm not the person who can ever love the writing of that person. I do it because it's what I seem to do or know how to do, and when I try to push it in another direction I just start sounding exceedingly pretentious. And that sounds worse to me than the baby talk. But I read Annette Michelson and I think, 'Oh!' I don't really understand it entirely, but I'm in awe of it. It's my idea of being an intellectual."
“You see, I wanted to be the others. I wanted to be Trisha [Brown] or Steve [Paxton]. I wanted to be making brilliant innovative work, and I was making show business. “And I was dealt with in that way. I was the comedy. And it continues to be hard to be in that position. Trisha Brown, whose work I admire more than anybody's, gets half the contemporary art world to come to her performances. I don't. And I'm never going to get those people. My work isn't art enough to get the art world, and it's not entertainment enough to wind up on Broadway. Frequently it hasn't been dancy enough to get the dance world in. I don't exactly understand it all. I don't have a lot of choice. I couldn't figure out how to suddenly be that thing the art world might be interested in, nor do I know how to turn into something called pure entertainment. “I value very much the fact that I'm still investigating. I feel amused that somebody can refer to something I've done as a seminal piece, because, for me, it was just another piece in a series of pieces in the midst of a particular investigation. At the moment it was made it was not important. “I've arrived at 48 and I know there's still an enormous amount of things I don't know anything about and can investigate. I don't have to spend the next 20 years making TV Reel, my big hit of 1983 or whenever the hell it was. I don't have to do it again. They can't force me to do it again. And I don't have to make the same bloody piece with another name for the next 12 years. That feels like something terrific.”