Reviews 1985
Well, Actually...
December 24
I was somewhat puzzled and intrigued by David Hurwith’s introspective solo Lumber. Since he earns some of his bread by carpentry. I expected a more obvious relationship to the title than what I got, but what I saw made me think about the psychic lumber that makes us inflexible, about the physical heaviness of lumbering. There’s something soft and thick in Hurwith’s moves that I half like and am half uncomfortable with. An inconclusive quality, perhaps. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really attend to the John Ashbery poem that accompanied most of the dance.
In a way, the movement is very plain and blunt; it doesn’t stretch beyond Hurwith’s own natural sphere. He reaches out straight arms in a sideways V, turns to look at the audience. He lets his hands melt, jumps and sinks to the floor, rolls, sits up, and looks at us again. In retrospect, I thought of some of this as puppyish; as if he were looking for approval for his trick or curious about what our response, if any, might be. But that’s not fair. What we’re watching is curiously personal but circumscribed. His gestures feel vague, inexplicit, but oddly evocative - as if he’s sticking with generalities because he isn’t quite sure of the facts. Hurwith measures his pace carefully and keeps an eye on himself and us - not with any particular suspicion. His composure - and the calculation in his eyes and in the way he holds his mouth - is almost the stronger element.
For Hurwith, thought comes first, before movement. And he’s dealing, I suspect, with the allure of stasis, the temptation to nurse oneself - a visible inclination to inertia and comfort that has to be thwarted, but not denied. Hurwith’s exploration keeps him within the realm in which we think we feel secure; an area, too, in which our babyishness still resides.
Jack Moore’s Three Stages for a Dancer - to a march, a Gershwin ballad, and a tango - is droll and very modest. In the first part, Hurwith, in a loose shirt and desert boots and a goofy orange cap that weirdly suggests a kepi, with hands sometimes behind his back, marches in short straight lines punctuated by sudden pop-up jumps. He gets a jauntier swing into his arms, which makes him veer and stagger. Briefly, he’s puppet-soldier; it’s as if he points himself in any direction willy-nilly and marches off, kicks, and salutes. I think of wind-up toys that fall over on their sides and keep on going in circles.
For the ballad, he takes off cap, shirt and boots. His stance seems weighted. Then he wiggles his hips loosely and mechanically, pats his cheek, touches his face and torso. He bends over and wiggles some more, crawls, runs, rubs his hand against a white backcloth half-heartedly. There’s no sense of stress and yet he’s lost something and being without it makes him seem slightly sad and foolish.
It’s almost sufficiently wonderful that Hurwith’s wearing a kimono for Moore’s coolest of tangos (was it “La Paloma”?), and that the steps are smooth and drag very lightly. Sometimes there’s a gentle grapevine in the footwork: Hurwith’s hands fold and bend; the space around him is formally indicated. It’s a thoroughly unfancy tango from which the usual tangle and heat has drained. The dancer becomes a person with no wrinkles and no baggage.
At 541 Broadway (December 7 to 9).
I was somewhat puzzled and intrigued by David Hurwith’s introspective solo Lumber. Since he earns some of his bread by carpentry. I expected a more obvious relationship to the title than what I got, but what I saw made me think about the psychic lumber that makes us inflexible, about the physical heaviness of lumbering. There’s something soft and thick in Hurwith’s moves that I half like and am half uncomfortable with. An inconclusive quality, perhaps. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really attend to the John Ashbery poem that accompanied most of the dance.
In a way, the movement is very plain and blunt; it doesn’t stretch beyond Hurwith’s own natural sphere. He reaches out straight arms in a sideways V, turns to look at the audience. He lets his hands melt, jumps and sinks to the floor, rolls, sits up, and looks at us again. In retrospect, I thought of some of this as puppyish; as if he were looking for approval for his trick or curious about what our response, if any, might be. But that’s not fair. What we’re watching is curiously personal but circumscribed. His gestures feel vague, inexplicit, but oddly evocative - as if he’s sticking with generalities because he isn’t quite sure of the facts. Hurwith measures his pace carefully and keeps an eye on himself and us - not with any particular suspicion. His composure - and the calculation in his eyes and in the way he holds his mouth - is almost the stronger element.
For Hurwith, thought comes first, before movement. And he’s dealing, I suspect, with the allure of stasis, the temptation to nurse oneself - a visible inclination to inertia and comfort that has to be thwarted, but not denied. Hurwith’s exploration keeps him within the realm in which we think we feel secure; an area, too, in which our babyishness still resides.
Jack Moore’s Three Stages for a Dancer - to a march, a Gershwin ballad, and a tango - is droll and very modest. In the first part, Hurwith, in a loose shirt and desert boots and a goofy orange cap that weirdly suggests a kepi, with hands sometimes behind his back, marches in short straight lines punctuated by sudden pop-up jumps. He gets a jauntier swing into his arms, which makes him veer and stagger. Briefly, he’s puppet-soldier; it’s as if he points himself in any direction willy-nilly and marches off, kicks, and salutes. I think of wind-up toys that fall over on their sides and keep on going in circles.
For the ballad, he takes off cap, shirt and boots. His stance seems weighted. Then he wiggles his hips loosely and mechanically, pats his cheek, touches his face and torso. He bends over and wiggles some more, crawls, runs, rubs his hand against a white backcloth half-heartedly. There’s no sense of stress and yet he’s lost something and being without it makes him seem slightly sad and foolish.
It’s almost sufficiently wonderful that Hurwith’s wearing a kimono for Moore’s coolest of tangos (was it “La Paloma”?), and that the steps are smooth and drag very lightly. Sometimes there’s a gentle grapevine in the footwork: Hurwith’s hands fold and bend; the space around him is formally indicated. It’s a thoroughly unfancy tango from which the usual tangle and heat has drained. The dancer becomes a person with no wrinkles and no baggage.
At 541 Broadway (December 7 to 9).
A Space of Grace
December 17
Only six days out of the hospital, and John Bernd was dancing - plainly and softly, but dancing. There was respect and welcome in the setup he arranged for the sanctuary of St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery. Under a single central light, the audience sat in an oval broken at top and bottom. At the near-end break was a cache of special objects, a sort of large-scale medicine bundle - a red child’s chair, small rocks from a river, a pair of hiking boots, a plastic flask, a cup - which was never touched except when Bernd went to trade his sneakers for the boots. On entering, the audience was asked to “take your shoes off, if you want to.” Many did, and spotlights shone on our piles and scattered coats and footwear, giving them, in a way, the same merit as those special objects of Bernd’s.
What he had arranged, I guess, beyond the architecture and the light, was a sound score that began with a gentle roaring that was maybe the sea, maybe a helicopter, as we sat by ourselves for a long time, and the formal pattern of improvised solos and duets for himself, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yvonne Meier, and Stephanie Skura. It was a very low-key sort of evening. Th four walked through the space in darkness, then passed through again, walking, lying down, crawling, kneeling, touching and tugging at each other as well. There was the sound of quietly bubbling water. They curved their bodies gently alongside one another, matching each other, letting their influence be felt.
Bernd solos first - circling his shoulders, rocking, making smooth sweeping gestures and smooth turns. All very meditative, very gentle and steady. Houston-Jones picks up the thread, with sharp little hand gestures and rocking, but he stops abruptly, frequently and twists - at a high pitch of energy - into dashing, sculptural poses like some wildly rococo warrior. Always marvelously conscious of who he is, he warps into fierce twists, swift contortions. Meier starts with quick little steps that build rapidly into a chaos of flying feet and slicing arms; then she slows way down. Skura enters shivering while Meier is finishing on the floor, rocking on her hip bones, then sort of playing turtle with her head. Meier pushes herself backward, trembling, then slides forward on her belly, kicking the floor. Skura’s quite a contrast; she presents herself more squarely, dances bigger, with more push, flinging away from herself.
Solos come again, and then pairings. The improvising gets rougher: Houston-Jones hovers impressively over Meier, and when she ducks, he tumbles. He butts her down, she jumps on his shoulder, he flings her down, later he climbs into her arms. The now-what-do-we-do? moments are quick and unembarrassed Generally, the dancers tend not to get too embroiled with each other for too long, but keep a certain independence.
The event was up and down, but easy and companionable. The architectural format ritualized the mixture of spontaneous and planned action, even sanctified it in a way. And as a result of the caring that went into it, the evening had grace.
At Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (December 5 to 8).
Title
In the Pepatian collective’s Underconstruction, in the first floor theater at La Mama, with views through doorways to occasional activity in the bare back room, and on a staircase to the basement, the dancers are initially seen through a delicate net on which various in-progress constructions are projected. They’re doing stylized phrases of running and sawing and carrying and tossing away. (Much later, they do similar “work,” and beat their foreheads against the ground as if they’re driving nails.). They roll up in sheets of plastic to sleep then disassemble their beds and carry them away. Shiro Kondo and Patti Bradshaw doze with their feet curled up in the air in symmetrical positions in a series of locations. (That reminded me of Alex Hay’s painfully funny 1963 Prairie, in which he snuggled on a horizontal metal bar while a recorded voice asked him repeatedly, “Are you comfortable?”)
Bradshaw and Merian Soto have selected certain “random” elements in connection with a theme of uncompleted structures and their temporary inhabitants. They rearrange Pepon Osorio’s environment, but there is nothing “incomplete” about the casually changing scene I observe. I think there is as little randomness in the appurtenances of the urban nomad as of the nomad of the steppe, so I don’t understand the applicability of the notion. If you must travel light, of necessity everything counts.
Soto and Bradshaw roll with difficulty (backward and upside down) up peatmoss-covered stair to a wooden loft. In an “intermission” purely for the performers, the dancers and musicians snap open cans of what I hope is beer and sip the contents (while up in the loft Soto and Bradshaw chat inaudibly about nomads). At the end, the dancers wheel out cages for sedentary birds with very long tails and, rigging curtains between them, set up a fragile, rectangular sort of “tent” illuminated in blue light. The dancers go inside, toss dust in the air, and leave the enclosure in mysteriously beautiful desolation.
But the movement, often, seems like filler, without any thrust beyond itself. It seems that the dancers are simply doing things the longest way round, the most indirect, inconvenient way. Even the most esoteric investigations are usually to some purpose, however temporary. But there’s no particular “what if...?” and no visible interior to this self-reflexive movement. What concerns me is that the experiments of 20 years ago have become the assumptions of today, and what we’re seeing is mere movement, without context. It’s merely beautiful, devalued, without much character.
Bradshaw scrooges around to whining sounds. Osorio keeps bringing stuff into the back room from the cellar. Kondo splooshes up to his ankles in buckets of mud,paces out a square, then, retraces his steps with fresh mud. K.J. Holmes walks soberly barefoot across the space, like a market woman, with a large box balanced on her head and her sneakers over her shoulder. Holmes’s clear intention convinced me she was doing something that made sense to her, and I rarely questioned what I saw her do. But often I wondered who these people were and what they were up to and why. What should I think of the two women rolling upstairs in dirt? Do they like getting dirty? Do they like doing things the hard way? Have they lost the ability to walk? Am I intended to admire the beauty of their effort?
Part of the problem I sense - one of the permanent exasperations of dance - is that these choreographers don’t seem to have much intimate knowledge of the choreographers who stand behind them in history, even recent history. It may be that to some extent dancers have to experience the evolution of the art within their own bodies. But even with video, and documentation up the kazoo, we’re endlessly reinventing the wheel.
At La Mama E.T.C. (November 14 to December 1).
Only six days out of the hospital, and John Bernd was dancing - plainly and softly, but dancing. There was respect and welcome in the setup he arranged for the sanctuary of St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery. Under a single central light, the audience sat in an oval broken at top and bottom. At the near-end break was a cache of special objects, a sort of large-scale medicine bundle - a red child’s chair, small rocks from a river, a pair of hiking boots, a plastic flask, a cup - which was never touched except when Bernd went to trade his sneakers for the boots. On entering, the audience was asked to “take your shoes off, if you want to.” Many did, and spotlights shone on our piles and scattered coats and footwear, giving them, in a way, the same merit as those special objects of Bernd’s.
What he had arranged, I guess, beyond the architecture and the light, was a sound score that began with a gentle roaring that was maybe the sea, maybe a helicopter, as we sat by ourselves for a long time, and the formal pattern of improvised solos and duets for himself, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yvonne Meier, and Stephanie Skura. It was a very low-key sort of evening. Th four walked through the space in darkness, then passed through again, walking, lying down, crawling, kneeling, touching and tugging at each other as well. There was the sound of quietly bubbling water. They curved their bodies gently alongside one another, matching each other, letting their influence be felt.
Bernd solos first - circling his shoulders, rocking, making smooth sweeping gestures and smooth turns. All very meditative, very gentle and steady. Houston-Jones picks up the thread, with sharp little hand gestures and rocking, but he stops abruptly, frequently and twists - at a high pitch of energy - into dashing, sculptural poses like some wildly rococo warrior. Always marvelously conscious of who he is, he warps into fierce twists, swift contortions. Meier starts with quick little steps that build rapidly into a chaos of flying feet and slicing arms; then she slows way down. Skura enters shivering while Meier is finishing on the floor, rocking on her hip bones, then sort of playing turtle with her head. Meier pushes herself backward, trembling, then slides forward on her belly, kicking the floor. Skura’s quite a contrast; she presents herself more squarely, dances bigger, with more push, flinging away from herself.
Solos come again, and then pairings. The improvising gets rougher: Houston-Jones hovers impressively over Meier, and when she ducks, he tumbles. He butts her down, she jumps on his shoulder, he flings her down, later he climbs into her arms. The now-what-do-we-do? moments are quick and unembarrassed Generally, the dancers tend not to get too embroiled with each other for too long, but keep a certain independence.
The event was up and down, but easy and companionable. The architectural format ritualized the mixture of spontaneous and planned action, even sanctified it in a way. And as a result of the caring that went into it, the evening had grace.
At Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (December 5 to 8).
Title
In the Pepatian collective’s Underconstruction, in the first floor theater at La Mama, with views through doorways to occasional activity in the bare back room, and on a staircase to the basement, the dancers are initially seen through a delicate net on which various in-progress constructions are projected. They’re doing stylized phrases of running and sawing and carrying and tossing away. (Much later, they do similar “work,” and beat their foreheads against the ground as if they’re driving nails.). They roll up in sheets of plastic to sleep then disassemble their beds and carry them away. Shiro Kondo and Patti Bradshaw doze with their feet curled up in the air in symmetrical positions in a series of locations. (That reminded me of Alex Hay’s painfully funny 1963 Prairie, in which he snuggled on a horizontal metal bar while a recorded voice asked him repeatedly, “Are you comfortable?”)
Bradshaw and Merian Soto have selected certain “random” elements in connection with a theme of uncompleted structures and their temporary inhabitants. They rearrange Pepon Osorio’s environment, but there is nothing “incomplete” about the casually changing scene I observe. I think there is as little randomness in the appurtenances of the urban nomad as of the nomad of the steppe, so I don’t understand the applicability of the notion. If you must travel light, of necessity everything counts.
Soto and Bradshaw roll with difficulty (backward and upside down) up peatmoss-covered stair to a wooden loft. In an “intermission” purely for the performers, the dancers and musicians snap open cans of what I hope is beer and sip the contents (while up in the loft Soto and Bradshaw chat inaudibly about nomads). At the end, the dancers wheel out cages for sedentary birds with very long tails and, rigging curtains between them, set up a fragile, rectangular sort of “tent” illuminated in blue light. The dancers go inside, toss dust in the air, and leave the enclosure in mysteriously beautiful desolation.
But the movement, often, seems like filler, without any thrust beyond itself. It seems that the dancers are simply doing things the longest way round, the most indirect, inconvenient way. Even the most esoteric investigations are usually to some purpose, however temporary. But there’s no particular “what if...?” and no visible interior to this self-reflexive movement. What concerns me is that the experiments of 20 years ago have become the assumptions of today, and what we’re seeing is mere movement, without context. It’s merely beautiful, devalued, without much character.
Bradshaw scrooges around to whining sounds. Osorio keeps bringing stuff into the back room from the cellar. Kondo splooshes up to his ankles in buckets of mud,paces out a square, then, retraces his steps with fresh mud. K.J. Holmes walks soberly barefoot across the space, like a market woman, with a large box balanced on her head and her sneakers over her shoulder. Holmes’s clear intention convinced me she was doing something that made sense to her, and I rarely questioned what I saw her do. But often I wondered who these people were and what they were up to and why. What should I think of the two women rolling upstairs in dirt? Do they like getting dirty? Do they like doing things the hard way? Have they lost the ability to walk? Am I intended to admire the beauty of their effort?
Part of the problem I sense - one of the permanent exasperations of dance - is that these choreographers don’t seem to have much intimate knowledge of the choreographers who stand behind them in history, even recent history. It may be that to some extent dancers have to experience the evolution of the art within their own bodies. But even with video, and documentation up the kazoo, we’re endlessly reinventing the wheel.
At La Mama E.T.C. (November 14 to December 1).
Unbroken Blossom
December 10
Beverly Blossom, with her hair in a becoming reddish frizz, wearing a long, dark shirt and baggy smock, recently presented a program of five extraordinarily witty and penetrating solos at the Nikolais/Louis DanceSpace. Back in the ‘50s, in Alwin Nikolais’s early days at the Henry Street Playhouse, Blossom was one of his most distinctive dancers. And, in the intervening years, she hasn’t lost her edge.
Quick-Step (Now and Then) is something of a routine turn for Blossom as an incredibly eager dingbat: doing the little quickstep of the title, zipping into tight little turnarounds and fizzy little scissors kicks, tossing the hem of her smock around like a carefree showoff. Lots of her gestures are quick and clipped, even sputtery. Her bounces seem vast. Then she’ll deflate, poop out - not for long, but repeatedly. Still, she never loses the will to pick herself up, dust herself off...
Blossom must be in her late fifties, could be older, I don’t know. There’s no pretense about it. But she looks damn good, partly because these pieces suit her perfectly. There’s not a gesture that hasn’t been considered and reconsidered; everything is essential and exact. Little she does can be read as literal, but, for example, the way she’ll hold her head in profile, looking like some Roman emperor on an antique medallion, or the delicately emphatic way she’ll use her hand, catches you up in an evanescent emotional fabric In her playful use of costume as an absolute part of character, her eloquent daffiness, the able way she uses comedy to expose, and exalt deeper feelings and perceptions, and in a certain innocent joy, she reminded me - very much to my surprise - of the late Katy Litz.
In the first of Three Valentines, she wears a big flattish hat with a rose. (Litz would have liked that hat.) Her hands are soft, her body arches backward in a near-swoon. She seems such a fragile being. Next, she walks into the projection of a Lartigue woman with closed eyes; Blossom’s face is within the kewpie’s exaggerated lips. The rose trembles in her hand. Her body sweeps into carefully circumscribed curves. Then, the rose’s redolence intoxicates her, and a minute later, that moment of abandon turns rueful: she’s belly-forward in pregnancy, and hardly overjoyed. In the third part, which is wonderfully strange and tender - to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s singing of “None but the Lonely Heart” - Blossom keeps changing shape. With the rose in her teeth, she wraps the smock around her head like a nun’s veil, let’s its hemline hang from her head in a droopy O. She shrinks and gets taller, shifts disjunctively sideways making wicked faces, then curves into big open shapes. Against the melancholy constriction of the song, Blossom is being anything you could want her to be. She pushes away with forlorn gestures. lifts her skirt behind and flashes her leg to show her spirit. Beneath her transformation, she remains herself: both game and sad.
So many layers of feeling have been wound into Dad’s Ties (1982) that, as deeply personal as it is, it takes color from our own memories and mirrors them back to us more brightly. It breaks into three “takes,” as for a film. In this funny and tender homage. suggested, I suppose, by finding her father’s stock of ties many years after his death, Blossom starts out as glamorous and full of herself as an old-time movie queen. From a secret stash behind her, she takes one tie - fat green and gray diagonal stripes - and drapes it over her head. Then another, and another, and another - handling each one as if it’s special. And each is a surprise: we actually wore ties like this! More stripes, solid red, plaids, brown with yellow blobs. Eventually, Blossom looks like Cleopatra in that enormous headdress, but she continues to adorn herself with more ties. She stoops with the weight of them and the weight of memories we can only guess at, but she’s inspirited too by the bliss of actually recapturing the past. She loads still more over her head, dangles bunches of ties from her hands and swings them tantalizingly. Puts them on too, straightens up, and grins. There seem to be hundreds of ties, and she somehow accepts, with them, the whole bittersweet sentimental burden.
In the second part, she ties one tie around all the others like a headband, and begins to shimmy and sway and poke her arms about like a cartoon Egyptian dancing girl. She flips her skirts up. It’s an outrageous, eye-popping moment, sweet and foolish and deliciously dirty: from her crotch hang dozens more ties which she swings and swishes and bumps (No wonder those ties were hidden away!)
In the last section, she’s seated, wearing a dark, rumpled coat and a derby. When she lifts a guitar case from the floor, all the ties fall out a once. She rescues them, drapes some over her hat, and circles the space, showing us her empty hands and outstretched fingers. She knots half a dozen or so around her neck at once, then drags the rest into a sort of path - leading where? What to make of the whole conundrum of love and loss, of the residue of memories and objects and the past coming back to clobber you when you least expect it, and not even being the person you were then?
In The Actor (with the closing piece, Re-Run, part of a work-in-progress) Blossom runs forcefully through a gallery of contrasts, sweeping massively through a repertoire of classic, declamatory postures, mugging outrageously, melting from authoritative to winsome, switching from the maiden to the rake In Re-Run, which is spectacular but not quite fully developed, the contrasts are more nearly simultaneous. Blossom is divided by wig and costume into man and woman - the man a mustachioed devil, the woman an enticement with long red tresses and a lace robe. First she keeps switching profiles; one almost chases the other. Then she shows herself to us full-front, freakishly divided in sex, in character. Circling, then whirling, she blurs the differences, then stops. She very slowly lifts the wig which most strongly divides her being. Her face seems to stretch and transform. Her eyes open wide - they’re so blue! - with a kind of amazing refreshment. And the gesture carries us with her to a kind of resolution and transcendence.
At Nikolais/Louis DanceSpace (November 21 to 24).
Beverly Blossom, with her hair in a becoming reddish frizz, wearing a long, dark shirt and baggy smock, recently presented a program of five extraordinarily witty and penetrating solos at the Nikolais/Louis DanceSpace. Back in the ‘50s, in Alwin Nikolais’s early days at the Henry Street Playhouse, Blossom was one of his most distinctive dancers. And, in the intervening years, she hasn’t lost her edge.
Quick-Step (Now and Then) is something of a routine turn for Blossom as an incredibly eager dingbat: doing the little quickstep of the title, zipping into tight little turnarounds and fizzy little scissors kicks, tossing the hem of her smock around like a carefree showoff. Lots of her gestures are quick and clipped, even sputtery. Her bounces seem vast. Then she’ll deflate, poop out - not for long, but repeatedly. Still, she never loses the will to pick herself up, dust herself off...
Blossom must be in her late fifties, could be older, I don’t know. There’s no pretense about it. But she looks damn good, partly because these pieces suit her perfectly. There’s not a gesture that hasn’t been considered and reconsidered; everything is essential and exact. Little she does can be read as literal, but, for example, the way she’ll hold her head in profile, looking like some Roman emperor on an antique medallion, or the delicately emphatic way she’ll use her hand, catches you up in an evanescent emotional fabric In her playful use of costume as an absolute part of character, her eloquent daffiness, the able way she uses comedy to expose, and exalt deeper feelings and perceptions, and in a certain innocent joy, she reminded me - very much to my surprise - of the late Katy Litz.
In the first of Three Valentines, she wears a big flattish hat with a rose. (Litz would have liked that hat.) Her hands are soft, her body arches backward in a near-swoon. She seems such a fragile being. Next, she walks into the projection of a Lartigue woman with closed eyes; Blossom’s face is within the kewpie’s exaggerated lips. The rose trembles in her hand. Her body sweeps into carefully circumscribed curves. Then, the rose’s redolence intoxicates her, and a minute later, that moment of abandon turns rueful: she’s belly-forward in pregnancy, and hardly overjoyed. In the third part, which is wonderfully strange and tender - to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s singing of “None but the Lonely Heart” - Blossom keeps changing shape. With the rose in her teeth, she wraps the smock around her head like a nun’s veil, let’s its hemline hang from her head in a droopy O. She shrinks and gets taller, shifts disjunctively sideways making wicked faces, then curves into big open shapes. Against the melancholy constriction of the song, Blossom is being anything you could want her to be. She pushes away with forlorn gestures. lifts her skirt behind and flashes her leg to show her spirit. Beneath her transformation, she remains herself: both game and sad.
So many layers of feeling have been wound into Dad’s Ties (1982) that, as deeply personal as it is, it takes color from our own memories and mirrors them back to us more brightly. It breaks into three “takes,” as for a film. In this funny and tender homage. suggested, I suppose, by finding her father’s stock of ties many years after his death, Blossom starts out as glamorous and full of herself as an old-time movie queen. From a secret stash behind her, she takes one tie - fat green and gray diagonal stripes - and drapes it over her head. Then another, and another, and another - handling each one as if it’s special. And each is a surprise: we actually wore ties like this! More stripes, solid red, plaids, brown with yellow blobs. Eventually, Blossom looks like Cleopatra in that enormous headdress, but she continues to adorn herself with more ties. She stoops with the weight of them and the weight of memories we can only guess at, but she’s inspirited too by the bliss of actually recapturing the past. She loads still more over her head, dangles bunches of ties from her hands and swings them tantalizingly. Puts them on too, straightens up, and grins. There seem to be hundreds of ties, and she somehow accepts, with them, the whole bittersweet sentimental burden.
In the second part, she ties one tie around all the others like a headband, and begins to shimmy and sway and poke her arms about like a cartoon Egyptian dancing girl. She flips her skirts up. It’s an outrageous, eye-popping moment, sweet and foolish and deliciously dirty: from her crotch hang dozens more ties which she swings and swishes and bumps (No wonder those ties were hidden away!)
In the last section, she’s seated, wearing a dark, rumpled coat and a derby. When she lifts a guitar case from the floor, all the ties fall out a once. She rescues them, drapes some over her hat, and circles the space, showing us her empty hands and outstretched fingers. She knots half a dozen or so around her neck at once, then drags the rest into a sort of path - leading where? What to make of the whole conundrum of love and loss, of the residue of memories and objects and the past coming back to clobber you when you least expect it, and not even being the person you were then?
In The Actor (with the closing piece, Re-Run, part of a work-in-progress) Blossom runs forcefully through a gallery of contrasts, sweeping massively through a repertoire of classic, declamatory postures, mugging outrageously, melting from authoritative to winsome, switching from the maiden to the rake In Re-Run, which is spectacular but not quite fully developed, the contrasts are more nearly simultaneous. Blossom is divided by wig and costume into man and woman - the man a mustachioed devil, the woman an enticement with long red tresses and a lace robe. First she keeps switching profiles; one almost chases the other. Then she shows herself to us full-front, freakishly divided in sex, in character. Circling, then whirling, she blurs the differences, then stops. She very slowly lifts the wig which most strongly divides her being. Her face seems to stretch and transform. Her eyes open wide - they’re so blue! - with a kind of amazing refreshment. And the gesture carries us with her to a kind of resolution and transcendence.
At Nikolais/Louis DanceSpace (November 21 to 24).
Greed
December 3
Bebe Miller’s four dances at P.S. 122 had a breezy, full-blooded confidence and a blithe transparency of mood and incident. There’s a lot of amicable belligerence in last year’s Trapped in Queens, gestures of saucy independence and pushing away. The dancers (Renee Lemieux, Amy Lieberman, Shelley Sabina Senter and David Thomson, plus Miller) lean against a truncated set of building fronts with windows and doors, zigzag freely through the space, rub against the set. One, upside-down, plants her feet against it. Another jumps and hands onto the top of it, then swings on a doorknob. But mostly there’s a deftly inflected legato quality in the dancing, a particular zip to the arms. The group augments and depletes quickly and often. The women walk with a sassy tremor, shaking their upper bodies. Thomson and one of the women cuddle together aginst the wall, drift into a brief nocturne. Later, three women march tightly shoulder to shoulder, like soldiers forming a wall of shields; their gestures are square, blunt, forceful. Three women and Thomson whirl and jump to a harder beat; they become a fountain of great eager springing. Miller skids and swings into Thomson’s arms, grabs him by the hair with friendly ferocity. clamps herself on his back on the way out.
The rhythm of Gypsy Pie, and the trickiness of No Evidence, both of which deserve a good deal more said of them. I particularly like the alertness of Miller’s dancers, the way their personalities come though unforced, the way they balance distance and naturalness. I enjoy Thomson’s slightly dangerous presence, his bold antelope springiness, his long-limbed spidery quality. He’s becoming a match for Miller, too.
All three of Miller’s lively group pieces, with their meandering, collagelike structures, pleased me. But in a group work, anybody’s particular inflections tend to be worn off by the need to fit. In her solo, Spending Time Doing Things, Miller was astonishing. It would be hard to imagine anyone else bringing it off. She’s not just a superb technician who also knows precisely how to shut up and let the dancing speak. She’s an expert tease who plays us for our pleasure with incredible subtlety. satisfies cravings we never knew we had, and builds our responsiveness back into her dancing. I know nothing of Bebe Miller’s life, but it seems to me that when she dancers nothing of herself is omitted. She is entire.
She couldn’t start more simply: a curl of the hand becomes a swing in the forearm that insinuates itself through her body and turns her into a kind of marvelous chameleon. Her personality shimmers. I think of the crystal balls that float across Michael Moschen’s arms and shoulders and fingertips. And of Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line, in which an adoring line transforms itself into every kind of ordinary and spectacular geometric creation to wow an unimpressed dot. Miller can do this - turn into anything - but she doesn’t have to. She just swings a leg and smiles and pretends it’s simple. She can be jelly, rubber, sharp as a tack, and all without gimmickry.
When Duke Ellington’s “In My Solitude” joins her, she folds herself into the fabric of the music so slyly; the twining threads of aural and visual music double the resonance. She’ll softly undercut what you think she’s up to, then burst into big wide leaps and sling herself into the floor, easy as pie. If she shoots her arm straight out, it seems to change speed at least a couple of times en route and say half a dozen things that I think I understand perfectly at that moment. If she snaps her hand shut, you see five individual fingers deciding to close on the palm. So even in the simplest moment there’s a hell of a lot to see. Everything is beautifully phrased and modulated. As far as dancing goes, it can’t get better or wiser than this But it made me insanely greedy: everybody should dance with this level of individuality, ingenuity, and finesse.
At P.S. 122 (November 15 to 17).
Bebe Miller’s four dances at P.S. 122 had a breezy, full-blooded confidence and a blithe transparency of mood and incident. There’s a lot of amicable belligerence in last year’s Trapped in Queens, gestures of saucy independence and pushing away. The dancers (Renee Lemieux, Amy Lieberman, Shelley Sabina Senter and David Thomson, plus Miller) lean against a truncated set of building fronts with windows and doors, zigzag freely through the space, rub against the set. One, upside-down, plants her feet against it. Another jumps and hands onto the top of it, then swings on a doorknob. But mostly there’s a deftly inflected legato quality in the dancing, a particular zip to the arms. The group augments and depletes quickly and often. The women walk with a sassy tremor, shaking their upper bodies. Thomson and one of the women cuddle together aginst the wall, drift into a brief nocturne. Later, three women march tightly shoulder to shoulder, like soldiers forming a wall of shields; their gestures are square, blunt, forceful. Three women and Thomson whirl and jump to a harder beat; they become a fountain of great eager springing. Miller skids and swings into Thomson’s arms, grabs him by the hair with friendly ferocity. clamps herself on his back on the way out.
The rhythm of Gypsy Pie, and the trickiness of No Evidence, both of which deserve a good deal more said of them. I particularly like the alertness of Miller’s dancers, the way their personalities come though unforced, the way they balance distance and naturalness. I enjoy Thomson’s slightly dangerous presence, his bold antelope springiness, his long-limbed spidery quality. He’s becoming a match for Miller, too.
All three of Miller’s lively group pieces, with their meandering, collagelike structures, pleased me. But in a group work, anybody’s particular inflections tend to be worn off by the need to fit. In her solo, Spending Time Doing Things, Miller was astonishing. It would be hard to imagine anyone else bringing it off. She’s not just a superb technician who also knows precisely how to shut up and let the dancing speak. She’s an expert tease who plays us for our pleasure with incredible subtlety. satisfies cravings we never knew we had, and builds our responsiveness back into her dancing. I know nothing of Bebe Miller’s life, but it seems to me that when she dancers nothing of herself is omitted. She is entire.
She couldn’t start more simply: a curl of the hand becomes a swing in the forearm that insinuates itself through her body and turns her into a kind of marvelous chameleon. Her personality shimmers. I think of the crystal balls that float across Michael Moschen’s arms and shoulders and fingertips. And of Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line, in which an adoring line transforms itself into every kind of ordinary and spectacular geometric creation to wow an unimpressed dot. Miller can do this - turn into anything - but she doesn’t have to. She just swings a leg and smiles and pretends it’s simple. She can be jelly, rubber, sharp as a tack, and all without gimmickry.
When Duke Ellington’s “In My Solitude” joins her, she folds herself into the fabric of the music so slyly; the twining threads of aural and visual music double the resonance. She’ll softly undercut what you think she’s up to, then burst into big wide leaps and sling herself into the floor, easy as pie. If she shoots her arm straight out, it seems to change speed at least a couple of times en route and say half a dozen things that I think I understand perfectly at that moment. If she snaps her hand shut, you see five individual fingers deciding to close on the palm. So even in the simplest moment there’s a hell of a lot to see. Everything is beautifully phrased and modulated. As far as dancing goes, it can’t get better or wiser than this But it made me insanely greedy: everybody should dance with this level of individuality, ingenuity, and finesse.
At P.S. 122 (November 15 to 17).
Manhattan Latin
November 19
The appealing company Tina Ramirez started 15 years ago, is still going strong, bolstered by an enthusiastic audience. And her current crop of dancers is still quite a young one, teetering on the edge of professionalism.
William Whitener’s 1984 Tito on Timbales, which featured Tito Puento and his percussion ensemble live, did pretty good service for the company, opening with eight dancers paired in a double line bobbing their heads, then moving to a sort of wiggly, loose-hipped, prancing square dance. Lots of Spanish touches: the arched back, the flamboyant twist of the arms, the wriggling shoulders, the swishing skirts of the women. The snap and intricate looping action of the beginning and ending group sections is lively, but the solos and duets in between demand a presence that these young dancers don’t yet have. There’s a kind of puppyish innocence, too, in their execution of the vocabulary of sexual come-on that’s built into this stuff. It’s not heavy, mind, but still it’s not second nature to these kinds, so they appear to be playing at being grown-ups. And the contrast with Puente’s pure concentration and physical economy is deleterious. As the drumming gets busier, wilder, more demanding, the dancing remains relatively tame, partly because too much emphasis goes into that put-on affect.
Roberto Lorca’s Sacromonte is an amazingly short - chopped-off, really - “gypsy” solo for Sandra Rivera in a ruffled red dress. Though her stamping and clapping aren’t always sharp, she delivers an assertive message, digging her weight solidly into the ground, letting the toughness of a half-squat stance gleam through unprettified.
Chiang Ching’s How Many Flowers Have Fallen, which opened and closed with the sweet-voiced singing of the Boys Choir of Harlem, doesn’t make a bit of sense to me: maybe it’s just a playful garland of artful designs. The dancers start in a circle on the floor, lift their arms and join hands, then sit, then stand, linking arms or touching hands to one another’s shoulders, constantly reattaching themselves. An extra girls runs in and joins up, then another boy. Playful groups of two, three or four lift one of their members as they move around the stage and reorganize. Two dancers leap over a rolling carpet of couples. A bunch of them climb on each other to form a sort of openwork sculpture, then the ones with free hands pull out and swirl pink handkerchiefs and drop them around the stage when the group disperses. Back in a circle, they tippy-toe around and over a couple lying down in their midst - not dead, just asleep, I guess. Then they’ve got more little handkerchiefs to wave and scatter over the pair. What I regretted about this piece, besides its unidimensional, happy-happy falseness, was the complete lack of impulsion between one action and the next. It was all now we do this, now we do that, now we do something else. No connections. Why is Ching showing us a flock of pretty nitwits?
In contrast, the closing number, Talley Beatty’s new Recuerdo de Campo Amor, is marvelously apt. In several sections, and sharply punctuated rhythmically, it moves at lightning speed, skipping the dancers around and on-and-off the stage like rockets. Beatty keeps our eyes zipping all over the place, and no single dancer has to carry much responsibility. There’s nothing in Recuerdo the dancers don’t do well; they don’t have to persuade us of anything, and they seem wonderfully exhilarated. There’s the color of flashing legs, lots of turns, pelvic punches, twitching shoulders - but the main effect comes through the flashing arms. Quick or slow, they’re almost always reaching. The dancers are making themselves bigger, quietly exploding to the limits of their stretch. That’s a little more like it!
At the Joyce Theater (November 5 to 10).
The appealing company Tina Ramirez started 15 years ago, is still going strong, bolstered by an enthusiastic audience. And her current crop of dancers is still quite a young one, teetering on the edge of professionalism.
William Whitener’s 1984 Tito on Timbales, which featured Tito Puento and his percussion ensemble live, did pretty good service for the company, opening with eight dancers paired in a double line bobbing their heads, then moving to a sort of wiggly, loose-hipped, prancing square dance. Lots of Spanish touches: the arched back, the flamboyant twist of the arms, the wriggling shoulders, the swishing skirts of the women. The snap and intricate looping action of the beginning and ending group sections is lively, but the solos and duets in between demand a presence that these young dancers don’t yet have. There’s a kind of puppyish innocence, too, in their execution of the vocabulary of sexual come-on that’s built into this stuff. It’s not heavy, mind, but still it’s not second nature to these kinds, so they appear to be playing at being grown-ups. And the contrast with Puente’s pure concentration and physical economy is deleterious. As the drumming gets busier, wilder, more demanding, the dancing remains relatively tame, partly because too much emphasis goes into that put-on affect.
Roberto Lorca’s Sacromonte is an amazingly short - chopped-off, really - “gypsy” solo for Sandra Rivera in a ruffled red dress. Though her stamping and clapping aren’t always sharp, she delivers an assertive message, digging her weight solidly into the ground, letting the toughness of a half-squat stance gleam through unprettified.
Chiang Ching’s How Many Flowers Have Fallen, which opened and closed with the sweet-voiced singing of the Boys Choir of Harlem, doesn’t make a bit of sense to me: maybe it’s just a playful garland of artful designs. The dancers start in a circle on the floor, lift their arms and join hands, then sit, then stand, linking arms or touching hands to one another’s shoulders, constantly reattaching themselves. An extra girls runs in and joins up, then another boy. Playful groups of two, three or four lift one of their members as they move around the stage and reorganize. Two dancers leap over a rolling carpet of couples. A bunch of them climb on each other to form a sort of openwork sculpture, then the ones with free hands pull out and swirl pink handkerchiefs and drop them around the stage when the group disperses. Back in a circle, they tippy-toe around and over a couple lying down in their midst - not dead, just asleep, I guess. Then they’ve got more little handkerchiefs to wave and scatter over the pair. What I regretted about this piece, besides its unidimensional, happy-happy falseness, was the complete lack of impulsion between one action and the next. It was all now we do this, now we do that, now we do something else. No connections. Why is Ching showing us a flock of pretty nitwits?
In contrast, the closing number, Talley Beatty’s new Recuerdo de Campo Amor, is marvelously apt. In several sections, and sharply punctuated rhythmically, it moves at lightning speed, skipping the dancers around and on-and-off the stage like rockets. Beatty keeps our eyes zipping all over the place, and no single dancer has to carry much responsibility. There’s nothing in Recuerdo the dancers don’t do well; they don’t have to persuade us of anything, and they seem wonderfully exhilarated. There’s the color of flashing legs, lots of turns, pelvic punches, twitching shoulders - but the main effect comes through the flashing arms. Quick or slow, they’re almost always reaching. The dancers are making themselves bigger, quietly exploding to the limits of their stretch. That’s a little more like it!
At the Joyce Theater (November 5 to 10).