Murky Waters
May 12
It’s exceedingly rare to see work by a contemporary Italian choreographer here, and I was glad of the opportunity to see Enzo Cosimi’s five-year-old company, Occhesc, in its American debut at DTW. There was a hard eloquence to Cosimi’s Acque, composed for himself and four women. His fourth full-length work, Acque is built in short, rhythmically varied segments filled with brittle, evocative details. But it’s pulled in conflicting directions.
Cosimi creates a spooky but generalized mythic atmosphere - yet a kind of self-consciousness, almost self-promotion constricts the piece. Because he never quite establishes a context for his images - which, individually, can be quite powerful - they don’t come into perspective. Ultimately, they create an overall mood of suspicion and futile exertion. Acque is not an abstract piece, but because there’s no hierarchy in the relation of its segments, the piece becomes its own smoke screen and obscures whatever is on Cosimi’s mind. Tight and ominous, Acque occurs in a carefully designed and controlled space, first partially shielded by three diagonally-angled white screens, about the size of window shades, upon which images of a sleeping man’s body are projected. Maybe we’re spying. In the small space remaining alongside the scrims, Cosimi appears, slightly sinister, moving his hands in the chary light - making short, chopping gestures, slightly twisting his body very slowly sweeping his arms, pushing outwards, nearly falling into a doze. When the screens are pulled up, like blinds, the space is still cut in two by two additional scrims, and the back wall features a silver shape of a house.
Much later, a large furry table is rolled onstage, around which the dancers hover, crawl and dangle. Cosimi is the wizard of the piece, but remains enigmatic. He has, too, the edginess of a Pasolini street kid. There’s something sullen and steamy in his presentation of himself. Seductive in a hooded way, he’s like somebody you fall for though you know he’ll probably do you in. This can be an attractive, if dangerous quality, but it seems out of place. He’s not intended to be the villain or the hero or the victim.
The women, who appear shortly, after, careful to be exact in their delivery, seem impenetrably blank and coldly fearful. There’s something absent in their faces. I don’t understand the significance of their difference, unless it substantiates the gap between a sat and his backup, between the focal male and his coterie of females. The moods of Cosimi’s constricted personality filter across his face. And because he appears to have changeable feelings he becomes fascinating. In comparison, the women have no dimension at all.
Acque is complicated and murky, full of attitude. There are only a few moments when I can read the action. The movement is largely in the upper body, most decisively in the arms and hands; sometimes it’s quite mimetic, like opening a door, jettisoning baggage, indicating the roundness of a swollen belly. The gestures are often dramatic, witchy, clawing; or they can be the ornaments of passionate, but nonexistent, speechifying. They carve around the body, swing narrowly, comment, and measure. Intense, controlled, Acque feels enclosed, more tightly reined-in and designed than we’re accustomed to. It’s never lavish. The legs and feet are used in a calculatedly gestural way, not to cover space. Holding their arms at chest level, Cosimi and the two women bob, then struggle to walk with their feet almost stick to the floor; they cover their mouths, smack their heads. The emphatic shapes of the body are always delineated as sharply as a cutout. The dancers duck and wobble their heads, swiftly tilt their bodies. The women are often determined and stiff in their activity. One crawls halfway through another’s legs, and changes her mind, as if deciding not to be born. Everyone whirls their arms like propellers. They hold their hands outward, with the fingers vaguely moving, much around with limp hands, and step gravely. Cosimi eats his fists. He tries to rip open his chest, his belly. He grips the sides of his head as if holding on the mask that is his face. Cosimi does not intend to be obscure, I think.
Somewhere is probably buried an actual scenario that details not only what happens but what it all signifies. But Acque is too laden with intention, and too fragmented. It is so self-consciously charged, so fraught - like the kind of horror flick that makes you gratuitously terrified of a doorknob or kitchen faucet It feels full of meaning that never actually means anything. There’s no payoff. Eventually it topples under a burden of incidents that don’t seem to matter.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 16 to 19).
It’s exceedingly rare to see work by a contemporary Italian choreographer here, and I was glad of the opportunity to see Enzo Cosimi’s five-year-old company, Occhesc, in its American debut at DTW. There was a hard eloquence to Cosimi’s Acque, composed for himself and four women. His fourth full-length work, Acque is built in short, rhythmically varied segments filled with brittle, evocative details. But it’s pulled in conflicting directions.
Cosimi creates a spooky but generalized mythic atmosphere - yet a kind of self-consciousness, almost self-promotion constricts the piece. Because he never quite establishes a context for his images - which, individually, can be quite powerful - they don’t come into perspective. Ultimately, they create an overall mood of suspicion and futile exertion. Acque is not an abstract piece, but because there’s no hierarchy in the relation of its segments, the piece becomes its own smoke screen and obscures whatever is on Cosimi’s mind. Tight and ominous, Acque occurs in a carefully designed and controlled space, first partially shielded by three diagonally-angled white screens, about the size of window shades, upon which images of a sleeping man’s body are projected. Maybe we’re spying. In the small space remaining alongside the scrims, Cosimi appears, slightly sinister, moving his hands in the chary light - making short, chopping gestures, slightly twisting his body very slowly sweeping his arms, pushing outwards, nearly falling into a doze. When the screens are pulled up, like blinds, the space is still cut in two by two additional scrims, and the back wall features a silver shape of a house.
Much later, a large furry table is rolled onstage, around which the dancers hover, crawl and dangle. Cosimi is the wizard of the piece, but remains enigmatic. He has, too, the edginess of a Pasolini street kid. There’s something sullen and steamy in his presentation of himself. Seductive in a hooded way, he’s like somebody you fall for though you know he’ll probably do you in. This can be an attractive, if dangerous quality, but it seems out of place. He’s not intended to be the villain or the hero or the victim.
The women, who appear shortly, after, careful to be exact in their delivery, seem impenetrably blank and coldly fearful. There’s something absent in their faces. I don’t understand the significance of their difference, unless it substantiates the gap between a sat and his backup, between the focal male and his coterie of females. The moods of Cosimi’s constricted personality filter across his face. And because he appears to have changeable feelings he becomes fascinating. In comparison, the women have no dimension at all.
Acque is complicated and murky, full of attitude. There are only a few moments when I can read the action. The movement is largely in the upper body, most decisively in the arms and hands; sometimes it’s quite mimetic, like opening a door, jettisoning baggage, indicating the roundness of a swollen belly. The gestures are often dramatic, witchy, clawing; or they can be the ornaments of passionate, but nonexistent, speechifying. They carve around the body, swing narrowly, comment, and measure. Intense, controlled, Acque feels enclosed, more tightly reined-in and designed than we’re accustomed to. It’s never lavish. The legs and feet are used in a calculatedly gestural way, not to cover space. Holding their arms at chest level, Cosimi and the two women bob, then struggle to walk with their feet almost stick to the floor; they cover their mouths, smack their heads. The emphatic shapes of the body are always delineated as sharply as a cutout. The dancers duck and wobble their heads, swiftly tilt their bodies. The women are often determined and stiff in their activity. One crawls halfway through another’s legs, and changes her mind, as if deciding not to be born. Everyone whirls their arms like propellers. They hold their hands outward, with the fingers vaguely moving, much around with limp hands, and step gravely. Cosimi eats his fists. He tries to rip open his chest, his belly. He grips the sides of his head as if holding on the mask that is his face. Cosimi does not intend to be obscure, I think.
Somewhere is probably buried an actual scenario that details not only what happens but what it all signifies. But Acque is too laden with intention, and too fragmented. It is so self-consciously charged, so fraught - like the kind of horror flick that makes you gratuitously terrified of a doorknob or kitchen faucet It feels full of meaning that never actually means anything. There’s no payoff. Eventually it topples under a burden of incidents that don’t seem to matter.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 16 to 19).
No Rough Edges
September 8
Ann Elizabeth Law, Lynn Lesniak and Danielle Shapiro joined forces to present a glossy concert of a half-dozen mostly new pieces at the DIA Foundation. It’s little weird to see a concert of young work mounted this handsomely (plus there were beverages during the intermission, and snacks apres). Unreasonably perhaps, you expect the work to be as mature as the production, but though the dances were well-polished and, usually, pretty, on the whole they didn’t have much inside.
Lesniak danced with Alwin Nikolais’s company for the past five years or so, and she used the body like a well-oiled mechanical device. In Placement, four dancers - in black unitards with wide strips on the side, cuffs and wristbands in magenta, blue and yellow - stretch, roll, fold, run in place and bounce their bodies rhythmically on sheets of Mylar taped to the floor. A fifth bobs on a small, round jogging trampoline. Their bodies briskly flex, twist, thrust, efficiently and elegantly in segments. Except for a couple of lifts, what is this but a demonstration exercise class?
Lesniak’s new Angles is in much the same pattern. A dance for six women, it’s similarly efficient, symmetrical, and rhythmically unvarying. But it has a quasi-Oriental flavor - evocations of resilient combat forms and temple dancing - and features a deeper bounce. Both pieces are expertly performed and assembled, but, like mink can openers, they have no inherent need to exist. In her 1985 solo Equanimity, Lesniak is lovely, articulate, creamy smooth. She reminded me of Carolyn Carlson in both her look and her dreamy self-absorption. Siting on the floor, slightly slumped, she contracts her torso gently, leans her ear into her palm, peers to one side of her forearms held vertically. She tips back on her buttocks with her limbs angled out, takes a prayerful attitude, arches back to the floor - a succulent morsel for someone’s dainty palate.
In Scroll of Coral, a pleasant, unpretentious duet by Danielle Shapiro to the delicate chiming of modern Indonesian music, Shapiro and Heide Sacjerlotzky, wearing flimsy costumes of pale blue and mauve, swirl on- and offstage in a soft flurry of constant, easy turns, lightly flung and reaching arms, sweeping legs. Small, but more than a sketch, Scroll had the merit of being appropriately scaled to its material.
“Eek!” is the theme of Shapiro’s second piece, Torn Curtains, which closed the program. It’s fun to do, I’m sure, but it’s an adolescent rehash of a single notion. A set of skewed window frames and lacy, windswept curtains (by Bill Tresch) suggests the haunted house in which, initially, two suspicious, grimacing women scrunch and creep to screeching music. Altogether, five black-lipped, bug-eyed, scaredy-cats wind up tramping around hunched over, running around in mock terror, lugging and dragging one another in and out. Leaps to escape are blocked dead in midair by somebody’s arm. Hideous funhouse laughter, bleating saxophones...
Ann Law’s Gabrielle Gone is an abrasive, complex dance in five sections for seven women, interestingly costumed in different styles by Reginald Bielamowicz (a rip-off of Degas’s “Little Ballerina” tutu, a bunchy black dress with white dots, a plastic miniskirt, a multicolored playsuit, etc.) To the hard, squawky music of Gone, the movement is bluntly executed, assertively delivered, strident. The arms thrust and shove, slice across and rip back, snap apart. The upper torso is wrested sideways or sharply twisted. Balletic phrases submit to a rock wriggle. These are tough, robotic women and, though I disliked and didn’t comprehend their hardness, there’s a comparable schematic toughness in the structure of the dance.
At DIA Art Foundation (August 18 to 20).
Ann Elizabeth Law, Lynn Lesniak and Danielle Shapiro joined forces to present a glossy concert of a half-dozen mostly new pieces at the DIA Foundation. It’s little weird to see a concert of young work mounted this handsomely (plus there were beverages during the intermission, and snacks apres). Unreasonably perhaps, you expect the work to be as mature as the production, but though the dances were well-polished and, usually, pretty, on the whole they didn’t have much inside.
Lesniak danced with Alwin Nikolais’s company for the past five years or so, and she used the body like a well-oiled mechanical device. In Placement, four dancers - in black unitards with wide strips on the side, cuffs and wristbands in magenta, blue and yellow - stretch, roll, fold, run in place and bounce their bodies rhythmically on sheets of Mylar taped to the floor. A fifth bobs on a small, round jogging trampoline. Their bodies briskly flex, twist, thrust, efficiently and elegantly in segments. Except for a couple of lifts, what is this but a demonstration exercise class?
Lesniak’s new Angles is in much the same pattern. A dance for six women, it’s similarly efficient, symmetrical, and rhythmically unvarying. But it has a quasi-Oriental flavor - evocations of resilient combat forms and temple dancing - and features a deeper bounce. Both pieces are expertly performed and assembled, but, like mink can openers, they have no inherent need to exist. In her 1985 solo Equanimity, Lesniak is lovely, articulate, creamy smooth. She reminded me of Carolyn Carlson in both her look and her dreamy self-absorption. Siting on the floor, slightly slumped, she contracts her torso gently, leans her ear into her palm, peers to one side of her forearms held vertically. She tips back on her buttocks with her limbs angled out, takes a prayerful attitude, arches back to the floor - a succulent morsel for someone’s dainty palate.
In Scroll of Coral, a pleasant, unpretentious duet by Danielle Shapiro to the delicate chiming of modern Indonesian music, Shapiro and Heide Sacjerlotzky, wearing flimsy costumes of pale blue and mauve, swirl on- and offstage in a soft flurry of constant, easy turns, lightly flung and reaching arms, sweeping legs. Small, but more than a sketch, Scroll had the merit of being appropriately scaled to its material.
“Eek!” is the theme of Shapiro’s second piece, Torn Curtains, which closed the program. It’s fun to do, I’m sure, but it’s an adolescent rehash of a single notion. A set of skewed window frames and lacy, windswept curtains (by Bill Tresch) suggests the haunted house in which, initially, two suspicious, grimacing women scrunch and creep to screeching music. Altogether, five black-lipped, bug-eyed, scaredy-cats wind up tramping around hunched over, running around in mock terror, lugging and dragging one another in and out. Leaps to escape are blocked dead in midair by somebody’s arm. Hideous funhouse laughter, bleating saxophones...
Ann Law’s Gabrielle Gone is an abrasive, complex dance in five sections for seven women, interestingly costumed in different styles by Reginald Bielamowicz (a rip-off of Degas’s “Little Ballerina” tutu, a bunchy black dress with white dots, a plastic miniskirt, a multicolored playsuit, etc.) To the hard, squawky music of Gone, the movement is bluntly executed, assertively delivered, strident. The arms thrust and shove, slice across and rip back, snap apart. The upper torso is wrested sideways or sharply twisted. Balletic phrases submit to a rock wriggle. These are tough, robotic women and, though I disliked and didn’t comprehend their hardness, there’s a comparable schematic toughness in the structure of the dance.
At DIA Art Foundation (August 18 to 20).
On Target
February 3
Ellen Fisher’s unsentimental solo, Prevailing Conditions - the opening work at Dance Chance’s three-woman program at Dance Theater Workshop - is an absorbing piece of political art, not just the usual multimedia statement of political opinion. Its elements - Fisher’s dancing, Frank Maya’s aggressive score, news footage - do more than add up. In particular, the film excerpts - of politicos and members of the military establishment speaking, and exhilarating, agonizing sequences of hostages being reunited with the people they love while the public goes wild around them - contrasts powerfully with the vicarious suffering and revulsion Fisher enacts.
Initially, standing on a square of white cloth, she twists away, buckling under attack from the assailing sound. Behind her, a green portal is projected on a dark screen, and within it, an indefinable vertical object stands, nearly blocking the opening. Something archaic, doom-laden, and quintessentially mysterious about the image. Quickly twisting her clasped hands, she seems to make them spin at the ends of her wrists like planet Earth, and as she gradually moves her hands apart, the imaginary globe seems to expand and the image transforms to suggest listening and being overwhelmed by what one hears. Fisher shakes the hands of invisible well-wishers, speeds that up and builds it into a whirling, side-switching routine. She holds her hands stiffly and directs them like two hostile objects - submarines, maybe - irresistibly seeking each other, but similarly charged magnetically and unable to engage. Then she’s cheerful, cute, making skippy moves, swiftly crisscrossing her arms and legs. But, opening her hands, she finds one covered with gummy blood. While we view onscreen an orderly arsenal of weaponry, Fisher dances with a metal arrow that she rotates and handles with suicidal fascination. Her hands flutter stiffly; then, clamping them flatly together like a fish, she dives them slowly into the target of her belly. Terrible, truncated screams issue from within the music as Fisher staggers backwards. She picks up the white cloth, holds it, embraces it like a long-missing lover, and lies back beneath it.
Fisher’s other piece, Woman of Disturbance, finds her seated at the opposite end of a long table from alter-ego Mary Shultz. After feeling her face for flaws, wiping her mouth hard, smacking herself, Fisher creeps and darts as if to run away - but where? - and just flops over. While a double heartbeat thumps in A. Leroy’s music, Shultz feels her limbs, leans on her chair and kicks her legs out behind her. Then, Fisher, who has been silently crying and touching herself, grabs Shultz, rudely sits on her and holds her down. In the second part, Fisher sits with her head on the table; Shultz hangs her head between her knees. Fisher scrawls on the table with her finger; Shultz starts sliding off her chair, and clings to the table leg. They gradually trade places, and back again, one creeping over the tabletop while the other crosses underneath.
Woman of Disturbance presents a thoroughly schematic portrait that has only as much resonance as a behavioral case study. The result is cold, though I don’t think it’s meant to be. The women are pitifully familiar in their isolation and distress, but the external evidence supplies no clues about what situation they come from, who they might be. They’re too far gone - the kind of people we turn away from on the street.
Isabelle Marteau’s Double Edge features two couples (Eric Barsness and Carol Clements, Mitch Kirsch and Marteau), often separated by a cloudily transparent screen. Something in the warmly atmospheric lighting (by Stan Pressner), the brittle, glassily percussive sound (by David Behrman), suggests, perhaps, a rubber plantation in Malaya between the wars. There’s a certain lack of privacy, and occasional spying through windows cut in the screen. But the relationship of the dancers, within each couple and couple-to-couple, is vague and innocuous. The lean, bare-bones movement, with that abrupt, arbitrary, Cunninghamesque use of the limbs, has only a small expressive component, and the actions we can read dramatically - like Kirsch and Marteau pushing each other’s face aside, Barsness falling diagonally across Clement’s body - occur outside any clear context. Though the structure of the piece directs us to make sense of it, the movement choices prevent us.
Danced in pinkish costumes under heavy yellow light, Marteau’s Yellow Dance, which closed the program, was a brisk and witty trifle set to an exciting score of Afro-Carribean drumming by James Lo. Five flattish ceramic bows containing a white powder are set out at regular intervals along the diagonal of the space (At the end, the dishes are abruptly, ceremonially smashed.) Four dancers (Dennis O’Connor, Barsness, Clements, Kirsch) comes in together carrying Marteau in a tutu, slowly lower her backwards, and go off. The last drags Marteau out by her feet. Then the dancers are in and out, singly and severally, in short displays of sharp-edged dancing that’s full of turning, kicking slicing motion. The stage is all arms and legs.
Diane Martel weighed in with Brother Jack Ass, a coarse, outrageous fantasy, or perhaps a furious joke, to solemn and spotty wind music, featuring a pari of sullen showgirl/hostesses (Cynthia Friberg and Sondra Loring), a young woman (Madeleien Seide) who cries loudly, inconsolably throughout almost the entire piece, and Adam Morris in a black suit with the buttocks cut out, no shirt, a shaggy, blondish wig, and a thick rhino horn growing out of his skull. The showgirls tartly present Morris like a celebrity, while a huge, matching horn descends from the ceiling; he just glares. Later, he’s on the floor holding his horn and rubbing his crotch. The showgirls lick the bare arms of the crybaby to no effect. An enraged Morris spews vicious obscenities, sticks both middle fingers to us, screams at Seide to shut up and threatens her with another, smaller horn mounted on a refrigerator tray. The showgirls pose sexily, Morris keeps burning with anger and madness, and everybody gives us a wink at the end. I liked the crude sexuality, its unsociability, and naked force. But then what? Martel confronts us with a totally objectionable, but charismatic beast. His intensity is compelling, his “personality” loathsome. What to do with such a monster?
At Dance Theater Workshop ( January 15 to 18).
Ellen Fisher’s unsentimental solo, Prevailing Conditions - the opening work at Dance Chance’s three-woman program at Dance Theater Workshop - is an absorbing piece of political art, not just the usual multimedia statement of political opinion. Its elements - Fisher’s dancing, Frank Maya’s aggressive score, news footage - do more than add up. In particular, the film excerpts - of politicos and members of the military establishment speaking, and exhilarating, agonizing sequences of hostages being reunited with the people they love while the public goes wild around them - contrasts powerfully with the vicarious suffering and revulsion Fisher enacts.
Initially, standing on a square of white cloth, she twists away, buckling under attack from the assailing sound. Behind her, a green portal is projected on a dark screen, and within it, an indefinable vertical object stands, nearly blocking the opening. Something archaic, doom-laden, and quintessentially mysterious about the image. Quickly twisting her clasped hands, she seems to make them spin at the ends of her wrists like planet Earth, and as she gradually moves her hands apart, the imaginary globe seems to expand and the image transforms to suggest listening and being overwhelmed by what one hears. Fisher shakes the hands of invisible well-wishers, speeds that up and builds it into a whirling, side-switching routine. She holds her hands stiffly and directs them like two hostile objects - submarines, maybe - irresistibly seeking each other, but similarly charged magnetically and unable to engage. Then she’s cheerful, cute, making skippy moves, swiftly crisscrossing her arms and legs. But, opening her hands, she finds one covered with gummy blood. While we view onscreen an orderly arsenal of weaponry, Fisher dances with a metal arrow that she rotates and handles with suicidal fascination. Her hands flutter stiffly; then, clamping them flatly together like a fish, she dives them slowly into the target of her belly. Terrible, truncated screams issue from within the music as Fisher staggers backwards. She picks up the white cloth, holds it, embraces it like a long-missing lover, and lies back beneath it.
Fisher’s other piece, Woman of Disturbance, finds her seated at the opposite end of a long table from alter-ego Mary Shultz. After feeling her face for flaws, wiping her mouth hard, smacking herself, Fisher creeps and darts as if to run away - but where? - and just flops over. While a double heartbeat thumps in A. Leroy’s music, Shultz feels her limbs, leans on her chair and kicks her legs out behind her. Then, Fisher, who has been silently crying and touching herself, grabs Shultz, rudely sits on her and holds her down. In the second part, Fisher sits with her head on the table; Shultz hangs her head between her knees. Fisher scrawls on the table with her finger; Shultz starts sliding off her chair, and clings to the table leg. They gradually trade places, and back again, one creeping over the tabletop while the other crosses underneath.
Woman of Disturbance presents a thoroughly schematic portrait that has only as much resonance as a behavioral case study. The result is cold, though I don’t think it’s meant to be. The women are pitifully familiar in their isolation and distress, but the external evidence supplies no clues about what situation they come from, who they might be. They’re too far gone - the kind of people we turn away from on the street.
Isabelle Marteau’s Double Edge features two couples (Eric Barsness and Carol Clements, Mitch Kirsch and Marteau), often separated by a cloudily transparent screen. Something in the warmly atmospheric lighting (by Stan Pressner), the brittle, glassily percussive sound (by David Behrman), suggests, perhaps, a rubber plantation in Malaya between the wars. There’s a certain lack of privacy, and occasional spying through windows cut in the screen. But the relationship of the dancers, within each couple and couple-to-couple, is vague and innocuous. The lean, bare-bones movement, with that abrupt, arbitrary, Cunninghamesque use of the limbs, has only a small expressive component, and the actions we can read dramatically - like Kirsch and Marteau pushing each other’s face aside, Barsness falling diagonally across Clement’s body - occur outside any clear context. Though the structure of the piece directs us to make sense of it, the movement choices prevent us.
Danced in pinkish costumes under heavy yellow light, Marteau’s Yellow Dance, which closed the program, was a brisk and witty trifle set to an exciting score of Afro-Carribean drumming by James Lo. Five flattish ceramic bows containing a white powder are set out at regular intervals along the diagonal of the space (At the end, the dishes are abruptly, ceremonially smashed.) Four dancers (Dennis O’Connor, Barsness, Clements, Kirsch) comes in together carrying Marteau in a tutu, slowly lower her backwards, and go off. The last drags Marteau out by her feet. Then the dancers are in and out, singly and severally, in short displays of sharp-edged dancing that’s full of turning, kicking slicing motion. The stage is all arms and legs.
Diane Martel weighed in with Brother Jack Ass, a coarse, outrageous fantasy, or perhaps a furious joke, to solemn and spotty wind music, featuring a pari of sullen showgirl/hostesses (Cynthia Friberg and Sondra Loring), a young woman (Madeleien Seide) who cries loudly, inconsolably throughout almost the entire piece, and Adam Morris in a black suit with the buttocks cut out, no shirt, a shaggy, blondish wig, and a thick rhino horn growing out of his skull. The showgirls tartly present Morris like a celebrity, while a huge, matching horn descends from the ceiling; he just glares. Later, he’s on the floor holding his horn and rubbing his crotch. The showgirls lick the bare arms of the crybaby to no effect. An enraged Morris spews vicious obscenities, sticks both middle fingers to us, screams at Seide to shut up and threatens her with another, smaller horn mounted on a refrigerator tray. The showgirls pose sexily, Morris keeps burning with anger and madness, and everybody gives us a wink at the end. I liked the crude sexuality, its unsociability, and naked force. But then what? Martel confronts us with a totally objectionable, but charismatic beast. His intensity is compelling, his “personality” loathsome. What to do with such a monster?
At Dance Theater Workshop ( January 15 to 18).
Opposites Attract
February 17
Peter Martins’s new ballets, Les Petits Riens and Ecstatic Orange, contrast so strongly that each might be a revolt against the style of the other. Petits Riens is a charming, gracious little Mozart ballet; Orange, to an exciting score by Michael Torke, is the latest addition to NYCB’s collection of geek ballets. Les Petits Riens is a neatly composed, well-mannered piece for eight (four couples) of the company’s younger dancers - Zippora Karz and Peter Boal, Wendy Whelan and Richard Marsden, Margaret Tracey and and Jeffrey Edwards, Kelly Cass and Carlo Merlo - wearing yellow and white costumes that evoke late 18th century elegance.
Petits Riens is marvelous as a kind of schooling ballet - it celebrates and challenges the dancers, giving ample opportunity for display while pushing them to the limits of their technique. The women, then the men, sortie from diagonal lines for their solo turns; a pas de deux for each couple follows, which engages them in refined and complex partnering. Flashes of wit and extravagance enhance these sweet, expansive duets and make them infectiously contemporary - like the droll little bounces for Karz at the end of the first, or Whelan’s wide plies on pointe that combine with a twist in the torso, or the way Tracey appears to sit on Edwards’s hip when he briefly catches her and slows her down as she leaps across him, or Merlo’s brisk fluttery leaps. Most striking, though, is the drama of the taut, precipitous, fully stretched leaps and poses that are swiftly accomplished and capped by a dive of the arm that rivets the eye and sweeps it down. Attention is constantly drawn to the body’s extremities, to the varying tensions in how hands and feet complement and oppose each other, and the way they amplify the body’s expressions with perfect integrity. Even in the most balanced, centered movement passages, the sphere of the body’s reach is fully energized. The title, meaning “little nothings,” is appealingly tongue-in-cheek in relation to the quality of performance that is demanded of the dancers; the ballet is most gratifying in the way it gives them room to shine.
Heather Watts and Jock Soto take the lead roles in Ecstatic Orange, and the four spiky groups that slash across the stage are led by Peter Frame, Helene Alexopoulos, Mel A. Tomlinson, and Victoria Hall. From kneeling, everyone jumps up flat-footed, flinging their arms straight up. All are wearing black unitards with fluorescent pink or orange hip wraps and headbands - reminiscent of a stylish, youth-gang movie like The Warriors - but Watts’s costume is cut out to expose her sides from rib cage to hip. Watts is bossy in the way she attacks every gesture, even the way she puts her hand on Soto’s shoulder for support, and her loose hair is a sure sign of her sexual availability. Soto slings her off balance; she leaps into his arms. She opens her legs, facing every which way. It’s so explicit, but perhaps the gestures don’t say “fuck me” plainly enough because Martins himself doesn’t take it seriously, doesn’t trouble to develop it, though he assigns Watts enough horny stuff to do. The choreographer sets up an overt sexual theme with deliberate coarseness, then chickens out. So he comes across as an adolescent - trying to shock, then playing dumb.
After Cendrillon, The Lyon Opera Ballet unmasked its dancers and showed them technically clean (no great surprise, with Gerard LeMaitre, once a member of the Netherlands Dance Theater, as ballet master), enthusiastic, and unaffected in a generally impressive bill of four works, opening with
Nils Christe’s sparkling Luminescence to Poulenc’s Concert for One Piano.
Monique Monnier and Jean Francis Duroure’s droll but sprawling Mama Sunday Morning or Always has a great, sexy look, with its cast running around clutching the collars of their narrow, tan raincoats above froufrou bursts of yellow or white petticoats. In Catalonian choreographer Nacho Duato’s earthy Jardi Tancat, set to some exquisite songs by Maria del Mar Bonet, three couples stoop and heave, fling their heads back, smack the ground. The scent of cedar wafts fro the arc of widely spaced wooden posts that loosely encloses them. Some of the men’s swinging, forceful movements suggest labor, like wood-chopping or hauling. Half the time the women are grieving or wounded: bent over, they pad along while the men leap around them. But I don’t grasp the nature of the community; there’s something fake primitive about it - undifferentiated. Then, at the end, to a long, ravishing song, three completely enthralling duets ribbon out, with movement that loops and swings, clutches and convulses, in a kind of animal trance woven of sexual love and sorrow.
William Forsythe’s fascinating Steptext - for a woman and three men - anchors the program. It condenses material from a full-length work, Artifact, in a jagged, virtuosic piece accompanied mostly by interrupted playing of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin. Steptext starts with a male dancer in a black unitard executing sharp, curving arm gestures that illustrate footwork, while the intermission lights remain on i the rear of the orchestra. He leaves casually, and a second man in black continues the chatter of darting, sketching arm-steps. here are sudden blurts of violin sound. Other lights blare on high in the front of the house, and when they go down, the stage lights brighten. Throughout the piece, Forsythe consistently pushes the movement off-center, cleverly exploits the jolt of intermittent silence against the passionate drive of the violin, and uses the lights to suddenly abort the action or dislocate the relationship of audience to performance. (The stage may be bright or black, or the dancers may gleam dimly in the reflected glare off the floor. Forsythe is responsible for the lighting, as well as costumes and decor.) Pascale Michelet is splendid, fearless, trading partners in one savage, lunging, off-kilter duet after another. And the men - Pierre Advokatoff, Claude Freva, Martin Schmitt - are scarcely less spectacular. There’s a constant brusqueness, prickliness, but also an ominous undercurrent in their occasional lazy voyeurism and brief lapses into distraction. But Steptext is essentially a brainy, technical our de force, hard-headed and demanding, like Tharp’s The Fugue.
Peter Martins’s new ballets, Les Petits Riens and Ecstatic Orange, contrast so strongly that each might be a revolt against the style of the other. Petits Riens is a charming, gracious little Mozart ballet; Orange, to an exciting score by Michael Torke, is the latest addition to NYCB’s collection of geek ballets. Les Petits Riens is a neatly composed, well-mannered piece for eight (four couples) of the company’s younger dancers - Zippora Karz and Peter Boal, Wendy Whelan and Richard Marsden, Margaret Tracey and and Jeffrey Edwards, Kelly Cass and Carlo Merlo - wearing yellow and white costumes that evoke late 18th century elegance.
Petits Riens is marvelous as a kind of schooling ballet - it celebrates and challenges the dancers, giving ample opportunity for display while pushing them to the limits of their technique. The women, then the men, sortie from diagonal lines for their solo turns; a pas de deux for each couple follows, which engages them in refined and complex partnering. Flashes of wit and extravagance enhance these sweet, expansive duets and make them infectiously contemporary - like the droll little bounces for Karz at the end of the first, or Whelan’s wide plies on pointe that combine with a twist in the torso, or the way Tracey appears to sit on Edwards’s hip when he briefly catches her and slows her down as she leaps across him, or Merlo’s brisk fluttery leaps. Most striking, though, is the drama of the taut, precipitous, fully stretched leaps and poses that are swiftly accomplished and capped by a dive of the arm that rivets the eye and sweeps it down. Attention is constantly drawn to the body’s extremities, to the varying tensions in how hands and feet complement and oppose each other, and the way they amplify the body’s expressions with perfect integrity. Even in the most balanced, centered movement passages, the sphere of the body’s reach is fully energized. The title, meaning “little nothings,” is appealingly tongue-in-cheek in relation to the quality of performance that is demanded of the dancers; the ballet is most gratifying in the way it gives them room to shine.
Heather Watts and Jock Soto take the lead roles in Ecstatic Orange, and the four spiky groups that slash across the stage are led by Peter Frame, Helene Alexopoulos, Mel A. Tomlinson, and Victoria Hall. From kneeling, everyone jumps up flat-footed, flinging their arms straight up. All are wearing black unitards with fluorescent pink or orange hip wraps and headbands - reminiscent of a stylish, youth-gang movie like The Warriors - but Watts’s costume is cut out to expose her sides from rib cage to hip. Watts is bossy in the way she attacks every gesture, even the way she puts her hand on Soto’s shoulder for support, and her loose hair is a sure sign of her sexual availability. Soto slings her off balance; she leaps into his arms. She opens her legs, facing every which way. It’s so explicit, but perhaps the gestures don’t say “fuck me” plainly enough because Martins himself doesn’t take it seriously, doesn’t trouble to develop it, though he assigns Watts enough horny stuff to do. The choreographer sets up an overt sexual theme with deliberate coarseness, then chickens out. So he comes across as an adolescent - trying to shock, then playing dumb.
After Cendrillon, The Lyon Opera Ballet unmasked its dancers and showed them technically clean (no great surprise, with Gerard LeMaitre, once a member of the Netherlands Dance Theater, as ballet master), enthusiastic, and unaffected in a generally impressive bill of four works, opening with
Nils Christe’s sparkling Luminescence to Poulenc’s Concert for One Piano.
Monique Monnier and Jean Francis Duroure’s droll but sprawling Mama Sunday Morning or Always has a great, sexy look, with its cast running around clutching the collars of their narrow, tan raincoats above froufrou bursts of yellow or white petticoats. In Catalonian choreographer Nacho Duato’s earthy Jardi Tancat, set to some exquisite songs by Maria del Mar Bonet, three couples stoop and heave, fling their heads back, smack the ground. The scent of cedar wafts fro the arc of widely spaced wooden posts that loosely encloses them. Some of the men’s swinging, forceful movements suggest labor, like wood-chopping or hauling. Half the time the women are grieving or wounded: bent over, they pad along while the men leap around them. But I don’t grasp the nature of the community; there’s something fake primitive about it - undifferentiated. Then, at the end, to a long, ravishing song, three completely enthralling duets ribbon out, with movement that loops and swings, clutches and convulses, in a kind of animal trance woven of sexual love and sorrow.
William Forsythe’s fascinating Steptext - for a woman and three men - anchors the program. It condenses material from a full-length work, Artifact, in a jagged, virtuosic piece accompanied mostly by interrupted playing of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin. Steptext starts with a male dancer in a black unitard executing sharp, curving arm gestures that illustrate footwork, while the intermission lights remain on i the rear of the orchestra. He leaves casually, and a second man in black continues the chatter of darting, sketching arm-steps. here are sudden blurts of violin sound. Other lights blare on high in the front of the house, and when they go down, the stage lights brighten. Throughout the piece, Forsythe consistently pushes the movement off-center, cleverly exploits the jolt of intermittent silence against the passionate drive of the violin, and uses the lights to suddenly abort the action or dislocate the relationship of audience to performance. (The stage may be bright or black, or the dancers may gleam dimly in the reflected glare off the floor. Forsythe is responsible for the lighting, as well as costumes and decor.) Pascale Michelet is splendid, fearless, trading partners in one savage, lunging, off-kilter duet after another. And the men - Pierre Advokatoff, Claude Freva, Martin Schmitt - are scarcely less spectacular. There’s a constant brusqueness, prickliness, but also an ominous undercurrent in their occasional lazy voyeurism and brief lapses into distraction. But Steptext is essentially a brainy, technical our de force, hard-headed and demanding, like Tharp’s The Fugue.
Panned Parenthood
October 5
As dancers, Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith are strikingly different. He’s good-natured, agile, bold - a daredevil adept at rapid dynamic transitions. In a way, he has the physical innocence of someone surprised by his own power. Smith is small, tight, spiky, precise, but a fireball. She displays the wiry toughness, electricity and veracity Helen McGhee used to show in the Graham repertoire.
The sophisticated articulation basic to the work they did with Murray Louise, with whom they danced until 1985, they turn to good use in the three semi-narrative, dramatic “couple” danes they presented at the Nikoalis/Louis ChoreoSpace. And they’re not gratuitously tricky. Two, premiered in Helsinki last year, is a regular modern dance, excellently made and performed. It’s traditional in its danciness, but also in that it’s a statement about relationships. There’s nothing in it you don’t already know. In the first section of Two, the pair bounce gently within wreaths made by their arms, swing and whirl together in romantic bliss. But the second part is a power struggle. He’s always holding her, reining her in. He gives her a good measure of necessary support - but allows her no freedom. She reaches, looks out, but he keeps her body clasped to him. She sways within the circle of his arms, banging dully against them with her forehead, in the final section, which intermittently surges with fast action, they become more independent, and their importance to each other alters without diminishing. They reach toward each other, and at the end, from opposite sides of the stage, gaze at each other in golden light.
In A Bedtime Story, the couple in nightclothes, often prone, dance on and around their bed. Restlessness prompts her to wake him. He seems dreamy, sluggish at first, but the invisible stresses of their life gradually get them both squirming, bouncing, leaning, rolling. Whatever excites their subsequent behavior remains insubstantial, but things come to an obvious head in a vivid, manipulative quartet with two teddy bears that they scold and shake and punish. She tears hers apart.
The new work, George and Betty’s House, expertly polishes off marriage and parenthood. It’s an effective acid satire on humdrum domestic horrors. I was happily surprised at the way Shapiro and Smith got their teeth into the subject and - like pit bulls or piranhas - wouldn’t let go. They play a dismal couple, and guest John Goodwin is the giant, diapered baby we see for a moment plopped on the dining table. They’re relentless in this jaundiced piece, and cruelly funny. Shapiro’s in a suit and spectacles, and Smith in a dowdy housedress and hideous slitty eyeglasses. The furniture is kiddie-size; there’s a mini-stove and refrigerator, too. Shapiro races around, bursting into urgent leaps; he crawls, runs clumsily on his knees, sticks his head in the oven. His mousy drudge of a mate, toting a saucepan, symbol of her authority perhaps, pushes her body out of its nearly perpetual slump, sticks her chest out, and collapses back into round-shouldered, swaybacked futility. As he postures at the table, she crawls around scrubbing the floor with a duster, and sinks into poses of dismal humiliation. He sits erect, stiff as a board, reading. She rocks back in a chair, looking dazed, like she’s been bopped on the head, and topples over backward.
We start knowing this couple much more intimately than we’d expected. She brings him a glass of water; he dashes it in his face, and vigorously towels himself off, as if after a shower. Holding one end to his crotch, he pulls the towel straight into an erection, but when he lets go of the end, it naturally wilts. They don blue lab aprons, coral-colored, surgical-type masks, heavy yellow gloves. Dressed for safe sex, which is doubtless a pretty repugnant activity to them anyway, they bump together as perfunctorily as possible. He touches her breast, she pushes him away. They briskly pat and slap and dust themselves off. Immediately they kiss they spit. The episode is a perfect caricature of rampant dread of disease combined with fundamental sexual terror. On toddles baby, pulling two plastic duckies; on his third entrance, mommy and daddy replace the ducks on baby’s leash. They give him a shopping bag of wrapped presents, each of which he rattles and tosses away. Nothing particularly catches his fancy, till he finds a pistol and pops mommy between the eyes.
At Nikolais/Louis ChoreoSpace (September 17 to 19).
As dancers, Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith are strikingly different. He’s good-natured, agile, bold - a daredevil adept at rapid dynamic transitions. In a way, he has the physical innocence of someone surprised by his own power. Smith is small, tight, spiky, precise, but a fireball. She displays the wiry toughness, electricity and veracity Helen McGhee used to show in the Graham repertoire.
The sophisticated articulation basic to the work they did with Murray Louise, with whom they danced until 1985, they turn to good use in the three semi-narrative, dramatic “couple” danes they presented at the Nikoalis/Louis ChoreoSpace. And they’re not gratuitously tricky. Two, premiered in Helsinki last year, is a regular modern dance, excellently made and performed. It’s traditional in its danciness, but also in that it’s a statement about relationships. There’s nothing in it you don’t already know. In the first section of Two, the pair bounce gently within wreaths made by their arms, swing and whirl together in romantic bliss. But the second part is a power struggle. He’s always holding her, reining her in. He gives her a good measure of necessary support - but allows her no freedom. She reaches, looks out, but he keeps her body clasped to him. She sways within the circle of his arms, banging dully against them with her forehead, in the final section, which intermittently surges with fast action, they become more independent, and their importance to each other alters without diminishing. They reach toward each other, and at the end, from opposite sides of the stage, gaze at each other in golden light.
In A Bedtime Story, the couple in nightclothes, often prone, dance on and around their bed. Restlessness prompts her to wake him. He seems dreamy, sluggish at first, but the invisible stresses of their life gradually get them both squirming, bouncing, leaning, rolling. Whatever excites their subsequent behavior remains insubstantial, but things come to an obvious head in a vivid, manipulative quartet with two teddy bears that they scold and shake and punish. She tears hers apart.
The new work, George and Betty’s House, expertly polishes off marriage and parenthood. It’s an effective acid satire on humdrum domestic horrors. I was happily surprised at the way Shapiro and Smith got their teeth into the subject and - like pit bulls or piranhas - wouldn’t let go. They play a dismal couple, and guest John Goodwin is the giant, diapered baby we see for a moment plopped on the dining table. They’re relentless in this jaundiced piece, and cruelly funny. Shapiro’s in a suit and spectacles, and Smith in a dowdy housedress and hideous slitty eyeglasses. The furniture is kiddie-size; there’s a mini-stove and refrigerator, too. Shapiro races around, bursting into urgent leaps; he crawls, runs clumsily on his knees, sticks his head in the oven. His mousy drudge of a mate, toting a saucepan, symbol of her authority perhaps, pushes her body out of its nearly perpetual slump, sticks her chest out, and collapses back into round-shouldered, swaybacked futility. As he postures at the table, she crawls around scrubbing the floor with a duster, and sinks into poses of dismal humiliation. He sits erect, stiff as a board, reading. She rocks back in a chair, looking dazed, like she’s been bopped on the head, and topples over backward.
We start knowing this couple much more intimately than we’d expected. She brings him a glass of water; he dashes it in his face, and vigorously towels himself off, as if after a shower. Holding one end to his crotch, he pulls the towel straight into an erection, but when he lets go of the end, it naturally wilts. They don blue lab aprons, coral-colored, surgical-type masks, heavy yellow gloves. Dressed for safe sex, which is doubtless a pretty repugnant activity to them anyway, they bump together as perfunctorily as possible. He touches her breast, she pushes him away. They briskly pat and slap and dust themselves off. Immediately they kiss they spit. The episode is a perfect caricature of rampant dread of disease combined with fundamental sexual terror. On toddles baby, pulling two plastic duckies; on his third entrance, mommy and daddy replace the ducks on baby’s leash. They give him a shopping bag of wrapped presents, each of which he rattles and tosses away. Nothing particularly catches his fancy, till he finds a pistol and pops mommy between the eyes.
At Nikolais/Louis ChoreoSpace (September 17 to 19).
Perfect Proportions
November 17
I was sorely tempted to leave Bucket’s performance after Garth Fagan’s Passion Distanced, his New York premiere, because I was so absorbed and satisfied. I didn’t want to shake off its exquisitely distilled images or is dark mood. The performances that preceded it - of Fagan’s excellent standbys Prelude and Oatka Trail - were as vita and brilliantly honed as any I’ve seen.
The last dance, Traipsing Through the May, the world premiere, was by contrast a colorful, hammy audience-pleaser for the whole company, garbed in lush, pastel harem costumes that they eventually discard for lustrous, richly colored neoswimsuits. Excerpts from Vivaldi cello concerti provided a strong and buoyant musical ground. Mooning, mock-courtly, good-natured, flamboyant and scatterbrained, Traipsing is as giddy as its unlikely title. The women flutter around swishing the winglike panels of their ample pants. A trio of men stalk on in Egyptian profiles; they jump and wiggle, and hold tilted balances while a woman whirls around them in outrageous thumping staggers. Five courtiers parade around with pretentious seriousness. Valentina Alexander, whose eyes dart and flash meaningfully for much of the piece, yearns after her cavalier, who’s sidling off with another maiden. Three women fall down, then jump up to chase a bunch of men. It’s a harmless, frolicking piece, like a burlesque of some Mozart or Rossini opera buffa.
The follies of Traipsing Through the May did nothing to diminish the impact of Passion Distanced, a spare work to music of exalted, almost cosmic loneliness by Arvo Part (Fratres, performed by violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Keith Jarrett). The piece opens with an exquisitely danced 11-minute solo for Norwood Pennewell that is both the core and culminating statement of the piece, which in its second part expands into a sextet. It’s hard to tear the choreography of the solo from its performance, which is so deeply understood and perfectly proportioned. Or from the music, which it matches in inspiration and intent.
Fagan’s ear is impeccable, and distilling emotions to their essences, he binds his choreography to the music’s soul. The movement is small, contained, partial. Almost always erect, Pennewell takes tight, skittering steps, lets his arms fly up without force, shakes his shoulders, plies suddenly. There’s an abstraction in the cautious, intense geometry of his body, in the exactness of his restraint. Moving on stiff, thunking legs, he seems clouded, momentarily thickheaded. When he perfunctorily raps his chest, it suggests anger or agony without embroiling us in the history of the feeling. Every gesture is like a new thought - urgent, direct, incredibly refined, distinctly drawn. He arches slightly back, touching his hands to his shoulders, then bends over and convulses upward with a centripetal ripple that pulls his torso into an ephemeral knot of confusion and evaporates,leaving no memory.
The overall dynamic is a thoughtful, resonant one that merges with the deep stillness into which the cries of the music keep subsiding. There’s a jagged timing to the movement phrases, but they’re bound together by the intrinsic truth of the performance, a kind of inner hum out of which these utterances erupt and take form. Pennewell’s hands float around his body, drop slightly open. He takes slow turns, one leg barely off the ground , and bursts into fast, wheeling stumbles. All these movement elements return, isolated or in slightly new contexts. They’re forthright, yet inexplicable too, as mysterious and thrilling in their meaning as we ultimately are to each other.He inches halfway across the stage. Turning sideways and gently bending into a twisted demi-plie, he extends his arms on a fragile diagonal that seems almost infinitely long. With this gesture, he seems to open himself fully to the world with a transcendent empathy that’s a pitiless fact, empty of desire and of will.
The group section of Passion Distanced broadens the material of the solo, to a repeat of the Part music. Five dancers - Bit Knighton, Steve Humphrey, Shelly Taplin, Jon Gourdine, and Valentina Alexander - stand in silence for a long time. Their first moves are mechanical: unison arms reach up, out, drop, and repeat as gradually the dancers’ bodies sag, then drift into a slow saunter and bent turns Joined by Pennewell, they burst simultaneously into flurries of tight fighting gestures; come into a circle, with their focus dropped and arms softly floating. In a solo, Humphrey seems pulled in two directions and in a traveling duet the dancers’ arms and legs thrust one way while their bodies are propelled in the opposite direction. In another duet, Knighton hops into Gourdine’s arms as if into a chair, but there’s a hollowness to their contact - somehow he can do nothing for her - and she winds up in a melancholy heap at his feet. Second time around, the shrieks of the violin seem even more piercing, the dancers grow erratic, frustrated, until they finally grind down, and everything concentrates in Pennewell, in plie, stretching out his tilted arms in that endless spiritual reach.
At the Joyce Theater (November 3 to 8).
Maguy Marin’s second major work, Babel Babel (1982), is the most uneven of the four pieces I’m familiar with, but it has many moments of remarkable beauty and, even when it falters, it shows an authentic imagination at work. Eleven nude dancers enter a grassy, hummocky stage space to strains of Mahler that suggest a journey. (The movement in Babel Babel’s dimly lit nude sections - the first and the last - tend to be restricted, bent, hunched, careful not to be overtly vulgar.)
The first ensemble is a gentle tribal gathering of nearly undifferentiated people who pad onstage in groups that immediately mingle, gently bending and turning, swaying, swinging their heads, rolling in unison. After them, pilgrims with bundles and lanterns arrive and begin rhythmic, even ecstatic labor stirred by shouts and the percussive sounds of striking tools, and eventually dance and chant an awkward stamping, clapping ritual. To me, the people onstage are always the same group, jumped further along in history. The broad semi-narrative sequence moves with a strong flow of feeling. Suddenly, tents pop out of the grass, picnic tables loaded with plastic food are hauled in. There are beach chairs, public toilets, laundry lines, harsh laughter and loud chatter. The people dance in concentric circles of women and men, clinch in couples, swing around with strident pleasure, keeping their good times going too long, and dribble off to their tents, where we hear a sudden shriek of laughter from one or dark mutterings from another. In the morning, the people emerge, looking all too familiar - a man in a red bikini, one in shorts with his face full of shaving cream, another in floral bermudas, another doing exercises.
It’s a Dogpatch Riviera, a raucous, low-rent vacation paradise. Marin in a yellow wig sings “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” in French, and other period hits, with a backup girl group and a band. Women in bullet bras exercise and mind their hordes of babies. The situation degenerates into squabbling and domestic brutality that, after a wild upheaval, leave a barren stage strewn with dismal litter - Styrofoam cups, terrycloth towels, wigs, plastic babies, and crumpled bodies one barely notices.
This long view of the dreary debris of “civilization” is poignant and horribly depressing like adding up mankind’s achievements and coming up with zip. A kind of obliteration that doesn’t even require a bomb. It even seems just. The very long final section is a mournful, difficult struggle for recovery, set to Mahler’s five Kindentotenlieder. The Mahler here seems too emotionally specific for Marin’s material, and this music’s association with Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies makes it impossible to watch with innocent eyes. But the action of the section is often touching in its flailing awkwardness. The dancers begin to crawl and struggle out of their clothes, painfully try to push themselves up. Shamed discards, barely coordinated, they begin a long clumsy effort toward rebirth. They roll and lean, gasp and convulse and jump and stagger, managing only by the very end to slowly pull themselves fully erect. It’s a sad sort of triumph that gets them almost back to step one.
Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 19 to 25).
I was sorely tempted to leave Bucket’s performance after Garth Fagan’s Passion Distanced, his New York premiere, because I was so absorbed and satisfied. I didn’t want to shake off its exquisitely distilled images or is dark mood. The performances that preceded it - of Fagan’s excellent standbys Prelude and Oatka Trail - were as vita and brilliantly honed as any I’ve seen.
The last dance, Traipsing Through the May, the world premiere, was by contrast a colorful, hammy audience-pleaser for the whole company, garbed in lush, pastel harem costumes that they eventually discard for lustrous, richly colored neoswimsuits. Excerpts from Vivaldi cello concerti provided a strong and buoyant musical ground. Mooning, mock-courtly, good-natured, flamboyant and scatterbrained, Traipsing is as giddy as its unlikely title. The women flutter around swishing the winglike panels of their ample pants. A trio of men stalk on in Egyptian profiles; they jump and wiggle, and hold tilted balances while a woman whirls around them in outrageous thumping staggers. Five courtiers parade around with pretentious seriousness. Valentina Alexander, whose eyes dart and flash meaningfully for much of the piece, yearns after her cavalier, who’s sidling off with another maiden. Three women fall down, then jump up to chase a bunch of men. It’s a harmless, frolicking piece, like a burlesque of some Mozart or Rossini opera buffa.
The follies of Traipsing Through the May did nothing to diminish the impact of Passion Distanced, a spare work to music of exalted, almost cosmic loneliness by Arvo Part (Fratres, performed by violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Keith Jarrett). The piece opens with an exquisitely danced 11-minute solo for Norwood Pennewell that is both the core and culminating statement of the piece, which in its second part expands into a sextet. It’s hard to tear the choreography of the solo from its performance, which is so deeply understood and perfectly proportioned. Or from the music, which it matches in inspiration and intent.
Fagan’s ear is impeccable, and distilling emotions to their essences, he binds his choreography to the music’s soul. The movement is small, contained, partial. Almost always erect, Pennewell takes tight, skittering steps, lets his arms fly up without force, shakes his shoulders, plies suddenly. There’s an abstraction in the cautious, intense geometry of his body, in the exactness of his restraint. Moving on stiff, thunking legs, he seems clouded, momentarily thickheaded. When he perfunctorily raps his chest, it suggests anger or agony without embroiling us in the history of the feeling. Every gesture is like a new thought - urgent, direct, incredibly refined, distinctly drawn. He arches slightly back, touching his hands to his shoulders, then bends over and convulses upward with a centripetal ripple that pulls his torso into an ephemeral knot of confusion and evaporates,leaving no memory.
The overall dynamic is a thoughtful, resonant one that merges with the deep stillness into which the cries of the music keep subsiding. There’s a jagged timing to the movement phrases, but they’re bound together by the intrinsic truth of the performance, a kind of inner hum out of which these utterances erupt and take form. Pennewell’s hands float around his body, drop slightly open. He takes slow turns, one leg barely off the ground , and bursts into fast, wheeling stumbles. All these movement elements return, isolated or in slightly new contexts. They’re forthright, yet inexplicable too, as mysterious and thrilling in their meaning as we ultimately are to each other.He inches halfway across the stage. Turning sideways and gently bending into a twisted demi-plie, he extends his arms on a fragile diagonal that seems almost infinitely long. With this gesture, he seems to open himself fully to the world with a transcendent empathy that’s a pitiless fact, empty of desire and of will.
The group section of Passion Distanced broadens the material of the solo, to a repeat of the Part music. Five dancers - Bit Knighton, Steve Humphrey, Shelly Taplin, Jon Gourdine, and Valentina Alexander - stand in silence for a long time. Their first moves are mechanical: unison arms reach up, out, drop, and repeat as gradually the dancers’ bodies sag, then drift into a slow saunter and bent turns Joined by Pennewell, they burst simultaneously into flurries of tight fighting gestures; come into a circle, with their focus dropped and arms softly floating. In a solo, Humphrey seems pulled in two directions and in a traveling duet the dancers’ arms and legs thrust one way while their bodies are propelled in the opposite direction. In another duet, Knighton hops into Gourdine’s arms as if into a chair, but there’s a hollowness to their contact - somehow he can do nothing for her - and she winds up in a melancholy heap at his feet. Second time around, the shrieks of the violin seem even more piercing, the dancers grow erratic, frustrated, until they finally grind down, and everything concentrates in Pennewell, in plie, stretching out his tilted arms in that endless spiritual reach.
At the Joyce Theater (November 3 to 8).
Maguy Marin’s second major work, Babel Babel (1982), is the most uneven of the four pieces I’m familiar with, but it has many moments of remarkable beauty and, even when it falters, it shows an authentic imagination at work. Eleven nude dancers enter a grassy, hummocky stage space to strains of Mahler that suggest a journey. (The movement in Babel Babel’s dimly lit nude sections - the first and the last - tend to be restricted, bent, hunched, careful not to be overtly vulgar.)
The first ensemble is a gentle tribal gathering of nearly undifferentiated people who pad onstage in groups that immediately mingle, gently bending and turning, swaying, swinging their heads, rolling in unison. After them, pilgrims with bundles and lanterns arrive and begin rhythmic, even ecstatic labor stirred by shouts and the percussive sounds of striking tools, and eventually dance and chant an awkward stamping, clapping ritual. To me, the people onstage are always the same group, jumped further along in history. The broad semi-narrative sequence moves with a strong flow of feeling. Suddenly, tents pop out of the grass, picnic tables loaded with plastic food are hauled in. There are beach chairs, public toilets, laundry lines, harsh laughter and loud chatter. The people dance in concentric circles of women and men, clinch in couples, swing around with strident pleasure, keeping their good times going too long, and dribble off to their tents, where we hear a sudden shriek of laughter from one or dark mutterings from another. In the morning, the people emerge, looking all too familiar - a man in a red bikini, one in shorts with his face full of shaving cream, another in floral bermudas, another doing exercises.
It’s a Dogpatch Riviera, a raucous, low-rent vacation paradise. Marin in a yellow wig sings “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” in French, and other period hits, with a backup girl group and a band. Women in bullet bras exercise and mind their hordes of babies. The situation degenerates into squabbling and domestic brutality that, after a wild upheaval, leave a barren stage strewn with dismal litter - Styrofoam cups, terrycloth towels, wigs, plastic babies, and crumpled bodies one barely notices.
This long view of the dreary debris of “civilization” is poignant and horribly depressing like adding up mankind’s achievements and coming up with zip. A kind of obliteration that doesn’t even require a bomb. It even seems just. The very long final section is a mournful, difficult struggle for recovery, set to Mahler’s five Kindentotenlieder. The Mahler here seems too emotionally specific for Marin’s material, and this music’s association with Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies makes it impossible to watch with innocent eyes. But the action of the section is often touching in its flailing awkwardness. The dancers begin to crawl and struggle out of their clothes, painfully try to push themselves up. Shamed discards, barely coordinated, they begin a long clumsy effort toward rebirth. They roll and lean, gasp and convulse and jump and stagger, managing only by the very end to slowly pull themselves fully erect. It’s a sad sort of triumph that gets them almost back to step one.
Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 19 to 25).
Persistence of Memory
November 3
In Brain Cafe, Otrabanda has developed a most beautiful and funny meditation on people who are lost in their own lives - alienated, muddled, sometimes frozen. Instead of stressing tension and frustration, director Roger Babb and his collaborators have deftly made of the material a tender, penetrating comedy, fluid and featherlight.
Brain Cafe is a superbly integrated and eloquently performed musical culmination of Otrabanda’s recent concerns: a poetic, sometimes dreamlike mixture of text by Roger Babb, choreography by Rocky Bornstein and music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, amplified by the smooth instantaneous mobility of Michael Fajans’s set (and Howard Thies’s lights) responding to the characters’ tremulous inner worlds. The set includes half-round tables, a tilted counter, and slanted stools, but the walls are its most dynamic feature: rear panels covered with gaudy, floral fabrics sweep down and back to flatten or deepen the enclosed space; the side walls of coppery-gold screening (which we see through clearly) open out, swing into a triangle with its trapping apex pointed at the audience, narrow into a corridor that runs straight front to back or diagonally.
At one point, behind the panels, we see a couple embracing, dancing, bathed in pink and blue light, their images multiplied in mirrors that show them front and back. It’s like a sweet memory or something vaguely wished for. Physically, and in the dialogue, the characters are unsure of who they are, uncertain when their experiences have been real or imagined, awkward, frequently mistaken. When Paul Zimet keeps reaching for his coffee cup but misjudges its distance from him and misses time after time, Rocky Bornstein - waitress, guardian angel, and sometimes nurse - turns the whole table so the cup comes to greet his waiting hand. The menu she amiably recites - echoed by the affable cook, John Fleming - is inexhaustible in its variety of beverages, pies, soups, cheeses. They’ve got everything; but with the infinite number of choices, it’s a comfort to stick with the ordinary.
We don’t know all the characters’ names, or what they might do for a living; but they’re struggling for contact, a sense of stability and reassurance from a past and present that keeps escaping them. They’re constantly trying to orient themselves, define what the space is, ascertain where they are located in it. Nothing is reliable, least of all themselves. Mary Shultz comes in looking for someone she’s supposed to meet at 10:30 or 11:00, his name is Bob, she thinks, maybe Robert, or perhaps Barb? It could be a woman. She’s not sure. When asked, she can’t manage to recall her own name, puzzles over it gravely, and accepts Betsy with happy relief when Zimet suggests that she looks like a Betsy. He tells her his name is Bob because he’s attracted to her.
“You look so far away,” he says, yearningly. “I am far away,” she replies, from her table across the room. But even when they’re nose to nose, the distance remains. This basic practicality grounds the psychological vagaries, and gives Brain Cafe its firm edge of wit and good sense. The outside world impinges strongly on the characters, but in suspect ways. Zimet walks down the street flinching at things that threaten him from the periphery of his vision, or imagines that people are coming on to him. “I turn around to face them and they’re not even looking at me... I think I’m just not fast enough.”
The quality of light was important, Shultz remembers, to her and the person she was supposed to meet. “If we saw things too clearly, we’d get depressed.” If it was too dark, they’d get scared. “We liked things a little blurry.” She is something of a bumbler: she’s not good with names, or faces, she’s always looking in the wrong place, missing the point. “When I remember the past,” she says, “it’s made of bits of other people’s conversations with me on the edge.”
Lenard Petit - hyper, desperate, expectantly waiting, like the other “customers,” for someone he has no way of recognizing - tensely strokes down his arms as if to peel off the skin like surgical gloves. Permanently pent-up, he urges the others to “release! let it go!” He feels so much better now, he says, because he doesn’t feel anything at all. Wrestling with confusion comes across as an ordinary condition of life, a difficulty there’s no need, really, to get upset about even if everything’s mobile, wobbly, going in and out of focus, and you don’t know who you are.
Living fully into their disorientation heightens these characters’ ability, on some level, to share. In the beginning, they try to move in consonance with each other; later they drift into and experience one another’s memories as strangely familiar territory. The sympathetic, unpressured atmosphere gradually becomes filled with reveries and recollections that flow in with the accumulation of many tiny details.
Shultz remembers an occasion when she and this person were looking out at the water. “I was looking at a boat, he was looking at a bird. But we both felt we were looking at the same thing Was that you?” Everyone nods, yes. The air, she describes, smelled like...”the sea,” they murmur, entranced, rapt in the sharing of this memory that belongs to none or all of them. ”...Lemons,” continues Shultz, without inhibiting their participation. She recalls a fragment of associated melody, and the group picks it up very lightly - odd, fragile, lone notes without much coherence, that somehow create a shimmering effect, a kind of aural levitation that blesses and momentarily transforms them all. Zimet insists that he really does recognize her, though he really didn’t before, but wanted to. Yes, he does recognize her, though her hair is different, and, well, her voice...And, though it’s not his name, he really is Bob.
At La Mama E.T.C. (October 3 to 25).
In Brain Cafe, Otrabanda has developed a most beautiful and funny meditation on people who are lost in their own lives - alienated, muddled, sometimes frozen. Instead of stressing tension and frustration, director Roger Babb and his collaborators have deftly made of the material a tender, penetrating comedy, fluid and featherlight.
Brain Cafe is a superbly integrated and eloquently performed musical culmination of Otrabanda’s recent concerns: a poetic, sometimes dreamlike mixture of text by Roger Babb, choreography by Rocky Bornstein and music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, amplified by the smooth instantaneous mobility of Michael Fajans’s set (and Howard Thies’s lights) responding to the characters’ tremulous inner worlds. The set includes half-round tables, a tilted counter, and slanted stools, but the walls are its most dynamic feature: rear panels covered with gaudy, floral fabrics sweep down and back to flatten or deepen the enclosed space; the side walls of coppery-gold screening (which we see through clearly) open out, swing into a triangle with its trapping apex pointed at the audience, narrow into a corridor that runs straight front to back or diagonally.
At one point, behind the panels, we see a couple embracing, dancing, bathed in pink and blue light, their images multiplied in mirrors that show them front and back. It’s like a sweet memory or something vaguely wished for. Physically, and in the dialogue, the characters are unsure of who they are, uncertain when their experiences have been real or imagined, awkward, frequently mistaken. When Paul Zimet keeps reaching for his coffee cup but misjudges its distance from him and misses time after time, Rocky Bornstein - waitress, guardian angel, and sometimes nurse - turns the whole table so the cup comes to greet his waiting hand. The menu she amiably recites - echoed by the affable cook, John Fleming - is inexhaustible in its variety of beverages, pies, soups, cheeses. They’ve got everything; but with the infinite number of choices, it’s a comfort to stick with the ordinary.
We don’t know all the characters’ names, or what they might do for a living; but they’re struggling for contact, a sense of stability and reassurance from a past and present that keeps escaping them. They’re constantly trying to orient themselves, define what the space is, ascertain where they are located in it. Nothing is reliable, least of all themselves. Mary Shultz comes in looking for someone she’s supposed to meet at 10:30 or 11:00, his name is Bob, she thinks, maybe Robert, or perhaps Barb? It could be a woman. She’s not sure. When asked, she can’t manage to recall her own name, puzzles over it gravely, and accepts Betsy with happy relief when Zimet suggests that she looks like a Betsy. He tells her his name is Bob because he’s attracted to her.
“You look so far away,” he says, yearningly. “I am far away,” she replies, from her table across the room. But even when they’re nose to nose, the distance remains. This basic practicality grounds the psychological vagaries, and gives Brain Cafe its firm edge of wit and good sense. The outside world impinges strongly on the characters, but in suspect ways. Zimet walks down the street flinching at things that threaten him from the periphery of his vision, or imagines that people are coming on to him. “I turn around to face them and they’re not even looking at me... I think I’m just not fast enough.”
The quality of light was important, Shultz remembers, to her and the person she was supposed to meet. “If we saw things too clearly, we’d get depressed.” If it was too dark, they’d get scared. “We liked things a little blurry.” She is something of a bumbler: she’s not good with names, or faces, she’s always looking in the wrong place, missing the point. “When I remember the past,” she says, “it’s made of bits of other people’s conversations with me on the edge.”
Lenard Petit - hyper, desperate, expectantly waiting, like the other “customers,” for someone he has no way of recognizing - tensely strokes down his arms as if to peel off the skin like surgical gloves. Permanently pent-up, he urges the others to “release! let it go!” He feels so much better now, he says, because he doesn’t feel anything at all. Wrestling with confusion comes across as an ordinary condition of life, a difficulty there’s no need, really, to get upset about even if everything’s mobile, wobbly, going in and out of focus, and you don’t know who you are.
Living fully into their disorientation heightens these characters’ ability, on some level, to share. In the beginning, they try to move in consonance with each other; later they drift into and experience one another’s memories as strangely familiar territory. The sympathetic, unpressured atmosphere gradually becomes filled with reveries and recollections that flow in with the accumulation of many tiny details.
Shultz remembers an occasion when she and this person were looking out at the water. “I was looking at a boat, he was looking at a bird. But we both felt we were looking at the same thing Was that you?” Everyone nods, yes. The air, she describes, smelled like...”the sea,” they murmur, entranced, rapt in the sharing of this memory that belongs to none or all of them. ”...Lemons,” continues Shultz, without inhibiting their participation. She recalls a fragment of associated melody, and the group picks it up very lightly - odd, fragile, lone notes without much coherence, that somehow create a shimmering effect, a kind of aural levitation that blesses and momentarily transforms them all. Zimet insists that he really does recognize her, though he really didn’t before, but wanted to. Yes, he does recognize her, though her hair is different, and, well, her voice...And, though it’s not his name, he really is Bob.
At La Mama E.T.C. (October 3 to 25).
Skin Deep
September 1
Terry Beck, who studied Wigman technique with Helmut Frick-Gottschild at Temple University and danced with Gootschild’s ZeroMoving Dance Company for eight years, began to choreograph in 1980 and formed a Philadelphia company in 1984. Beck demonstrates his skills in four pieces presented as part of Dance Theater Workshop’s annual Out-of-Towners series.
His signature solo, Passerby, is vaguely thoughtful with an elusive emotional dimension; like his larger works, the piece stays on the surface of its subject. This plastic masks of an ordinary, vacant, smiling face, hang from the ceiling. They’re bland or sinister according to how the light happens to fall. Standing in place, swaying slightly, Beck dryly curls his fingers, lets his arms curve loosely up and down, drops down with a smack of his hands, lifts an arm with an arresting gesture then rises to it. Again and again. He lets his body dangle from the reaching arm.. He moves to the opposite side of the stage, jabs his fist in insult, covers his eyes, wriggles his fingers, keeps metronomic time with one finger. There’s pleading in the way he flips open his hands or dangles them from limp wrists like a woeful Pierrot. He makes an X of his body in sudden vigorous jumps, cradles and rocks something in his arm, then throws it away.
Physically, Beck’s movement grows bolder, more athletic, but the curt intellectuality of its chopped-up phrases makes it seem stingy. As the piece goes on, I realize that I’m never going to know what he thinks he’s doing. His actions are initially intriguing as clues, and his conviction is compelling, but eventually every move appears arbitrary. The material seems rearranged rather than developed. The feelings that glimmer through Beck’s dancing don’t resonate because you can’t get in sync with his choreographic decisions. Busy Boy is a bright but dubious exercise for a marching band of six dancers with instruments. Movement that’s hard and sharp is set off against movement that’s curved and softer. In the tightest section, the dancers rush to form a standing group, cover their ears, their eyes, while half of them drop, jump, twist, arch back in a steady, bouncing rhythm. Simultaneously, they build fragmentary vowel exclamations into a rhythmic chant and canon - “He is busy, we are busy, they are busy” - repeated with changing emphases and tones that range from squealing to ponderous. But there’s some essential missing: why the instruments? Why a band? why this particular verbal text?
Next come things you can do with chairs. A deftly executed duet with Beck and Richard Denson, Home involves the pair - clad in neat, identical tan street clothes with a pair of office chairs - leaning on them, sitting on the armrests, slouching against the backrests, perching on the arms with their feet on the seats, just sprawling. Thinking, watching, increasingly intent on something in front of them, they have no particular awareness of each other though both may hop into the same seat. Then they begin to slip: Beck’s elbow slides off the armrest, Denson’s ankle slips off his knee, they slither out of the chairs. They execute a vigorous, complex pattern of noisy smacks on their own bodies, the floor, and the chairs, mixed with jumps, kicks, and swings, while a taped voice recites phrases using the word “home”: “house is not a home,” there’s no place like home,” etc. Denson and Beck look fine and businesslike, but why are they dressed alike? Why don’t they acknowledge each other? Are they the same person? What are they watching? Television?
If the piece were just meant to be a technical adventure for two men and two chairs, it should have ended much sooner, before the “home” text upped its pretensions. But if Home is about something more, Beck doesn’t make that clear. A dreamlike, ritualistic work, Basins is the most ambitious piece on the program and, like the others, peters out long before it finishes. Once it becomes clear that it’s more about being mysterious than about any subject matter, it seems inflated and silly.
But along the way it renders vividly carved images of muddled sexuality and desire. A spotlight falls on a basin, a woman in a white beekeeper’s hat carries a bouquet of yellow flowers. She twists the stems, tears off a fistful of petals, and dribbles them into the basin. Crouched, monkish figures in black robes sponge the ams and shoulders of three women in turquoise standing with their arms crossed overhead. The women writhe gently as the whole frieze moves sideways one step at a time. The middle figure lifts his woman straight up and carries her, stiff as a statue. When he sets her down, she droops, crumples, unable to bear her own weight. With his hand on the back of her neck, he guides her and lies her down on a ramp at the side of the stage. When all the women are reclining, the men lean into them like incubi and the women - sleepers, dreamers - wrap their legs around the men’s hips. The men whirl out; the women run up the short ramps then spring back onto the men’s middles. An elaborated ritual is enacted, some kind of initiation, with the men both self-assertive and prissy, and the women only half-awake, sad and intoxicated, curving into themselves with soporific self-absorption. High-pitched excerpts from Meredith Monk’s Tablet are irritatingly inappropriate.
The helplessness of the women is matched by the ignorance of the prigs who tend, guide and blindly mate with them. There’s not the sense of biological inevitability that informs Eiko and Koma’s work, or the gluttonous relish Pilobolus shows in murky psychosexual matters. But Beck creates something vaguely loathsome and incestuous in the sexual unconsciousness of Basins. And because there’s no distinct point of view, Beck loses us in its ceremonial swamp.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 13 to 15).
Terry Beck, who studied Wigman technique with Helmut Frick-Gottschild at Temple University and danced with Gootschild’s ZeroMoving Dance Company for eight years, began to choreograph in 1980 and formed a Philadelphia company in 1984. Beck demonstrates his skills in four pieces presented as part of Dance Theater Workshop’s annual Out-of-Towners series.
His signature solo, Passerby, is vaguely thoughtful with an elusive emotional dimension; like his larger works, the piece stays on the surface of its subject. This plastic masks of an ordinary, vacant, smiling face, hang from the ceiling. They’re bland or sinister according to how the light happens to fall. Standing in place, swaying slightly, Beck dryly curls his fingers, lets his arms curve loosely up and down, drops down with a smack of his hands, lifts an arm with an arresting gesture then rises to it. Again and again. He lets his body dangle from the reaching arm.. He moves to the opposite side of the stage, jabs his fist in insult, covers his eyes, wriggles his fingers, keeps metronomic time with one finger. There’s pleading in the way he flips open his hands or dangles them from limp wrists like a woeful Pierrot. He makes an X of his body in sudden vigorous jumps, cradles and rocks something in his arm, then throws it away.
Physically, Beck’s movement grows bolder, more athletic, but the curt intellectuality of its chopped-up phrases makes it seem stingy. As the piece goes on, I realize that I’m never going to know what he thinks he’s doing. His actions are initially intriguing as clues, and his conviction is compelling, but eventually every move appears arbitrary. The material seems rearranged rather than developed. The feelings that glimmer through Beck’s dancing don’t resonate because you can’t get in sync with his choreographic decisions. Busy Boy is a bright but dubious exercise for a marching band of six dancers with instruments. Movement that’s hard and sharp is set off against movement that’s curved and softer. In the tightest section, the dancers rush to form a standing group, cover their ears, their eyes, while half of them drop, jump, twist, arch back in a steady, bouncing rhythm. Simultaneously, they build fragmentary vowel exclamations into a rhythmic chant and canon - “He is busy, we are busy, they are busy” - repeated with changing emphases and tones that range from squealing to ponderous. But there’s some essential missing: why the instruments? Why a band? why this particular verbal text?
Next come things you can do with chairs. A deftly executed duet with Beck and Richard Denson, Home involves the pair - clad in neat, identical tan street clothes with a pair of office chairs - leaning on them, sitting on the armrests, slouching against the backrests, perching on the arms with their feet on the seats, just sprawling. Thinking, watching, increasingly intent on something in front of them, they have no particular awareness of each other though both may hop into the same seat. Then they begin to slip: Beck’s elbow slides off the armrest, Denson’s ankle slips off his knee, they slither out of the chairs. They execute a vigorous, complex pattern of noisy smacks on their own bodies, the floor, and the chairs, mixed with jumps, kicks, and swings, while a taped voice recites phrases using the word “home”: “house is not a home,” there’s no place like home,” etc. Denson and Beck look fine and businesslike, but why are they dressed alike? Why don’t they acknowledge each other? Are they the same person? What are they watching? Television?
If the piece were just meant to be a technical adventure for two men and two chairs, it should have ended much sooner, before the “home” text upped its pretensions. But if Home is about something more, Beck doesn’t make that clear. A dreamlike, ritualistic work, Basins is the most ambitious piece on the program and, like the others, peters out long before it finishes. Once it becomes clear that it’s more about being mysterious than about any subject matter, it seems inflated and silly.
But along the way it renders vividly carved images of muddled sexuality and desire. A spotlight falls on a basin, a woman in a white beekeeper’s hat carries a bouquet of yellow flowers. She twists the stems, tears off a fistful of petals, and dribbles them into the basin. Crouched, monkish figures in black robes sponge the ams and shoulders of three women in turquoise standing with their arms crossed overhead. The women writhe gently as the whole frieze moves sideways one step at a time. The middle figure lifts his woman straight up and carries her, stiff as a statue. When he sets her down, she droops, crumples, unable to bear her own weight. With his hand on the back of her neck, he guides her and lies her down on a ramp at the side of the stage. When all the women are reclining, the men lean into them like incubi and the women - sleepers, dreamers - wrap their legs around the men’s hips. The men whirl out; the women run up the short ramps then spring back onto the men’s middles. An elaborated ritual is enacted, some kind of initiation, with the men both self-assertive and prissy, and the women only half-awake, sad and intoxicated, curving into themselves with soporific self-absorption. High-pitched excerpts from Meredith Monk’s Tablet are irritatingly inappropriate.
The helplessness of the women is matched by the ignorance of the prigs who tend, guide and blindly mate with them. There’s not the sense of biological inevitability that informs Eiko and Koma’s work, or the gluttonous relish Pilobolus shows in murky psychosexual matters. But Beck creates something vaguely loathsome and incestuous in the sexual unconsciousness of Basins. And because there’s no distinct point of view, Beck loses us in its ceremonial swamp.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 13 to 15).
Snake Eyes
June 9
In Fred Holland’s Delicate Prey, made in collaboration with Nicky Paraiso and Robbie McCauley, with video by Cathy Weis, the performers inhabit grim and separate worlds that rarely overlap. Even with a particularly powerful characterization by McCauley, the desolation of the piece and the intentional isolation of the scenes produced a strange feeling of detachment in me. They are related in a moody, thematic way, but not by immediate, specific images or events than can spark some recognition.
Only in retrospect do some of its compartmentalized elements touch each other off. There’s large rectangular bed of straw in front; Holland, a shadow presence in a dark suit, walks across and lies on it. Robbie McCauley slogs in and sits, facing away from us, at a table covered with bags and bottles, like that of some herb-gathering, potion-making medicine woman. She stretches erratically, sprawls in the chair, lets her hands hang limp, a she falls back in a compulsive, tormented way about walls - “The walls keep coming.” “What if the walls weren’t there?” - and brews herself a cup of something. Nicky Paraiso, seated on a chair in front of the white door, thrashes and gasps. There are some recorded smacks; maybe he’s being tortured. “Take, just take the walls,” incants McCauley.
All these people are wounded. McCauley seems ageless, maybe old, certainly wrecked, haunted by family memories, including the death of, I think, a younger brother She squeezes a black doll and water runs out of it, like her brother’s life. She recounts how a psychic Jewish woman from Wisconsin told her that with her sickness she could heal her people; with the thought, a painful swelling of her foot subsides. Paraiso tells a strange story I can hear only intermittently about an old man and a boy who stole one of his snakes. He begins to twitch and writhes in a small, tight way, like a snake shedding its old skin. Cathy Weis’s videos are an important part of the mix. Two amiable bums rest on a bench; one touts the perfections of Toronto. An elderly woman washes at a bathroom sink, makes herself up, teases her hair, sprays it with a familiar flourish. The voice-over tells me she’s depressed.
“I’m alone...After he died, I died with him.” Sharks and manta rays swim in an aquarium, ominous in the smooth economy of their movement. Holland walks slowly, stiffly, in the dark. Paraiso replaces him in the bed of straw. Both of them have something white - a bandage? - wrapped around two fingers. I have no inkling why. McCauley packs her bottles and papers into a trunk. She covers the cleared table with newspaper, and lays heavy rocks on top, making a formal kind of burial place. You can feel the whole event wrapping up. Holland stops in front of the door, and, standing stiffly, and slightly hunched, maybe groggy, makes little movements with his hands. Paraiso tells a tale of an old lady who lived alone, abandoned by her sons. In a bluish video, a manta ray, nearly motionless, ruffles its fins. McCauley is lying near the table. Holland is nodding, jerking in a disjointed way. Tremors pass through him, his head wobbles, twists. It’s as if he’s trying to get out of something, or through it. Not just out of his skin, like a snake, but to creep entirely out of his life.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 21 to 14).
In Fred Holland’s Delicate Prey, made in collaboration with Nicky Paraiso and Robbie McCauley, with video by Cathy Weis, the performers inhabit grim and separate worlds that rarely overlap. Even with a particularly powerful characterization by McCauley, the desolation of the piece and the intentional isolation of the scenes produced a strange feeling of detachment in me. They are related in a moody, thematic way, but not by immediate, specific images or events than can spark some recognition.
Only in retrospect do some of its compartmentalized elements touch each other off. There’s large rectangular bed of straw in front; Holland, a shadow presence in a dark suit, walks across and lies on it. Robbie McCauley slogs in and sits, facing away from us, at a table covered with bags and bottles, like that of some herb-gathering, potion-making medicine woman. She stretches erratically, sprawls in the chair, lets her hands hang limp, a she falls back in a compulsive, tormented way about walls - “The walls keep coming.” “What if the walls weren’t there?” - and brews herself a cup of something. Nicky Paraiso, seated on a chair in front of the white door, thrashes and gasps. There are some recorded smacks; maybe he’s being tortured. “Take, just take the walls,” incants McCauley.
All these people are wounded. McCauley seems ageless, maybe old, certainly wrecked, haunted by family memories, including the death of, I think, a younger brother She squeezes a black doll and water runs out of it, like her brother’s life. She recounts how a psychic Jewish woman from Wisconsin told her that with her sickness she could heal her people; with the thought, a painful swelling of her foot subsides. Paraiso tells a strange story I can hear only intermittently about an old man and a boy who stole one of his snakes. He begins to twitch and writhes in a small, tight way, like a snake shedding its old skin. Cathy Weis’s videos are an important part of the mix. Two amiable bums rest on a bench; one touts the perfections of Toronto. An elderly woman washes at a bathroom sink, makes herself up, teases her hair, sprays it with a familiar flourish. The voice-over tells me she’s depressed.
“I’m alone...After he died, I died with him.” Sharks and manta rays swim in an aquarium, ominous in the smooth economy of their movement. Holland walks slowly, stiffly, in the dark. Paraiso replaces him in the bed of straw. Both of them have something white - a bandage? - wrapped around two fingers. I have no inkling why. McCauley packs her bottles and papers into a trunk. She covers the cleared table with newspaper, and lays heavy rocks on top, making a formal kind of burial place. You can feel the whole event wrapping up. Holland stops in front of the door, and, standing stiffly, and slightly hunched, maybe groggy, makes little movements with his hands. Paraiso tells a tale of an old lady who lived alone, abandoned by her sons. In a bluish video, a manta ray, nearly motionless, ruffles its fins. McCauley is lying near the table. Holland is nodding, jerking in a disjointed way. Tremors pass through him, his head wobbles, twists. It’s as if he’s trying to get out of something, or through it. Not just out of his skin, like a snake, but to creep entirely out of his life.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 21 to 14).
Sob Story
March 10
Rosalind Newman’s new three-part Technology of Tears is no automated sob story - there’s hardly room for a tear. A hasty, scribbled figure etched of a decomposing stream of nervous, white lines on black, runs runs runs across the scrim getting nowhere. Fred Frith’s score, sparse initially, insistently keeps track of the time. When the rush of figures freezes in a single arching shape, Clarice Marshall, in white halter and tights, appears behind it. It’s hard, for a moment, to credit her substance. Thin lines zap like tracers across the screen image.
We’re looking at a battle zone, one of the many locales where the battle of the sexes is enacted. Except that sex itself is only one - notably unsatisfactory - aspect of the action. The first section powerfully fuses film, music and movement to create a fascinating din of frustration and unpleasantness. Fred Frith’s score - relentlessly hammering and grating - is like having people yell in your ear. And Pierre Hebert’s headlong film - alternately the background and foreground of the dancing - presents a desperate, aimless rush through an anonymous, sketchy landscape of cruddy buildings.
With a crew of five dancers in street clothes behind her, Marshall shivers. Their gestures are hard, cutting; they hold onto themselves - the backs of their necks, their arms. The music turns tinny and hard; the squiggles, zaps and wilting zigzags on the scrim crumble, expressing distress more plainly than the dancers can. They’re playing tough; the dry anguish of the situation emerges out of and vanishes into the deep shadows of the stage; Marshall is mostly left alone, though she clutches an occasional partner momentarily. Then they discard each other. The screen fills with outline images of buildings with more and more of their windows blocked up. The scribble of figure races down an unending canyon of buildings and finally crashes.
Relationships in Newman’s piece are hostile, insubstantial, cold. Disappointment and dissatisfaction are guaranteed since no partner can trouble to extend him or herself. The dancers sporadically but urgently bang against (and just bang) each other. “It’s your fault,” could be inscribed over the entrance to the bright and witty cartoon home - a tilted bed, a curtained window - that’s the set for Part II (costumes and set are by Pier Voulkos). Marshall lies on the bed tossing and writhing. Her guy sits on the side of the bed. They grab each other, let go, try again. There’s no chemistry. There are brief gestures of rough affection but they quickly give way to angry oppositional twists of the body. Dancers bite their way up the arms of their partners in a manner much more destructive than erotic. Moments of indiscriminate and perfunctory sex litter the scene. Several times prostrate couples are dragged apart by disapproving watchers.
The Technology of Tears is a vehicle for anger and frustration - not the flagrant, temporary kinds that happen and pass, but the insidious, self-justified, permanent kinds that petrify character and make people mechanical. In the second and third sections in particular, which are visually less dense than the first, the choreographer seems to nurture anger and revel in it, to exploit its poison for the sake of some secret spite. Up until the end, that is, when the dancers - who for Part II have been decked out in black formal wear, with silver canes - fling down the canes, strip off their jackets, spats, cummerbunds, pants till they’re down to brown bras and shorts and tank tops, and one by one leave. We’ve had to wait too long for this declaration. It’s like seeing someone finally smash something she’s hated forever.
At the Joyce Theater (February 24 to March 1).
Rosalind Newman’s new three-part Technology of Tears is no automated sob story - there’s hardly room for a tear. A hasty, scribbled figure etched of a decomposing stream of nervous, white lines on black, runs runs runs across the scrim getting nowhere. Fred Frith’s score, sparse initially, insistently keeps track of the time. When the rush of figures freezes in a single arching shape, Clarice Marshall, in white halter and tights, appears behind it. It’s hard, for a moment, to credit her substance. Thin lines zap like tracers across the screen image.
We’re looking at a battle zone, one of the many locales where the battle of the sexes is enacted. Except that sex itself is only one - notably unsatisfactory - aspect of the action. The first section powerfully fuses film, music and movement to create a fascinating din of frustration and unpleasantness. Fred Frith’s score - relentlessly hammering and grating - is like having people yell in your ear. And Pierre Hebert’s headlong film - alternately the background and foreground of the dancing - presents a desperate, aimless rush through an anonymous, sketchy landscape of cruddy buildings.
With a crew of five dancers in street clothes behind her, Marshall shivers. Their gestures are hard, cutting; they hold onto themselves - the backs of their necks, their arms. The music turns tinny and hard; the squiggles, zaps and wilting zigzags on the scrim crumble, expressing distress more plainly than the dancers can. They’re playing tough; the dry anguish of the situation emerges out of and vanishes into the deep shadows of the stage; Marshall is mostly left alone, though she clutches an occasional partner momentarily. Then they discard each other. The screen fills with outline images of buildings with more and more of their windows blocked up. The scribble of figure races down an unending canyon of buildings and finally crashes.
Relationships in Newman’s piece are hostile, insubstantial, cold. Disappointment and dissatisfaction are guaranteed since no partner can trouble to extend him or herself. The dancers sporadically but urgently bang against (and just bang) each other. “It’s your fault,” could be inscribed over the entrance to the bright and witty cartoon home - a tilted bed, a curtained window - that’s the set for Part II (costumes and set are by Pier Voulkos). Marshall lies on the bed tossing and writhing. Her guy sits on the side of the bed. They grab each other, let go, try again. There’s no chemistry. There are brief gestures of rough affection but they quickly give way to angry oppositional twists of the body. Dancers bite their way up the arms of their partners in a manner much more destructive than erotic. Moments of indiscriminate and perfunctory sex litter the scene. Several times prostrate couples are dragged apart by disapproving watchers.
The Technology of Tears is a vehicle for anger and frustration - not the flagrant, temporary kinds that happen and pass, but the insidious, self-justified, permanent kinds that petrify character and make people mechanical. In the second and third sections in particular, which are visually less dense than the first, the choreographer seems to nurture anger and revel in it, to exploit its poison for the sake of some secret spite. Up until the end, that is, when the dancers - who for Part II have been decked out in black formal wear, with silver canes - fling down the canes, strip off their jackets, spats, cummerbunds, pants till they’re down to brown bras and shorts and tank tops, and one by one leave. We’ve had to wait too long for this declaration. It’s like seeing someone finally smash something she’s hated forever.
At the Joyce Theater (February 24 to March 1).
Some Nerve
March 17
In the summer of 1983, dancer Carey Erickson broke his neck in a swimming accident in Easthampton and became paralyzed. In January 1984, Joseph Pupello, Nanette DeCillis and other friends organized a benefit (“two action packed shows,” says Pupello) at St. Mark’s to raise money to hep pay for Erickson’s rehabilitation. Between the shows and contributions people mailed in, they collected about $11,000. The group was amazed and lifted up by the response. Not just by the money. “The spirit overwhelmed me,” says Erickson. “I thought, ‘Why not do this on a larger scale for a bigger cause?’” And it became Erickson’s “quest,” as Pupello calls it, to figure out how to bring it to another level - a project to raise money for research into spinal cord injury.
And now it’s happening: “The Spinal Series,” two dance benefits (March 4 was at Town Hall, the March 12 concert is at Tully Hall) for a trio of organizations involved in medical research and the rehabilitation of people who have suffered injury to the central nervous system. The accident blew Erickson’s life apart, but he was lucky. He had been very carefully handled from the moment of the accident, and quickly brought to an established center (at NYU/Bellevue Medical Center, part of the New York Regional Spinal Cord Injury System) where the staff was experienced in dealing with spinal cord injury. He also had immense, long-term support from people who cared about him and an absolute determination to make himself as physically able as possible.
Early on he began to get some ”return,” and the NYU/Bellevue staff recognized that he would probably walk again, though no one would have taken bets on when or how well. When he was fit enough to work, around the spring of 1985, Erickson found employment in a research project at NYU Medical Center’s Department of Neurosurgery. He began to talk then with the American Paralysis Association about his idea for a performance that would benefit their Project Target, as well as other organizations - the New York Regional Spinal Cord Injury System (established in 1972 to provide a center of expertise to deal with the effects of spinal cord injury) and Shake-a-Leg, a organization that offers a wide and eclectic range of rehabilitative possibilities. Project Target is focused on speeding funding to the research programs that have the best chance of yielding clinical treatment within three years.
Twenty years ago, most people with spinal cord injuries died. The current issue - how to prevent or minimize paralysis - didn’t even exist. Nowadays, 90 per cent survive; the question is, how can they do better than that? According to an article by Dr. Wise Young in the series program, major advances in treatment of central nervous system damage are being made. “Recent studies have shown that neurons can be stimulated to regenerate under special circumstances, that nervous tissues can be transplanted, and that certain drugs given shortly after injury may reduce damage to the spinal cord.”
Meantime, while Erickson was recovering, Manhattan Performing Ensemble incorporated (with Pupello and DeCillis as directors). A confident, infectious, let’s-put-on-a-show spirit seems to spark and sustain them. Call it naive, but theirs is the kind of naivete that gets things done, Besides presenting their own works,they invited STEP C, an after-school theater enrichment program at P.S. 34 on the Lower East Side, supported in large part, by a festive fund raising bash at P.S. 122 around Christmas time. (So far, there have been two Christmas shows; the program actually started this past September.)
“One of the philosophies of the company,” says Pupello, “is to utilize the performing arts to support other aspects of the community.” Early modern dancers took their social role seriously, donating performances to war relief, antifascism, and other humanist causes - but it’s astonishing nowadays to hear the notion that the arts might be able to support anything but themselves.
Gregory Hines and singer Paul Stookey turned up as surprise guests at the first “Spinal Series” program at Town Hall March 4. Tigger Benford and Martha Partridge slapped, patty-cake clapped and stamped in a brilliantly rhythmic piece that left their thighs bright pink; Charles Moulton tapped too, in his amplified “Tapnology”; Mari MacKenzie of Ballet Hispanico danced a piece by William Whitener; Marta Renzi made goo goo eyes and confronted the lifelong penalties of not being born beautiful in I’m Not Very Pretty,. And seven dancers and seven paralyzed young men and women stepped and cruised through a simply patterned but inspiring ensemble piece.
Most of the people involved in the series performances are not strangers. Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer vigiled at Erickson’s bedside, and gave him massages, Beverly Blossom is a teacher who meant a lot to him. Renzi was in class with him at Maggie Black’s when he had recovered enough to be making his first feeble struggles at the barre. But the game young paraplegics and quadriplegics rolling and tipping and even pirouetting through the ensemble work - are new friends. Some like Tim Flynn, whom Erickson met through Shake-a-Leg, were immediately eager to do the piece and undaunted by the problems. Others may have been initially skeptical or perhaps just fiercely curious, but eventually returned bringing pals.
It was almost two years ago that Erickson first spoke to people at the APA, which eventually provided backing for the project. It came into being inch by inch, Then things went into high gear last November, Writing hundreds of letters was perhaps the biggest drag, but some of it was as easy as pie, like getting the costumes for the ensemble’s piece. Pupello and Erickson were crazy about some shirts by designer Paul Smith. “We went shopping for them in Easthampton,” says Pupello. “After, we went to the spot where I broke my neck,” Erickson continues, “and danced around on the beach with our new clothes on. Then we called the guy from Paul Smith sportswear and told him about the benefit and he almost immediately said yes.”
In the summer of 1983, dancer Carey Erickson broke his neck in a swimming accident in Easthampton and became paralyzed. In January 1984, Joseph Pupello, Nanette DeCillis and other friends organized a benefit (“two action packed shows,” says Pupello) at St. Mark’s to raise money to hep pay for Erickson’s rehabilitation. Between the shows and contributions people mailed in, they collected about $11,000. The group was amazed and lifted up by the response. Not just by the money. “The spirit overwhelmed me,” says Erickson. “I thought, ‘Why not do this on a larger scale for a bigger cause?’” And it became Erickson’s “quest,” as Pupello calls it, to figure out how to bring it to another level - a project to raise money for research into spinal cord injury.
And now it’s happening: “The Spinal Series,” two dance benefits (March 4 was at Town Hall, the March 12 concert is at Tully Hall) for a trio of organizations involved in medical research and the rehabilitation of people who have suffered injury to the central nervous system. The accident blew Erickson’s life apart, but he was lucky. He had been very carefully handled from the moment of the accident, and quickly brought to an established center (at NYU/Bellevue Medical Center, part of the New York Regional Spinal Cord Injury System) where the staff was experienced in dealing with spinal cord injury. He also had immense, long-term support from people who cared about him and an absolute determination to make himself as physically able as possible.
Early on he began to get some ”return,” and the NYU/Bellevue staff recognized that he would probably walk again, though no one would have taken bets on when or how well. When he was fit enough to work, around the spring of 1985, Erickson found employment in a research project at NYU Medical Center’s Department of Neurosurgery. He began to talk then with the American Paralysis Association about his idea for a performance that would benefit their Project Target, as well as other organizations - the New York Regional Spinal Cord Injury System (established in 1972 to provide a center of expertise to deal with the effects of spinal cord injury) and Shake-a-Leg, a organization that offers a wide and eclectic range of rehabilitative possibilities. Project Target is focused on speeding funding to the research programs that have the best chance of yielding clinical treatment within three years.
Twenty years ago, most people with spinal cord injuries died. The current issue - how to prevent or minimize paralysis - didn’t even exist. Nowadays, 90 per cent survive; the question is, how can they do better than that? According to an article by Dr. Wise Young in the series program, major advances in treatment of central nervous system damage are being made. “Recent studies have shown that neurons can be stimulated to regenerate under special circumstances, that nervous tissues can be transplanted, and that certain drugs given shortly after injury may reduce damage to the spinal cord.”
Meantime, while Erickson was recovering, Manhattan Performing Ensemble incorporated (with Pupello and DeCillis as directors). A confident, infectious, let’s-put-on-a-show spirit seems to spark and sustain them. Call it naive, but theirs is the kind of naivete that gets things done, Besides presenting their own works,they invited STEP C, an after-school theater enrichment program at P.S. 34 on the Lower East Side, supported in large part, by a festive fund raising bash at P.S. 122 around Christmas time. (So far, there have been two Christmas shows; the program actually started this past September.)
“One of the philosophies of the company,” says Pupello, “is to utilize the performing arts to support other aspects of the community.” Early modern dancers took their social role seriously, donating performances to war relief, antifascism, and other humanist causes - but it’s astonishing nowadays to hear the notion that the arts might be able to support anything but themselves.
Gregory Hines and singer Paul Stookey turned up as surprise guests at the first “Spinal Series” program at Town Hall March 4. Tigger Benford and Martha Partridge slapped, patty-cake clapped and stamped in a brilliantly rhythmic piece that left their thighs bright pink; Charles Moulton tapped too, in his amplified “Tapnology”; Mari MacKenzie of Ballet Hispanico danced a piece by William Whitener; Marta Renzi made goo goo eyes and confronted the lifelong penalties of not being born beautiful in I’m Not Very Pretty,. And seven dancers and seven paralyzed young men and women stepped and cruised through a simply patterned but inspiring ensemble piece.
Most of the people involved in the series performances are not strangers. Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer vigiled at Erickson’s bedside, and gave him massages, Beverly Blossom is a teacher who meant a lot to him. Renzi was in class with him at Maggie Black’s when he had recovered enough to be making his first feeble struggles at the barre. But the game young paraplegics and quadriplegics rolling and tipping and even pirouetting through the ensemble work - are new friends. Some like Tim Flynn, whom Erickson met through Shake-a-Leg, were immediately eager to do the piece and undaunted by the problems. Others may have been initially skeptical or perhaps just fiercely curious, but eventually returned bringing pals.
It was almost two years ago that Erickson first spoke to people at the APA, which eventually provided backing for the project. It came into being inch by inch, Then things went into high gear last November, Writing hundreds of letters was perhaps the biggest drag, but some of it was as easy as pie, like getting the costumes for the ensemble’s piece. Pupello and Erickson were crazy about some shirts by designer Paul Smith. “We went shopping for them in Easthampton,” says Pupello. “After, we went to the spot where I broke my neck,” Erickson continues, “and danced around on the beach with our new clothes on. Then we called the guy from Paul Smith sportswear and told him about the benefit and he almost immediately said yes.”
Suddenly There Came a Tapping
August 25
A compact performer who danced in the original Broadway productions of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, Los Angeles-based Alfred Desio offered a concert of tap dances featuring electronically amplified shoes: the sound zapped through synthesizers, special effects modules, and a battery of other equipment. If you gotta have a gimmick, this is not a bad one - particularly handy if you were to do a concert without live musicians.
Here, Desio was assisted by dancers David Sharp and Damon Winmon, plus percussionist Roger Boyce (who offered two solos of his own), and presented 11 short pieces that slipped effortlessly from one to the next. It’s fine to see Desio (in Ragtap and Zapped Taps) - wired up, earphones in place - above a bank of equipment onstage and to watch its little red and green and blue light blink along with his dancing. (In Ragtap, his plugged-in tapes make blue and magenta lights blare and fade with the sound, and he casts a rainbow series of multicolored shadows.) Musically the result just isn’t all that inherently interesting, although the sounds produced are not so manipulated that they lose rhythmic connection with the footwork.
A number of dancers are working with amplified tapes - Gregory Hines and Charlie Moulton come immediately to mind - so I guess this is a wave of the present. But as far as I’m concerned, the sounds Desio raps out in his regular tap shoes are richer, more varied, more rhythmically playful, easier to tune in to. The old-time acoustic sound is more beautiful to me. Fiddling with switches and listening to feedback inevitably distracts from the essential music-making of tap. The taps take second place. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot to like in Desio’s program, but the electronic stuff - the novelty - wasn’t it.
In the first dance, Danca Solitaria, Desio blends the crisp, introspective patter of his taps with contrasting guitar music that is so independent it’s almost intrusive. His upper body scrunches slightly, digging in, as his shoulders hunch forward to emphasize a step. Oddly, he never looks up, doesn’t, in effect introduce himself; rather, he lets hi taps speak for him. Though there’s sufficient wit in the dancing, it seems studied, overly dry - lacking the usual illusion of spontaneity. Later on, as I get used to his style, I don’t miss that so much.
Sturdy David Sharp takes over for his own somewhat coy Alternating Current, in which the bubbling “Tap-Tronic” score by Desio virtually echoes Sharp’s bold tapping. Initially, I thought that the impact of Sharp’s taps, slightly delayed, rippled out to produce the music, but, in fact, the score was set and the tapping interwoven. Covering Ground, a duet for Desio and Winmon, a tall skinny guy with hiked-up shoulders and a winning style, is full of broad, rhythmic action in the dancing, and the clatter produced by their amplified taps combines with a hollow, twanging, preprogrammed score that culminates in a dense rhythmic racket. In Capriccio Stomp, unamped, the same pair choo-choos side-to-side, perfectly coordinated in their unison tapping. Lots of snap, crackle pop in this piece - scoots, slaps, little cries punctuating the sharp raps and light chatter of the footwork.
Sharp, with a crooked grin, slips into surprise splits, bounces into repeated forward flips, falls head over heels in his Direct Current, and Boyce beats out a couple of riffs on the taps while Sharp’s feet are conveniently upturned. In Dinah (to Thelonious Monk music), Winmon is bossy, insistent, impatient, huffy with someone offstage, then turns all charm, for us - with lazy, floaty hands, sassy looks, spry crisscrossing steps and jokey tap bourrees. Tiger Rag was choice, and it permanently endeared the performers to the audience. Desio and Winmon bring on a 1930’s wind-up Victrola and an old 78 (their only one, the other copy broke) of “Tiger Rag.” Singing light syllabic scat and the familiar “Hold That Tiger! Hold That Tiger!” over the instrumental, they rock side to side, do the simplest pointy-foot steps neatly in place, and a couple of times burst unexpectedly into brief, enthusiastic blizzards of tapping. Without a trace of mockery, Tiger Rag had the innocent charm and sly elegance of another era.
My other favorite, a splendid acoustic duet for Desio and percussionist Roger Boyce. Desio dances right next to Boyce, laying down a steady rhythm on a mylar-covered sheet of masonite that produces higher sounds than the theater floor can. Boyce keeps his drumming soft. Early on, there are Spanish effects in the ornamented rhythms of Desio’s tapping. Then he returns for a couple of moments to the basic beat. Together they play with and against each other, making marvelous music. Desio displays an amazing range of pitch in his taps, devises delicate rhythmic variations dotted with slides, scrapes, and flutters. Getting faster and lighter, but not louder, the dancing and drumming whip their intensity into a galloping chase.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 10 to 18).
A compact performer who danced in the original Broadway productions of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, Los Angeles-based Alfred Desio offered a concert of tap dances featuring electronically amplified shoes: the sound zapped through synthesizers, special effects modules, and a battery of other equipment. If you gotta have a gimmick, this is not a bad one - particularly handy if you were to do a concert without live musicians.
Here, Desio was assisted by dancers David Sharp and Damon Winmon, plus percussionist Roger Boyce (who offered two solos of his own), and presented 11 short pieces that slipped effortlessly from one to the next. It’s fine to see Desio (in Ragtap and Zapped Taps) - wired up, earphones in place - above a bank of equipment onstage and to watch its little red and green and blue light blink along with his dancing. (In Ragtap, his plugged-in tapes make blue and magenta lights blare and fade with the sound, and he casts a rainbow series of multicolored shadows.) Musically the result just isn’t all that inherently interesting, although the sounds produced are not so manipulated that they lose rhythmic connection with the footwork.
A number of dancers are working with amplified tapes - Gregory Hines and Charlie Moulton come immediately to mind - so I guess this is a wave of the present. But as far as I’m concerned, the sounds Desio raps out in his regular tap shoes are richer, more varied, more rhythmically playful, easier to tune in to. The old-time acoustic sound is more beautiful to me. Fiddling with switches and listening to feedback inevitably distracts from the essential music-making of tap. The taps take second place. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot to like in Desio’s program, but the electronic stuff - the novelty - wasn’t it.
In the first dance, Danca Solitaria, Desio blends the crisp, introspective patter of his taps with contrasting guitar music that is so independent it’s almost intrusive. His upper body scrunches slightly, digging in, as his shoulders hunch forward to emphasize a step. Oddly, he never looks up, doesn’t, in effect introduce himself; rather, he lets hi taps speak for him. Though there’s sufficient wit in the dancing, it seems studied, overly dry - lacking the usual illusion of spontaneity. Later on, as I get used to his style, I don’t miss that so much.
Sturdy David Sharp takes over for his own somewhat coy Alternating Current, in which the bubbling “Tap-Tronic” score by Desio virtually echoes Sharp’s bold tapping. Initially, I thought that the impact of Sharp’s taps, slightly delayed, rippled out to produce the music, but, in fact, the score was set and the tapping interwoven. Covering Ground, a duet for Desio and Winmon, a tall skinny guy with hiked-up shoulders and a winning style, is full of broad, rhythmic action in the dancing, and the clatter produced by their amplified taps combines with a hollow, twanging, preprogrammed score that culminates in a dense rhythmic racket. In Capriccio Stomp, unamped, the same pair choo-choos side-to-side, perfectly coordinated in their unison tapping. Lots of snap, crackle pop in this piece - scoots, slaps, little cries punctuating the sharp raps and light chatter of the footwork.
Sharp, with a crooked grin, slips into surprise splits, bounces into repeated forward flips, falls head over heels in his Direct Current, and Boyce beats out a couple of riffs on the taps while Sharp’s feet are conveniently upturned. In Dinah (to Thelonious Monk music), Winmon is bossy, insistent, impatient, huffy with someone offstage, then turns all charm, for us - with lazy, floaty hands, sassy looks, spry crisscrossing steps and jokey tap bourrees. Tiger Rag was choice, and it permanently endeared the performers to the audience. Desio and Winmon bring on a 1930’s wind-up Victrola and an old 78 (their only one, the other copy broke) of “Tiger Rag.” Singing light syllabic scat and the familiar “Hold That Tiger! Hold That Tiger!” over the instrumental, they rock side to side, do the simplest pointy-foot steps neatly in place, and a couple of times burst unexpectedly into brief, enthusiastic blizzards of tapping. Without a trace of mockery, Tiger Rag had the innocent charm and sly elegance of another era.
My other favorite, a splendid acoustic duet for Desio and percussionist Roger Boyce. Desio dances right next to Boyce, laying down a steady rhythm on a mylar-covered sheet of masonite that produces higher sounds than the theater floor can. Boyce keeps his drumming soft. Early on, there are Spanish effects in the ornamented rhythms of Desio’s tapping. Then he returns for a couple of moments to the basic beat. Together they play with and against each other, making marvelous music. Desio displays an amazing range of pitch in his taps, devises delicate rhythmic variations dotted with slides, scrapes, and flutters. Getting faster and lighter, but not louder, the dancing and drumming whip their intensity into a galloping chase.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 10 to 18).
Takes Two to Tangle
October 19
Jean-Francois Duroure and Monique Monnier are a hot duo in France and there’s a good reason for it. Both trained at the Centre de Danse Contemporaine in Angers when Viola Farber directed it. Monnier danced in the CNDC company that mingled Farber’s American ensemble with a group of French dancers. Joel Luecht, who is performing Duroure’s roles in half the performances on their tour, was a member of Farber’s company at that time.
In 1984, while studying at the Cunningham Studio, Monnier and Duroure began to collaborate on Pudique Acide, the first duet on their program at DTW, and the next year devised Extasis (which was expanded for the Lyon Opera Ballet into Mama Monday Sunday or Always, seen here early this year at City Center. Two powerful elements in their dancing remind me strongly of Farber’s own, and that is the breadth and willfulness of their movement. The focus is particularly acute at the extreme position of a movement and there is unusual drama in the stretch of the limbs.
Monnier and Duroure dovetail physically with cool expertise, but the fascination in their performing comes from an air of guilty knowledge they exude and a kind of gritty insolence at the core. This doesn’t come across as hostile or snotty, but concentrated, secretive, and mysterious. His face is wary, knowing, unpredictable, perhaps wily, with an elfin quality that reminds me of Jim Self; her strong-boned face expresses a very cautious receptivity, and suggests, underneath, the presence of a psychic wound that cannot heal - she’s a woman with a past.
There’s a noirish, B-movie quality to Monnier/Duroure’s work. It could be in black-and-white. In Pudique Acide, to excerpts from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and intermittent silences, they’re all over each other, coldly intimate, using each other, intrinsically defensive. Identically dressed, their hair in brusque cuts, they wear each other’s protective sexual coloration - red plaid skirts and black sweaters over gray pedal pushers, gray shirts and suspenders. He comes up behind her, smelling her hair, slides against her body. He holds her heel, and twists her leg into him. Leaning, he slides down, and she curls over on top of him. They pull each other up, force their weight against each other to drag themselves down, crush one another to the floor. But though their actions often effectively pit them against each other, there’s nothing personal at stake. Kicking, rocking, bending sideways smartly, their moves are always sharp. Moving in space, they eat it up with the intense clarity, scope and possessiveness of their gestures. Doomed to be allies, they tug at each other, clutch at their skirts, pull at their clothing, throw themselves at each other and fling each other away with hectic, nonsexual passion.
In its somewhat overblown Lyon Opera Ballet version, Extasis was an amusing, mocking piece - chic but meek. Using songs of Kurt Weill, in German, and music by Bernard Hermann from some Hitchcock movies, the duet is tougher, crueler, more desperate. In a setting suggestive of a modeling shoot, we find them - Duroure standing, Monnier sitting with her face hidden - wearing raincoats, collars up, over masses of ruffled, gauzy skirts. Lipstick in hand, glaring, Monnier rouges her lips while lounging on Duroure’s back. They race around with big, scooting steps, sink down and rock side-tos-de in deep plie, whirl into each other’s arms, clutch at each other, fall over, scramble back and heave themselves around. She jumps on his thighs; he leaps on her back. They pull at each other, wrench each other’s heads back by the hair, haul each other around by the scruff of their coats like naughty kittens. The movement sequences are erratic, and there’s a frequent disjointedness - small, jagged convulsions of the upper body, forearms flinging in-and-out from stiffly held elbows, a series of mechanical steps to Weill’s “Mandalay Song.”
The piece is a kind of frantic, flickering assault - erupting in bursts of conflict, dampened by temporary routines of realignment. Victims of more than fashion, they shove their petticoats around their ankles, then drag them as they hobble along. Duroure puts on lipstick, then smears it. Monnier reenters wearing a bridal veil; fluorescent lights set on the floor glare with deadly whiteness; he flings her around, then sags in her arms. They hit the floor, then they’re up and he knocks her down, she drags him and buries him in petticoats...
At Dance Theater Workshop (October 1 to 4).
The Graham Company’s splashy October 6 gala roused the audience to wild enthusiasm. Guests Baryshnikov and Nureyev danced the Husbandman and the Revivalist in Appalachian Spring. Baryshnikov’s effort was goodhearted, but he didn’t have the proper force for Graham’s movement (and how could he?); Nureyev, who has danced this role adequately many times, seemed pinched, and in the hellfire solo, demented. I guess this is not unusual for the sort of gala where stars generously bestow themselves on inappropriate material. In Ruth St. Denis’s The Incense, gorgeous Maya Plisetskaya conjured the smoke eloquently with her ravishing arms, but never became the smoke, as St. Denis plainly does in surviving films.
The gem of the program was a stunning 1937 film of Graham in Frontier. How beautifully centered her dancing was, how surprisingly light, even in those repeated kicks and extensions of - always - the left leg, which must be brutal to perform! Graham’s movement is full of feeling sensitively modulated, and its precise shapes expand the expressiveness of the dancer and transmute it into something grander. Very little of this exists in her company today, when the dances are too often performed as arcane technical feats, pushy sequences of sensual choreographic designs. Whatever feeling is conveyed in the dancing now comes almost purely from tension, its unbreathing, clenched quality. For her splendid and revolutionary career up to the early ‘50s, Graham deserves all the homage she can bear.
Though it’s nice, in the abstract, that, aged somewhere over 90, she is still active, her works of recent decades are skillful efforts of not much merit. The gestures she once molded for powerful dramatic purposes now serve glamour and pomposity. For example, the “Ritual to the Sun” section of Acts of Light (1981) and last year’s Temptations of the Moon - both performed on the gala, and adored by the audience - are gleaming, muscular rites of ecstatic self-congratulation. “Me! Me! Me!” shout the dancers bodies every moment. There is no other real content.
Jean-Francois Duroure and Monique Monnier are a hot duo in France and there’s a good reason for it. Both trained at the Centre de Danse Contemporaine in Angers when Viola Farber directed it. Monnier danced in the CNDC company that mingled Farber’s American ensemble with a group of French dancers. Joel Luecht, who is performing Duroure’s roles in half the performances on their tour, was a member of Farber’s company at that time.
In 1984, while studying at the Cunningham Studio, Monnier and Duroure began to collaborate on Pudique Acide, the first duet on their program at DTW, and the next year devised Extasis (which was expanded for the Lyon Opera Ballet into Mama Monday Sunday or Always, seen here early this year at City Center. Two powerful elements in their dancing remind me strongly of Farber’s own, and that is the breadth and willfulness of their movement. The focus is particularly acute at the extreme position of a movement and there is unusual drama in the stretch of the limbs.
Monnier and Duroure dovetail physically with cool expertise, but the fascination in their performing comes from an air of guilty knowledge they exude and a kind of gritty insolence at the core. This doesn’t come across as hostile or snotty, but concentrated, secretive, and mysterious. His face is wary, knowing, unpredictable, perhaps wily, with an elfin quality that reminds me of Jim Self; her strong-boned face expresses a very cautious receptivity, and suggests, underneath, the presence of a psychic wound that cannot heal - she’s a woman with a past.
There’s a noirish, B-movie quality to Monnier/Duroure’s work. It could be in black-and-white. In Pudique Acide, to excerpts from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and intermittent silences, they’re all over each other, coldly intimate, using each other, intrinsically defensive. Identically dressed, their hair in brusque cuts, they wear each other’s protective sexual coloration - red plaid skirts and black sweaters over gray pedal pushers, gray shirts and suspenders. He comes up behind her, smelling her hair, slides against her body. He holds her heel, and twists her leg into him. Leaning, he slides down, and she curls over on top of him. They pull each other up, force their weight against each other to drag themselves down, crush one another to the floor. But though their actions often effectively pit them against each other, there’s nothing personal at stake. Kicking, rocking, bending sideways smartly, their moves are always sharp. Moving in space, they eat it up with the intense clarity, scope and possessiveness of their gestures. Doomed to be allies, they tug at each other, clutch at their skirts, pull at their clothing, throw themselves at each other and fling each other away with hectic, nonsexual passion.
In its somewhat overblown Lyon Opera Ballet version, Extasis was an amusing, mocking piece - chic but meek. Using songs of Kurt Weill, in German, and music by Bernard Hermann from some Hitchcock movies, the duet is tougher, crueler, more desperate. In a setting suggestive of a modeling shoot, we find them - Duroure standing, Monnier sitting with her face hidden - wearing raincoats, collars up, over masses of ruffled, gauzy skirts. Lipstick in hand, glaring, Monnier rouges her lips while lounging on Duroure’s back. They race around with big, scooting steps, sink down and rock side-tos-de in deep plie, whirl into each other’s arms, clutch at each other, fall over, scramble back and heave themselves around. She jumps on his thighs; he leaps on her back. They pull at each other, wrench each other’s heads back by the hair, haul each other around by the scruff of their coats like naughty kittens. The movement sequences are erratic, and there’s a frequent disjointedness - small, jagged convulsions of the upper body, forearms flinging in-and-out from stiffly held elbows, a series of mechanical steps to Weill’s “Mandalay Song.”
The piece is a kind of frantic, flickering assault - erupting in bursts of conflict, dampened by temporary routines of realignment. Victims of more than fashion, they shove their petticoats around their ankles, then drag them as they hobble along. Duroure puts on lipstick, then smears it. Monnier reenters wearing a bridal veil; fluorescent lights set on the floor glare with deadly whiteness; he flings her around, then sags in her arms. They hit the floor, then they’re up and he knocks her down, she drags him and buries him in petticoats...
At Dance Theater Workshop (October 1 to 4).
The Graham Company’s splashy October 6 gala roused the audience to wild enthusiasm. Guests Baryshnikov and Nureyev danced the Husbandman and the Revivalist in Appalachian Spring. Baryshnikov’s effort was goodhearted, but he didn’t have the proper force for Graham’s movement (and how could he?); Nureyev, who has danced this role adequately many times, seemed pinched, and in the hellfire solo, demented. I guess this is not unusual for the sort of gala where stars generously bestow themselves on inappropriate material. In Ruth St. Denis’s The Incense, gorgeous Maya Plisetskaya conjured the smoke eloquently with her ravishing arms, but never became the smoke, as St. Denis plainly does in surviving films.
The gem of the program was a stunning 1937 film of Graham in Frontier. How beautifully centered her dancing was, how surprisingly light, even in those repeated kicks and extensions of - always - the left leg, which must be brutal to perform! Graham’s movement is full of feeling sensitively modulated, and its precise shapes expand the expressiveness of the dancer and transmute it into something grander. Very little of this exists in her company today, when the dances are too often performed as arcane technical feats, pushy sequences of sensual choreographic designs. Whatever feeling is conveyed in the dancing now comes almost purely from tension, its unbreathing, clenched quality. For her splendid and revolutionary career up to the early ‘50s, Graham deserves all the homage she can bear.
Though it’s nice, in the abstract, that, aged somewhere over 90, she is still active, her works of recent decades are skillful efforts of not much merit. The gestures she once molded for powerful dramatic purposes now serve glamour and pomposity. For example, the “Ritual to the Sun” section of Acts of Light (1981) and last year’s Temptations of the Moon - both performed on the gala, and adored by the audience - are gleaming, muscular rites of ecstatic self-congratulation. “Me! Me! Me!” shout the dancers bodies every moment. There is no other real content.
Tales From the Dork Side
October 27
Bill Coleman’s The Other Story (titled until the last minute, Baryshnikov: The Other Story) is an amiable jaunt into the undistinguished past of Barry Shenkov, the greatest dancer in the world, a supposed defector who really grew up in Iowa as told - a little too importantly - by his mostly admiring younger brother Joe (Coleman).
As a piece, it really only works intermittently, but I like Coleman’s mind. The Baryshnikov business isn’t much more than a conceit; the core of the piece is Coleman’s quaint perception of hick Middle America. “Everyone from Iowa wants to defect,” remarks Joe, though he seems content enough where he is. “But Barry had the guts to do it.” A long drink of water, Joe’s mostly a good-natured dork. From time to time his body sweeps into a sudden, stiff-limbed extreme pose, erupts momentarily into a bundle of twitches and cries, strikes authoritative ballet positions - invasions perhaps of his brother's persona. The piece is spiked by brittle images of a cliched and legendary America: for a second, Joe is Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, the music slides from Appalachian Spring into The Big Country. Ballet positions drift into slouchy, ordinary movement (a passe becomes a saunter) or sharpen into the deft mime of tuning a radio, pumping gas, or slapping a mosquito that creates a nostalgic sense of place and time.
Brother Barry, played as a confident twerp by Mark Shaub, is the kind of guy who slips his pecker through the bottom of the popcorn box. But Joe remembers him with mixed affections as a towheaded kid of seven, dancing in a cornfield. “He looked so happy,” he says, “it made me feel lousy.”
Dancing in the Streets’s Grand Central Station spectacle was a huge success, though I doubt if late commuters struggling through the crush to find their trains on Friday night thought so.
Merce Cunningham’s company was splendid in a mainstage Event that mixed sections of many dances; the movement was commanding and elegant in the vast hall, though sheer distance made it seem unusually cool. Lucinda Childs’s Available Light seemed particularly introverted and repetitious, however sleek and beautiful the dancing. Philippe Petit, impeccable in white, didn’t go splat, but made an infinitely slow and very classy progress across a high wire, occasionally flinging laser-stars (by Science Faction) across the ceiling. I missed Paul Thompson and Troop Three downstairs near Track 40.
But Stephan Koplowitz’s 15-minute Fenstrations, performed by three-dozen dancers inside the glorious four-story arched windows (they’re double, with glass walkways within them) on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, was exhilarating, with groups of dancers appearing, vanishing, rushing across one window to - apparently - continue their flight across the next on another level. The dance was a thrilling example of a site-specific work, vividly lit in a richly colored palette by Tony Giovanetti. The audience went appropriately ape.
Elise Bernhardt, artistic director of Dancing in the Streets, and the hordes of people - technicians, bureaucrats, performers, patrons - who must have worked on this reasonably glitch-free project pulled off no small miracle.
Bill Coleman’s The Other Story (titled until the last minute, Baryshnikov: The Other Story) is an amiable jaunt into the undistinguished past of Barry Shenkov, the greatest dancer in the world, a supposed defector who really grew up in Iowa as told - a little too importantly - by his mostly admiring younger brother Joe (Coleman).
As a piece, it really only works intermittently, but I like Coleman’s mind. The Baryshnikov business isn’t much more than a conceit; the core of the piece is Coleman’s quaint perception of hick Middle America. “Everyone from Iowa wants to defect,” remarks Joe, though he seems content enough where he is. “But Barry had the guts to do it.” A long drink of water, Joe’s mostly a good-natured dork. From time to time his body sweeps into a sudden, stiff-limbed extreme pose, erupts momentarily into a bundle of twitches and cries, strikes authoritative ballet positions - invasions perhaps of his brother's persona. The piece is spiked by brittle images of a cliched and legendary America: for a second, Joe is Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, the music slides from Appalachian Spring into The Big Country. Ballet positions drift into slouchy, ordinary movement (a passe becomes a saunter) or sharpen into the deft mime of tuning a radio, pumping gas, or slapping a mosquito that creates a nostalgic sense of place and time.
Brother Barry, played as a confident twerp by Mark Shaub, is the kind of guy who slips his pecker through the bottom of the popcorn box. But Joe remembers him with mixed affections as a towheaded kid of seven, dancing in a cornfield. “He looked so happy,” he says, “it made me feel lousy.”
Dancing in the Streets’s Grand Central Station spectacle was a huge success, though I doubt if late commuters struggling through the crush to find their trains on Friday night thought so.
Merce Cunningham’s company was splendid in a mainstage Event that mixed sections of many dances; the movement was commanding and elegant in the vast hall, though sheer distance made it seem unusually cool. Lucinda Childs’s Available Light seemed particularly introverted and repetitious, however sleek and beautiful the dancing. Philippe Petit, impeccable in white, didn’t go splat, but made an infinitely slow and very classy progress across a high wire, occasionally flinging laser-stars (by Science Faction) across the ceiling. I missed Paul Thompson and Troop Three downstairs near Track 40.
But Stephan Koplowitz’s 15-minute Fenstrations, performed by three-dozen dancers inside the glorious four-story arched windows (they’re double, with glass walkways within them) on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, was exhilarating, with groups of dancers appearing, vanishing, rushing across one window to - apparently - continue their flight across the next on another level. The dance was a thrilling example of a site-specific work, vividly lit in a richly colored palette by Tony Giovanetti. The audience went appropriately ape.
Elise Bernhardt, artistic director of Dancing in the Streets, and the hordes of people - technicians, bureaucrats, performers, patrons - who must have worked on this reasonably glitch-free project pulled off no small miracle.
The Objective English Eye
February 24
Ballet Rambert had the misfortune of opening against Twyla Tharp in its first New York appearance since a weekend at Brooklyn College in 1982. For a company pretty much unknown here and performing at City Center, one of our largest dance theaters, that’s bad timing. Rambert’s Program B featured Christopher Bruce’s pallid but exquisitely danced Night With Waning Moon, for a crew of commedia dell-arte characters; and three ballets by the company’s artistic director, Richard Alston - Dutiful Ducks, Dangerous Liasons, and Java.
Alston’s pieces are spacious and velvety, and musical in a conventional sense. Though he uses space with Merce Cunningham’s kind of freedom, he avoids Cunningham’s out-of-the-blue shock tactics. And the dancing - essentially balletic - is smooth. It elides, glides through the constant little climactic positions that give ballet its brilliance. It, in fact, ignores them. Proper and well-behaved, the result is mellow, floaty, with no hard edges for the eye to snag on.
In Dangerous Liasons, which contrasts opposing small ensembles, Alston uses a tilting body as Cunnningham does, but the arms, which in Cunningham’s work thrust straight and hyperextend, retain the rich amplitude of ballet ports de bras. We hear plenty of scores as perilously rattling, crashing, thumping, bleeping as this one by Simon Waters, but rarely is the choreography so alert to the bangs and cracks and the shifting quality of its atmosphere, without dogging the music.
Despite the speed and stretch of the dancing, there’s no urgency - rather, it has a curious placidity. Something unemphatic in the delivery allows me to watch loosely, without committing myself to the work. The dancing looks as if its moments were unconnected, without implications for one another, moving frame by frame in a place where sequence doesn’t count. Alston lets me feel safe and detached in my observation; he demands my brain, but not my heart.
Alston didn’t particularly want to bring Java, his popular and delightfully wry piece to the Ink Spots, because it represents a phase that the company has already left behind. The piece is suave and sly, and the movement and gestures paint references to words and vocal eccentricities as explicitly as Monteverdi. It’s the one piece everybody seems to like even if they don’t care for the rest.
On Program A, Soda Lake, in which Mark Baldwin dances on a sage empty save for Nigel Hall’s two sculptural elements - a high, horizontal hoop floating off the end of a sharply angled pole, and a narrow, free-standing vertical post - is almost an essay in thoughtfulness. Alston lets me appreciate how Baldwin can be objective, as purely graphic as Hall’s minimal, linear sculptures that electrify the space. There’s genuine pictorial excitement in Baldwin’s ruler-straight arms cutting diagonally through the body’s arc in arabesque, even in the ordinary way his seated body sickles from head to thigh and the lower leg, like a handle, assertively angles in at the knee.
Soda Lake is a formal consideration of the relationships of a moving body and static objects, of a body with volume contrasting against bodies with virtually none. There’s an architectural drama in the way Baldwin composes his physique to echo the set pieces’ curve and line, and in the way his presence and distance from them compresses and attenuates the space. This is a vigorous, demanding solo, but what sticks in the mind are its motionless images. Taken as a whole, Program A seems to represent the company’s current direction - more abstraction, density, and surface emotion. But it puzzles me, because beneath the fuss seems to lie a queer emptiness.
In Alston’s urgent, tangled Zansa (1986), to music by Nigel Osborne that occasionally threatens to turn in to Rite of Spring, I’m struck by the way the 13 dancers hover over each other, clamp on, enfold, wrestle, interlock like pronged jacks. They start out in blue, but many of them wind up in yellow dashed with swipes of red and green. The changing backdrop is darkly dramatic, splotches with burning red; sometimes it’s bright with blobs of color, other times it may be ominous. Furious, suspiciously quiet, consoling, Zansa, by the end, leaves me feeling battered by an indiscriminate clutter of incidents.
The other two ballets on that program are also from 1986. Royal Ballet principal Ashley Page’s intricate nonstop Carmen Arcadiae, is much like the right side of its colorful set design (by Jack Smith). On the left is a jazzy but orderly design of stylized musical elements (staffs, notes, trumpets); on the right they tilt, spill, and jam together. Except the split backdrop is giddy and immensely good humored, and Page’s work hectic and irritable - it seems to have no innards. Michael Clark’s Swamp captivated me initially with the stealthy deliberateness of the movement, but gradually I came to experience it as almost purely atmospheric, a dance whose specific elements don’t much matter.
At City Center (February 3 to 8).
Ballet Rambert had the misfortune of opening against Twyla Tharp in its first New York appearance since a weekend at Brooklyn College in 1982. For a company pretty much unknown here and performing at City Center, one of our largest dance theaters, that’s bad timing. Rambert’s Program B featured Christopher Bruce’s pallid but exquisitely danced Night With Waning Moon, for a crew of commedia dell-arte characters; and three ballets by the company’s artistic director, Richard Alston - Dutiful Ducks, Dangerous Liasons, and Java.
Alston’s pieces are spacious and velvety, and musical in a conventional sense. Though he uses space with Merce Cunningham’s kind of freedom, he avoids Cunningham’s out-of-the-blue shock tactics. And the dancing - essentially balletic - is smooth. It elides, glides through the constant little climactic positions that give ballet its brilliance. It, in fact, ignores them. Proper and well-behaved, the result is mellow, floaty, with no hard edges for the eye to snag on.
In Dangerous Liasons, which contrasts opposing small ensembles, Alston uses a tilting body as Cunnningham does, but the arms, which in Cunningham’s work thrust straight and hyperextend, retain the rich amplitude of ballet ports de bras. We hear plenty of scores as perilously rattling, crashing, thumping, bleeping as this one by Simon Waters, but rarely is the choreography so alert to the bangs and cracks and the shifting quality of its atmosphere, without dogging the music.
Despite the speed and stretch of the dancing, there’s no urgency - rather, it has a curious placidity. Something unemphatic in the delivery allows me to watch loosely, without committing myself to the work. The dancing looks as if its moments were unconnected, without implications for one another, moving frame by frame in a place where sequence doesn’t count. Alston lets me feel safe and detached in my observation; he demands my brain, but not my heart.
Alston didn’t particularly want to bring Java, his popular and delightfully wry piece to the Ink Spots, because it represents a phase that the company has already left behind. The piece is suave and sly, and the movement and gestures paint references to words and vocal eccentricities as explicitly as Monteverdi. It’s the one piece everybody seems to like even if they don’t care for the rest.
On Program A, Soda Lake, in which Mark Baldwin dances on a sage empty save for Nigel Hall’s two sculptural elements - a high, horizontal hoop floating off the end of a sharply angled pole, and a narrow, free-standing vertical post - is almost an essay in thoughtfulness. Alston lets me appreciate how Baldwin can be objective, as purely graphic as Hall’s minimal, linear sculptures that electrify the space. There’s genuine pictorial excitement in Baldwin’s ruler-straight arms cutting diagonally through the body’s arc in arabesque, even in the ordinary way his seated body sickles from head to thigh and the lower leg, like a handle, assertively angles in at the knee.
Soda Lake is a formal consideration of the relationships of a moving body and static objects, of a body with volume contrasting against bodies with virtually none. There’s an architectural drama in the way Baldwin composes his physique to echo the set pieces’ curve and line, and in the way his presence and distance from them compresses and attenuates the space. This is a vigorous, demanding solo, but what sticks in the mind are its motionless images. Taken as a whole, Program A seems to represent the company’s current direction - more abstraction, density, and surface emotion. But it puzzles me, because beneath the fuss seems to lie a queer emptiness.
In Alston’s urgent, tangled Zansa (1986), to music by Nigel Osborne that occasionally threatens to turn in to Rite of Spring, I’m struck by the way the 13 dancers hover over each other, clamp on, enfold, wrestle, interlock like pronged jacks. They start out in blue, but many of them wind up in yellow dashed with swipes of red and green. The changing backdrop is darkly dramatic, splotches with burning red; sometimes it’s bright with blobs of color, other times it may be ominous. Furious, suspiciously quiet, consoling, Zansa, by the end, leaves me feeling battered by an indiscriminate clutter of incidents.
The other two ballets on that program are also from 1986. Royal Ballet principal Ashley Page’s intricate nonstop Carmen Arcadiae, is much like the right side of its colorful set design (by Jack Smith). On the left is a jazzy but orderly design of stylized musical elements (staffs, notes, trumpets); on the right they tilt, spill, and jam together. Except the split backdrop is giddy and immensely good humored, and Page’s work hectic and irritable - it seems to have no innards. Michael Clark’s Swamp captivated me initially with the stealthy deliberateness of the movement, but gradually I came to experience it as almost purely atmospheric, a dance whose specific elements don’t much matter.
At City Center (February 3 to 8).
Toe Jam
July 7
Funny Feet, Bob Bowyer’s revue, composed of 13 dance pastiches, is very broad. A couple of items are pretty great - notably “The Buttercups” and the mammoth finale, “The Big Ballet in the Sky” - and some develop amusing ideas, but about half are unforgivably crude coarse and lazy. They’re dance skits for people who never see dancing. Nothing is subtle or particularly detailed, and it’s a given that the characters are hopelessly stupid. The audience is entirely delighted with this.
Takeoffs of an acrobatic adagio team, a bearded Russian folk quartet, a ruffle-trampling Spanish duo, and tension-bound trio performed a dance of modern angst that the Trocks, or Charles Ludlam, for example, would have made brilliant through observation and sheer love of the real thing, are handled by Bowyer in a ham-fisted way. I recall fondly how excruciatingly close to the mark Olga Plushinskaya’s Graham and Duncan rip-offs were. Bowyer’s are nearer to the comedy on Hee Haw.
The problem with most of these pieces is that the dancing just isn’t interesting, and there are few dance ideas. There are only the kind of steps that anyone can recognize as “dancing,” and the kind of intentionally klutzy moves that anyone can tell are inappropriate - like falling on your behind or posing with your butt in the air and a big, dumb grin. This is some of the better stuff.
In “The Black Cockroach Pas de Deux,” M. and Mlle. Roach (an extra pair of legs stick out of their waists) intimidate a New Yorker. But it’s only the idea of a cockroach duet that’s funny, until Natasha Roach pleads, with desperate tendus, for a Dorito, and the man threatens to whack her with a slipper when she becomes too importunate. Raid or D-Con produces the dances’ sudden tragic end. In “Baby Bobby’s Backyard,” a mauve butterfly emerges from the fuzzy body of a giant caterpillar. Bobby (Bowyer in shorts and pinwheel hat) adores her, dad wants to swat her, mom brings a bottle and a giant pin to add the creature to her collection. The butterfly’s trembling point work is at least pertinent.
“Duet for Mating Organisms” is a clever sort of Eijko and Koma imitation for two pink creatures whose feet quiver at each other from opposite wings. The feet are clearly their expressive and sensitive organs, and when I and II get together they artfully wrap their legs into decorative and evidently titillating designs, and eventually achieve the ultimate satisfaction. As they roll offstage entwines, a pink doll pops from between them.
There’s hardly a bit of dancing in Bowyer’s absolutely charming “The Buttercups,” in which three glittering lady flowers in curly blonde wigs, green leaf mittens and green sequined stems,enjoy their day. It’s very much like the lovely old Paper Bag Players skit, “The Big Red Day,” and has wonderful costumes by Lindsay W. Davis (who provided imaginative designs for the entire show). The sun appears, like a great gleaming starfish, and the ladies put on their shades. A roly-poly cloud tour jetes around shaking tinsel rain; there’s a rainbow, and a fat bee wiggles up against and kisses the flowers. A crescent moon of cheese turns up, and hangs out the stars. A corpse is laid out for the opening of “The Big Ballet in the Sky,” a giddily blasphemous DeMille-scale climx. (Even vs. Mel Brooks, Bowyer would be a definite contender in the chutzpah competition. This is meant as a compliment.)
Ruffly angels unzip a dancer’s soul from its earthly envelope and transport her to St. Peter, who gives her the once-over. Out of a wing, the giant finger of a fabulous, huge hand beckons her, and fondles her with spiritual ardor. With a flutter of fabric flame, the devil appears to claim the Dear Departed in a tug of war with the hand. The hand whooshes across the stage to whomp the devil; its size is thrilling on the Lamb’s modest stage. The new recruit is assigned to the heavenly choir (each dancer/angel is flanked by a pair of life-size puppets), but she’s discontent. In flimsy disguise, the devil woos her again, announcing a party downstairs, but she spots his horns when his party hat slips. With a metaphorical snap of his fingers, the Almighty relieves her of vocal duties and provides a snap-on tutu so she can be dead happily ever after.
At the Lamb’s Theater.
In Flying, Falling and Standing Still, a fanciful project conceived for schoolchildren and senior citizens, Multigravitational Aerodance Group and storyteller Posy Gering devised a joint piece on the origins of the world, built mostly on Aztec and Mesopotamian creation myths, as well as stories by students at P.S. 19 explaining how come things are as they are - like “Why Bats Have Wings.” They were fat rats who went on diets.
In a tale of creatures born in the abyss (from “Gilgamesh”), the dancers, completely covered up, creep and bounce suspended in an elastic, hammock-like tube stretched from wing to wing. In the Eskimo legend, Sedna, a dancer “swims” down to the bottom of the sea through the gaps in a couple of flexible, suspended ladders to comb the hair of the irascible girl (so bratty her brothers had thrown her from their boat) who is ruining their fishing. In the Aztec tale of “The Second World,” rivalrous twin brothers make perfect creatures and lumpy, defective ones while the dancers clown grotesquely, dangling on ropes. In “The Third World,” the hapless new people come down from the sky, can’t find their way home and turn into clouds. Gering - a handsome, gleaming woman with a great smile and a fine sense of irony - tears a rude human figure out of newspaper in “The Hungry Woman.” She rips a hole for the mouth. But, says Gering, she had mouths all over her body - tearing more holes in the knees, the shoulders - and chatters her teeth in the empty spaces. She tells the story of Pandora’s box with a vivid gestural wit, with sympathy and malicious glee.
The movement sections illustrate visual aspects of the stories in interludes that give these tasty tales a reflective dimension without diluting their verbal force. The mid-air dances only need to vary and amplify one idea or action; primacy is given to the spoken text. The format works. Both these shows are designed for naive audiences. Flying, Falling has a pungent, poetic quality because it addresses and excites its audience’s imagination. Funny Feet, despite several excellent skits, is designed for the folks that watch Star Search and whose brains are presumed to have atrophied.
Funny Feet, Bob Bowyer’s revue, composed of 13 dance pastiches, is very broad. A couple of items are pretty great - notably “The Buttercups” and the mammoth finale, “The Big Ballet in the Sky” - and some develop amusing ideas, but about half are unforgivably crude coarse and lazy. They’re dance skits for people who never see dancing. Nothing is subtle or particularly detailed, and it’s a given that the characters are hopelessly stupid. The audience is entirely delighted with this.
Takeoffs of an acrobatic adagio team, a bearded Russian folk quartet, a ruffle-trampling Spanish duo, and tension-bound trio performed a dance of modern angst that the Trocks, or Charles Ludlam, for example, would have made brilliant through observation and sheer love of the real thing, are handled by Bowyer in a ham-fisted way. I recall fondly how excruciatingly close to the mark Olga Plushinskaya’s Graham and Duncan rip-offs were. Bowyer’s are nearer to the comedy on Hee Haw.
The problem with most of these pieces is that the dancing just isn’t interesting, and there are few dance ideas. There are only the kind of steps that anyone can recognize as “dancing,” and the kind of intentionally klutzy moves that anyone can tell are inappropriate - like falling on your behind or posing with your butt in the air and a big, dumb grin. This is some of the better stuff.
In “The Black Cockroach Pas de Deux,” M. and Mlle. Roach (an extra pair of legs stick out of their waists) intimidate a New Yorker. But it’s only the idea of a cockroach duet that’s funny, until Natasha Roach pleads, with desperate tendus, for a Dorito, and the man threatens to whack her with a slipper when she becomes too importunate. Raid or D-Con produces the dances’ sudden tragic end. In “Baby Bobby’s Backyard,” a mauve butterfly emerges from the fuzzy body of a giant caterpillar. Bobby (Bowyer in shorts and pinwheel hat) adores her, dad wants to swat her, mom brings a bottle and a giant pin to add the creature to her collection. The butterfly’s trembling point work is at least pertinent.
“Duet for Mating Organisms” is a clever sort of Eijko and Koma imitation for two pink creatures whose feet quiver at each other from opposite wings. The feet are clearly their expressive and sensitive organs, and when I and II get together they artfully wrap their legs into decorative and evidently titillating designs, and eventually achieve the ultimate satisfaction. As they roll offstage entwines, a pink doll pops from between them.
There’s hardly a bit of dancing in Bowyer’s absolutely charming “The Buttercups,” in which three glittering lady flowers in curly blonde wigs, green leaf mittens and green sequined stems,enjoy their day. It’s very much like the lovely old Paper Bag Players skit, “The Big Red Day,” and has wonderful costumes by Lindsay W. Davis (who provided imaginative designs for the entire show). The sun appears, like a great gleaming starfish, and the ladies put on their shades. A roly-poly cloud tour jetes around shaking tinsel rain; there’s a rainbow, and a fat bee wiggles up against and kisses the flowers. A crescent moon of cheese turns up, and hangs out the stars. A corpse is laid out for the opening of “The Big Ballet in the Sky,” a giddily blasphemous DeMille-scale climx. (Even vs. Mel Brooks, Bowyer would be a definite contender in the chutzpah competition. This is meant as a compliment.)
Ruffly angels unzip a dancer’s soul from its earthly envelope and transport her to St. Peter, who gives her the once-over. Out of a wing, the giant finger of a fabulous, huge hand beckons her, and fondles her with spiritual ardor. With a flutter of fabric flame, the devil appears to claim the Dear Departed in a tug of war with the hand. The hand whooshes across the stage to whomp the devil; its size is thrilling on the Lamb’s modest stage. The new recruit is assigned to the heavenly choir (each dancer/angel is flanked by a pair of life-size puppets), but she’s discontent. In flimsy disguise, the devil woos her again, announcing a party downstairs, but she spots his horns when his party hat slips. With a metaphorical snap of his fingers, the Almighty relieves her of vocal duties and provides a snap-on tutu so she can be dead happily ever after.
At the Lamb’s Theater.
In Flying, Falling and Standing Still, a fanciful project conceived for schoolchildren and senior citizens, Multigravitational Aerodance Group and storyteller Posy Gering devised a joint piece on the origins of the world, built mostly on Aztec and Mesopotamian creation myths, as well as stories by students at P.S. 19 explaining how come things are as they are - like “Why Bats Have Wings.” They were fat rats who went on diets.
In a tale of creatures born in the abyss (from “Gilgamesh”), the dancers, completely covered up, creep and bounce suspended in an elastic, hammock-like tube stretched from wing to wing. In the Eskimo legend, Sedna, a dancer “swims” down to the bottom of the sea through the gaps in a couple of flexible, suspended ladders to comb the hair of the irascible girl (so bratty her brothers had thrown her from their boat) who is ruining their fishing. In the Aztec tale of “The Second World,” rivalrous twin brothers make perfect creatures and lumpy, defective ones while the dancers clown grotesquely, dangling on ropes. In “The Third World,” the hapless new people come down from the sky, can’t find their way home and turn into clouds. Gering - a handsome, gleaming woman with a great smile and a fine sense of irony - tears a rude human figure out of newspaper in “The Hungry Woman.” She rips a hole for the mouth. But, says Gering, she had mouths all over her body - tearing more holes in the knees, the shoulders - and chatters her teeth in the empty spaces. She tells the story of Pandora’s box with a vivid gestural wit, with sympathy and malicious glee.
The movement sections illustrate visual aspects of the stories in interludes that give these tasty tales a reflective dimension without diluting their verbal force. The mid-air dances only need to vary and amplify one idea or action; primacy is given to the spoken text. The format works. Both these shows are designed for naive audiences. Flying, Falling has a pungent, poetic quality because it addresses and excites its audience’s imagination. Funny Feet, despite several excellent skits, is designed for the folks that watch Star Search and whose brains are presumed to have atrophied.
Voyage to the End of the Night
October 12
Accordion tangos greet the audience for Natsu Nakajima’s Niwa - the Garden at the Asia Society. “I feel romantic already,” remarks a woman nearby. Nostalgic, but stirring, the tangos introduce an exhilarating fatal atmosphere that’s weirdly appropriate. Images of reeds and other plants are projected on a tent-like fabric cube that floats in midair over the audience.
Onstage, a ghostly lady (Natsu Nakajima) with ashen skin, carrying a dried bouquet, seems to hover, wavering in dim light. Wearing a dated dress of starchy gauze, dyed indigo and beige, with a bustle and long, tight sleeves, Nakajima moves diagonally forward with tenuous, uncertain steps. Slender gleaming ornaments dangle around her face and a stiff, tufted spike of hair stands upright from the back of her head. She suddenly offers the bouquet heavenward in a glaring downspot, then slowly puts it down. Her eyes blink and blink as if seeing were a near impossible feat; her hands vaguely gather and draw in toward her chest. In a scene recalling Nakajima’s wartime evacuation from Sakhalin as a baby, a ship’s horn blasts. Yuriko Maezawa (who has been working with Nakajima for a decade), wrapped in a cloak, with a baggage tag in her hair looks blank, innocent. She stoops or crouches, hobbles, creeps, glides rapidly around the floor in a squat. She gazes blindly, showing only the whites of her half-open eyes. Alternately sleepy, grumpy, vaguely smiling, bouncy, quiet, wretched, she seems like a vehicle for emotions that pass through her in an unfocused way, unfiltered through any personality.
Episodic structure and unconcern for Western ideas and traditions of sequence and composition often give Butoh works a disconcerting amorphic and arbitrary quality. The characteristic sudden emotional shifts, the apparent lack of causality and absence of motivation, add to the sense of internal chaos. A piece on a grandly theatrical scale may seem like an astonishing carnival freak show erected on psychic quicksand. On a more intimate scale, someone like Kazuo Ohno, for example, must be taken partly on trust - or written off as a dotty old man - because the alogical form of his performances doesn’t make a bit of sense to the observer.
The drama of Butoh is frequently unfathomable, amenable to almost any interpretation - so fragile and indirect is the relationship between the inner experience of the performer and the resultant action or stasis. Yet we can feel the evident truth of some of these performances. Nakajima’s Niwa seems particularly personal and moving. As it proceeds, Niwa gradually becomes a strange, semi-conscious voyage to reconcile and reintegrate the remnant images of the past - to call them awake and subject oneself anew to their power. Eyes nearly closed, Nakajima, sitting in a dress of thin, stiffish cotton and a gilt court hat, insinuates her arms through a delicate ceremonial of curving, flickering, wafting, patting gestures that has a dreamy sweetness.
Unlike most Butoh artists, who tend to use music for atmosphere and operatic effect, Nakajima is a musical performer. She hears music, and her body responds to it in subtle and detailed ways. Nakajima and Maezawa - right behind and up against her - step painfully across the stage, arms reaching, mouths half gaping. Maezawa climbs out of a huge round basket in a red and yellow kimono with floor-length sleeves. She grins, makes chomping, skull-like faces. Turned away from us, she opens the kimono wide and sails around the stage, grim and laughing. Nakajima, wearing a rice-paper shawl and a conical paper bonnet, is bent and motionless. She chooses one of several palm-sized stones, stacks and arranges them, taps them together, and listens. Coming erect, she walks with certain elegance, then sways, as if overwhelmed by spirit forces. Becoming haggard, vulnerable, weakened, uncomprehending, stupefied, she wavers, sags, trembles. Her throat seems parched. Aimless, she cringes, drifting like a jellyfish or a soul in limbo. In a yellow ochre robe and a sort of Belle Epoque wig, she stands, then slowly sinks, with her head bowed. She is depleted, but not defeated.
(Butoh performers don’t seem defeated even in a state of utter misery when no shred of humanity clings to them. Absolute bottom doesn’t exit. Things can never get so bad that they can’t get worse or more degrading, humiliating, ridiculous, terrifying. But there is not enough “I” to suffer and know defeat.)
She tilts her head sideways and munches a few grains of something. The music chimes and shimmers as she huddles, then stands, pensively. The music soars with Wagnerian harmonies and a soprano voice bursts into one of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne. The music catches up Nakajima’s patient spirit, like a withered leaf, and sets it loose.
At Asia Society (September 29 and 30).
Accordion tangos greet the audience for Natsu Nakajima’s Niwa - the Garden at the Asia Society. “I feel romantic already,” remarks a woman nearby. Nostalgic, but stirring, the tangos introduce an exhilarating fatal atmosphere that’s weirdly appropriate. Images of reeds and other plants are projected on a tent-like fabric cube that floats in midair over the audience.
Onstage, a ghostly lady (Natsu Nakajima) with ashen skin, carrying a dried bouquet, seems to hover, wavering in dim light. Wearing a dated dress of starchy gauze, dyed indigo and beige, with a bustle and long, tight sleeves, Nakajima moves diagonally forward with tenuous, uncertain steps. Slender gleaming ornaments dangle around her face and a stiff, tufted spike of hair stands upright from the back of her head. She suddenly offers the bouquet heavenward in a glaring downspot, then slowly puts it down. Her eyes blink and blink as if seeing were a near impossible feat; her hands vaguely gather and draw in toward her chest. In a scene recalling Nakajima’s wartime evacuation from Sakhalin as a baby, a ship’s horn blasts. Yuriko Maezawa (who has been working with Nakajima for a decade), wrapped in a cloak, with a baggage tag in her hair looks blank, innocent. She stoops or crouches, hobbles, creeps, glides rapidly around the floor in a squat. She gazes blindly, showing only the whites of her half-open eyes. Alternately sleepy, grumpy, vaguely smiling, bouncy, quiet, wretched, she seems like a vehicle for emotions that pass through her in an unfocused way, unfiltered through any personality.
Episodic structure and unconcern for Western ideas and traditions of sequence and composition often give Butoh works a disconcerting amorphic and arbitrary quality. The characteristic sudden emotional shifts, the apparent lack of causality and absence of motivation, add to the sense of internal chaos. A piece on a grandly theatrical scale may seem like an astonishing carnival freak show erected on psychic quicksand. On a more intimate scale, someone like Kazuo Ohno, for example, must be taken partly on trust - or written off as a dotty old man - because the alogical form of his performances doesn’t make a bit of sense to the observer.
The drama of Butoh is frequently unfathomable, amenable to almost any interpretation - so fragile and indirect is the relationship between the inner experience of the performer and the resultant action or stasis. Yet we can feel the evident truth of some of these performances. Nakajima’s Niwa seems particularly personal and moving. As it proceeds, Niwa gradually becomes a strange, semi-conscious voyage to reconcile and reintegrate the remnant images of the past - to call them awake and subject oneself anew to their power. Eyes nearly closed, Nakajima, sitting in a dress of thin, stiffish cotton and a gilt court hat, insinuates her arms through a delicate ceremonial of curving, flickering, wafting, patting gestures that has a dreamy sweetness.
Unlike most Butoh artists, who tend to use music for atmosphere and operatic effect, Nakajima is a musical performer. She hears music, and her body responds to it in subtle and detailed ways. Nakajima and Maezawa - right behind and up against her - step painfully across the stage, arms reaching, mouths half gaping. Maezawa climbs out of a huge round basket in a red and yellow kimono with floor-length sleeves. She grins, makes chomping, skull-like faces. Turned away from us, she opens the kimono wide and sails around the stage, grim and laughing. Nakajima, wearing a rice-paper shawl and a conical paper bonnet, is bent and motionless. She chooses one of several palm-sized stones, stacks and arranges them, taps them together, and listens. Coming erect, she walks with certain elegance, then sways, as if overwhelmed by spirit forces. Becoming haggard, vulnerable, weakened, uncomprehending, stupefied, she wavers, sags, trembles. Her throat seems parched. Aimless, she cringes, drifting like a jellyfish or a soul in limbo. In a yellow ochre robe and a sort of Belle Epoque wig, she stands, then slowly sinks, with her head bowed. She is depleted, but not defeated.
(Butoh performers don’t seem defeated even in a state of utter misery when no shred of humanity clings to them. Absolute bottom doesn’t exit. Things can never get so bad that they can’t get worse or more degrading, humiliating, ridiculous, terrifying. But there is not enough “I” to suffer and know defeat.)
She tilts her head sideways and munches a few grains of something. The music chimes and shimmers as she huddles, then stands, pensively. The music soars with Wagnerian harmonies and a soprano voice bursts into one of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne. The music catches up Nakajima’s patient spirit, like a withered leaf, and sets it loose.
At Asia Society (September 29 and 30).