1987 Continued
Rights of the Inorganic
January 20
I recalled Marta Renzi’s On Looking Through a Book of Indian Miniatures as a wry, poker-faced catalogue of sexual positions from the Kama Sutra. But I’d forgotten its understated tenderness, the pertness of its quasi-Indian steps and gestures and bent-legged poses, and the meditative atmosphere created by Daniel Wolff’s twice-repeated love poem, which never speaks of love but of brilliant colors, discarded clothing, transformations of vision, and of the world suddenly crashing in. The piece starts with a series of blackout images of reasonably arcane sexual poses, proceeds to the delicate physical conversation of courtship, and concludes in a sweet, two-dimensional crescendo of coolly extravagant bodily configurations. Matthew Cazier and Marta Miller dance with an elegant precision and sensitivity, letting a sense of absolute union come through - as if they unquestionably always were, always will be, a couple. Swaying together, with his hands cupping her breasts, they have no history beyond this extended moment. The recorded recitations of the poem - first by Wolff, later by Renzi - with their differences of tone and modesty and weight - broaden that mutuality.
Renzi danced I’m Not Very Pretty, a solo excerpt of exceptional power taken from last year’s evening-length Soft Sell. In an orange halter and shorts, like a pea-brained Petty girl or Superbimbo, Renzi’s brilliant caricature gaily excoriates male fantasies of the woman-child who is nothing but a giggling sexual toy. Renzi teasingly draws circles over her nipple, pats herself, sucks her thumb, and cavorts ecstatically, uttering rhythmic and melodic exclamations of nitwit joy. She is suddenly sobered in the second part, accompanied by a wise, taped dialogue about a woman’s feeling of not being really attractive. “I love the way you look,” says the man’s voice earnestly. “Yes...but you were years too late, replies the woman, who clearly believes him but can never be convinced in her deepest being that she’s better than adequate.
There’s a rustic bluffness and sociability to the dancing in Caravan, a New York premiere set to songs by Van Morrison The five dancers (Cal Grogan, Hetty King, Miller, Cazier, Renzi) stroll, sashay, skip, twirl with a breezy languor, pulling each other under the group’s looping arms. Couples embrace. There’s a kind of agreeable restraint in the movement, a lack of forcing or urgency - comfortable sense that we’ll all get there when we get there. It’s not laziness, it’s a kind of easy enjoyment of the present moment There’s a similar frankness in Renzi’s old In the Dark, too, and a confidence that dancers don’t need to pull out all the stops all the time to dance admirably (Chisa Hidaka was particularly lovely in it.)
Renzi has greatly revised and tightened The Marriage Between Zones, set to splendid, eager, blurting music by Leroy Pickett played live by an eight-person band), and an elaborate set by Robert Taplin. The pice has something of the feel of a carnival or traveling circus. I enjoyed the chunkiness, the bunchy assertiveness of the movement for the two rival four-person groups - one in black, the other in gray - though they didn’t seem very different in what they represented. Taplin’s elaborate set of movable elements - primarily, a red stretcher, a chrome ladder, several slim silver structures that stand like calipers on their points, two large, blue circles backed by arching metal struts that become the huge wheels of the cart that’s assembled for the triumphal finish - is well-proportioned for the Joyce stage and used to break up and redefine the space in vivid, incidental ways. Individual dancers lie or sit or slide on the blue circles or the red stretcher, are framed by the circles or disappear behind them when they’re balanced on edge and swiveled like revolving doors. Belligerence, decorousness, and a sense of impermanence combine in the temper of the piece. Gradually, as the groups engage each other and mass more frequently, and the blue circles are manipulated more vigorously, Marriage begins to compress. Its elements are marshaled into a pattern of ritual action that culminates in the act of construction. I’m rarely comfortable when performers are serving the needs of objects to be lifted and turned and moved and generally attended to. I can’t quite grant equal rights to the inorganic. But the challenge to the gray and the black groups is to fit together rather than to win, and the visual elements seem to be crucial.
Joyce Theater (January 6 and 11).
I recalled Marta Renzi’s On Looking Through a Book of Indian Miniatures as a wry, poker-faced catalogue of sexual positions from the Kama Sutra. But I’d forgotten its understated tenderness, the pertness of its quasi-Indian steps and gestures and bent-legged poses, and the meditative atmosphere created by Daniel Wolff’s twice-repeated love poem, which never speaks of love but of brilliant colors, discarded clothing, transformations of vision, and of the world suddenly crashing in. The piece starts with a series of blackout images of reasonably arcane sexual poses, proceeds to the delicate physical conversation of courtship, and concludes in a sweet, two-dimensional crescendo of coolly extravagant bodily configurations. Matthew Cazier and Marta Miller dance with an elegant precision and sensitivity, letting a sense of absolute union come through - as if they unquestionably always were, always will be, a couple. Swaying together, with his hands cupping her breasts, they have no history beyond this extended moment. The recorded recitations of the poem - first by Wolff, later by Renzi - with their differences of tone and modesty and weight - broaden that mutuality.
Renzi danced I’m Not Very Pretty, a solo excerpt of exceptional power taken from last year’s evening-length Soft Sell. In an orange halter and shorts, like a pea-brained Petty girl or Superbimbo, Renzi’s brilliant caricature gaily excoriates male fantasies of the woman-child who is nothing but a giggling sexual toy. Renzi teasingly draws circles over her nipple, pats herself, sucks her thumb, and cavorts ecstatically, uttering rhythmic and melodic exclamations of nitwit joy. She is suddenly sobered in the second part, accompanied by a wise, taped dialogue about a woman’s feeling of not being really attractive. “I love the way you look,” says the man’s voice earnestly. “Yes...but you were years too late, replies the woman, who clearly believes him but can never be convinced in her deepest being that she’s better than adequate.
There’s a rustic bluffness and sociability to the dancing in Caravan, a New York premiere set to songs by Van Morrison The five dancers (Cal Grogan, Hetty King, Miller, Cazier, Renzi) stroll, sashay, skip, twirl with a breezy languor, pulling each other under the group’s looping arms. Couples embrace. There’s a kind of agreeable restraint in the movement, a lack of forcing or urgency - comfortable sense that we’ll all get there when we get there. It’s not laziness, it’s a kind of easy enjoyment of the present moment There’s a similar frankness in Renzi’s old In the Dark, too, and a confidence that dancers don’t need to pull out all the stops all the time to dance admirably (Chisa Hidaka was particularly lovely in it.)
Renzi has greatly revised and tightened The Marriage Between Zones, set to splendid, eager, blurting music by Leroy Pickett played live by an eight-person band), and an elaborate set by Robert Taplin. The pice has something of the feel of a carnival or traveling circus. I enjoyed the chunkiness, the bunchy assertiveness of the movement for the two rival four-person groups - one in black, the other in gray - though they didn’t seem very different in what they represented. Taplin’s elaborate set of movable elements - primarily, a red stretcher, a chrome ladder, several slim silver structures that stand like calipers on their points, two large, blue circles backed by arching metal struts that become the huge wheels of the cart that’s assembled for the triumphal finish - is well-proportioned for the Joyce stage and used to break up and redefine the space in vivid, incidental ways. Individual dancers lie or sit or slide on the blue circles or the red stretcher, are framed by the circles or disappear behind them when they’re balanced on edge and swiveled like revolving doors. Belligerence, decorousness, and a sense of impermanence combine in the temper of the piece. Gradually, as the groups engage each other and mass more frequently, and the blue circles are manipulated more vigorously, Marriage begins to compress. Its elements are marshaled into a pattern of ritual action that culminates in the act of construction. I’m rarely comfortable when performers are serving the needs of objects to be lifted and turned and moved and generally attended to. I can’t quite grant equal rights to the inorganic. But the challenge to the gray and the black groups is to fit together rather than to win, and the visual elements seem to be crucial.
Joyce Theater (January 6 and 11).
A Graceful Recycling
March 24
I liked the cleanness, the gentleness, gentility...the lilt and bite of Daniel McCusker’s two dances, Story and Vantage Points, presented by the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s. McCusker, who danced with Lucinda Childs between 1977 and 1984, became director of Portland, Maine’s Ram Island Dance Company in 1985. It seems a good marriage. In McCusker’s pieces, the dancing is pure, yet it hasn’t been scoured into abstraction. It’s not particularly emotional, yet emotion’s not banished. It remains human, about people as much as about pattern and music.
McCusker’s own performing is polished, beautifully calibrated, almost weightless. In comparison to the other Ram Island dancers - Betsy Beaven, Brian Crabtree, Emily Ojala, Joan Proudman, Rebecca Reinhart, Larry Lee Van Horne, Sara Whale - it sometimes seems too tight, too highly refined. McCusker cuts through the space. He has the definition, the sense of physical outline, to dance in a phone booth if he has to. On the whole, the other dancers are looser, seem to assume more space as their natural allotment. Their expansiveness gives an airy fullness to his lyric choreographic impulses. In the three-part Story, naturally there’s no story, but there is an exploration of warm and flexible relationships within an undefined but comfortably conventional social entity. There’s nothing narrow in its feeling; rather it swings with an inherent freedom, attuned to David Munson’s effervescent music (scored as waltz, tarantella and jig).
The formal clarity and visual balance of McCusker’s designs in space are alleviated by the long, relaxed rhythms, the rise-and-fall energies of the piece overall, by the lack of pressure. McCusker recycles his dance material so gracefully that even the obvious thematic repetitions - like the quiet back rolls that open the dance - are as soothing and restorative as familiar choruses. Like touching base, coming home. Placid duets, almost singable phrases, are interrupted by poses that don’t seem abrupt or frozen, don’t have the delicate brittleness of an extraordinary balance, but evoke an instantaneous nostalgia that sustains the previous few moments beyond themselves. Pose is perhaps the wrong word - what happens is more provisional. The dancers pause with a wide-open expectancy, like the unsuspicious but natural wariness of small birds. In Vantage Points, to music written for it by David Friedman, we can barely see the dancers at first in a shaft of dim yellow light; then they double in number as the light grows.
The stage is divided into quadrants: in each, couples help each other on and off with jackets, the helpers ending either seated or extending the helping-on motion beyond the partner’s body. As performed originally in the galleries of the Portland Museum of Art, the four spaces of Vantage Points were separate from each other, and audience members had to choose what they would watch - hence, the title. Happily, at St. Mark’s, no such choices had to be made. The dance is full of twistings, foldings, crossings. In seven main sections, in sometimes simultaneous scenes, the dancers entwine, impinge, bend, step over and over each other, curl up, hang on each other in vigorous but companionable ways. Their bodies gently brace against the air. There’s sometimes a rather Spanish flair in the pulled-up bodies, tossed-back heads.
McCusker rolls in a slow, skewed-over-one-shoulder somersault, steps into a small ring made by his partner’s arms, and pulls his body through. Then he jumps, dives over her, holds her. Most vivid to me as an image of the buoyant elegance of Van Horne. With his foot extended in tendu, his arms wide open, he’s stretched so strong and easy, almost becoming insubstantial at the fingertips and toes. There’s no novelty in this, but an inestimable freshness. I hold McCusker responsible.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (March 6 to 8).
I liked the cleanness, the gentleness, gentility...the lilt and bite of Daniel McCusker’s two dances, Story and Vantage Points, presented by the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s. McCusker, who danced with Lucinda Childs between 1977 and 1984, became director of Portland, Maine’s Ram Island Dance Company in 1985. It seems a good marriage. In McCusker’s pieces, the dancing is pure, yet it hasn’t been scoured into abstraction. It’s not particularly emotional, yet emotion’s not banished. It remains human, about people as much as about pattern and music.
McCusker’s own performing is polished, beautifully calibrated, almost weightless. In comparison to the other Ram Island dancers - Betsy Beaven, Brian Crabtree, Emily Ojala, Joan Proudman, Rebecca Reinhart, Larry Lee Van Horne, Sara Whale - it sometimes seems too tight, too highly refined. McCusker cuts through the space. He has the definition, the sense of physical outline, to dance in a phone booth if he has to. On the whole, the other dancers are looser, seem to assume more space as their natural allotment. Their expansiveness gives an airy fullness to his lyric choreographic impulses. In the three-part Story, naturally there’s no story, but there is an exploration of warm and flexible relationships within an undefined but comfortably conventional social entity. There’s nothing narrow in its feeling; rather it swings with an inherent freedom, attuned to David Munson’s effervescent music (scored as waltz, tarantella and jig).
The formal clarity and visual balance of McCusker’s designs in space are alleviated by the long, relaxed rhythms, the rise-and-fall energies of the piece overall, by the lack of pressure. McCusker recycles his dance material so gracefully that even the obvious thematic repetitions - like the quiet back rolls that open the dance - are as soothing and restorative as familiar choruses. Like touching base, coming home. Placid duets, almost singable phrases, are interrupted by poses that don’t seem abrupt or frozen, don’t have the delicate brittleness of an extraordinary balance, but evoke an instantaneous nostalgia that sustains the previous few moments beyond themselves. Pose is perhaps the wrong word - what happens is more provisional. The dancers pause with a wide-open expectancy, like the unsuspicious but natural wariness of small birds. In Vantage Points, to music written for it by David Friedman, we can barely see the dancers at first in a shaft of dim yellow light; then they double in number as the light grows.
The stage is divided into quadrants: in each, couples help each other on and off with jackets, the helpers ending either seated or extending the helping-on motion beyond the partner’s body. As performed originally in the galleries of the Portland Museum of Art, the four spaces of Vantage Points were separate from each other, and audience members had to choose what they would watch - hence, the title. Happily, at St. Mark’s, no such choices had to be made. The dance is full of twistings, foldings, crossings. In seven main sections, in sometimes simultaneous scenes, the dancers entwine, impinge, bend, step over and over each other, curl up, hang on each other in vigorous but companionable ways. Their bodies gently brace against the air. There’s sometimes a rather Spanish flair in the pulled-up bodies, tossed-back heads.
McCusker rolls in a slow, skewed-over-one-shoulder somersault, steps into a small ring made by his partner’s arms, and pulls his body through. Then he jumps, dives over her, holds her. Most vivid to me as an image of the buoyant elegance of Van Horne. With his foot extended in tendu, his arms wide open, he’s stretched so strong and easy, almost becoming insubstantial at the fingertips and toes. There’s no novelty in this, but an inestimable freshness. I hold McCusker responsible.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (March 6 to 8).
Alien Cries
June 30
In Matter of Fact, Sin Cha Hong has put together a fascinating, large-scale work reminiscent of Meredith Monk’s in its episodic style and vivid, imagistic scenes. Matter of Fact is an epic experience that becomes increasingly mythic as it proceeds, but the context the piece creates doesn’t allow us to know much about who or what its characters are or what their experiences may mean. It’s a difficult piece to feel. The relationships of its events, juxtapositions, sequences don’t communicate enough to me.
A little girl (Sonya Ihara) reads aloud from a newspaper; an older man (Ted Dalbotten) helps her with the words she’s not sure of. In another world that occupies the same large space, a nearly naked man crouches, winding yearn into a skein. Black-clad Satoru Shimazaki, facing away, howls; a second man, thrashes in the middle of the floor; bald-headed Marika Blosfeldt emits a shrill ululation; the sounds of rain splash in black-and-white on the two screens of the backcloth. Something fierce, unbending, and archaic in our natures blooms in Hong’s images.
Yet, sometimes I feel I’m looking at an evocation of an indefinite past as quaint as Quest for Fire. A crouching man meticulously measures out steps with his hands and crawls after them. He crab-walks sideways, rolls over, flops down, and continues his measuring with beautiful exactitude. Building hand on hand, he marches his hands up a woman’s body. Two men tackle each other; one drags the other across the floor, twisting him by one leg, then carries him over his back. Many people walk in, crossing each other’s perpendicular paths. With dry yet erotic curiosity, a man carefully licks a woman’s cheek with his tongue. She touches her own wrist with her tongue. Gradually, the whole group gets involved, touching each other, tasting each other, as well as themselves, with a grave neutrality, like a tribe of strangers. Apart from them, a pale, bare-chested man - who suggests an angelic messenger and expresses some kind of mystic yearning - raises his arms, embraces himself, twists and sinks to the ground, covers his face.
There’s more silver rain on the screen. People - all in black - lie around, reclining. A woman walks with the fragile spikiness of a bird; a man grabs her and carries her off. The people begin to wander around with a sense of haste, rushing with arms outstretched, whipping to the floor. Alone or clasped in a partner’s arms, they spin, stagger, tumble down in an accelerating mating frenzy in which they fly to and from indiscriminate partners. While four couples writhe, the modern-day older man and the little girl skip around; he plays at being a child, lays his head in her lap. The couples roll apart as the girl smooths the man’s head. A woman lies in the middle of the floor clenched in a fetal position, as seven people watch. Like a creature from a chrysalis, she emerges from the clenched position clumsily. Two men approach, pick her up, and kneeling, rock back and forth. They roll her to another pair of men who rock her too. Then they separate, pulling and shoving her contemptuously from one to another, and abandoning her. She rolls around frantically, mostly on her own, sometimes being pushed by one of the men. Finally, she lies splayed, exhausted. Apart, a trio of women cavort mildly, like the Graces. The men pick up the first woman by her feet and hands, hoist her high, swing her in huge arcs, throw her from one to another, and carry her limp, dancing body off. The three women become wild as maenads.
With painful slowness, two pairs of men carry a man and woman in white who stand as stiffly as the statues of saints in a religious procession or the bride and groom on a wedding cake. He’s martial in his stance, she douce and prayerful. When they’re brought into proximity, she smiles, they touch fingers, hold hands, and are carried apart. At the end, the older man and the little girl crawl toward each other through the other people, meet and creep toward us with limp paws.
Are they helpless, nearly defeated? In what battle, with what enemy? David Simons’s and Denman Maroney’s live musical score provided a superb, responsive accompaniment. And the cast - which also included Madeleine Higbie, Phyllis Jacobs, Gary Onsum, Annie-B Parsons, David Phillips, and Christopher Caines - is excellent. Matter of Fact is a remarkable work. Hong’s scenes etch themselves powerfully in the mind, yet they don’t have the visceral force you’d expect. Images one doesn’t consciously grasp often invade and grip one’s heart and psyche. They arise out of a world as dire and unforgiving as that of the grand, appalling tragedies of the Greeks. But there’s something dispassionate in Hong’s calculation, and the drama of her work - however spellbinding - is alien enough to keep its distance and permit the observer an undesired objectivity. Like the purely biological horror of masses of lemmings plunging into the sea or the extinction of the dinosaurs, there’s something in Hong’s piece that’s too big and cold to move us.
At La Mama Annex (June 10 to 14).
In Matter of Fact, Sin Cha Hong has put together a fascinating, large-scale work reminiscent of Meredith Monk’s in its episodic style and vivid, imagistic scenes. Matter of Fact is an epic experience that becomes increasingly mythic as it proceeds, but the context the piece creates doesn’t allow us to know much about who or what its characters are or what their experiences may mean. It’s a difficult piece to feel. The relationships of its events, juxtapositions, sequences don’t communicate enough to me.
A little girl (Sonya Ihara) reads aloud from a newspaper; an older man (Ted Dalbotten) helps her with the words she’s not sure of. In another world that occupies the same large space, a nearly naked man crouches, winding yearn into a skein. Black-clad Satoru Shimazaki, facing away, howls; a second man, thrashes in the middle of the floor; bald-headed Marika Blosfeldt emits a shrill ululation; the sounds of rain splash in black-and-white on the two screens of the backcloth. Something fierce, unbending, and archaic in our natures blooms in Hong’s images.
Yet, sometimes I feel I’m looking at an evocation of an indefinite past as quaint as Quest for Fire. A crouching man meticulously measures out steps with his hands and crawls after them. He crab-walks sideways, rolls over, flops down, and continues his measuring with beautiful exactitude. Building hand on hand, he marches his hands up a woman’s body. Two men tackle each other; one drags the other across the floor, twisting him by one leg, then carries him over his back. Many people walk in, crossing each other’s perpendicular paths. With dry yet erotic curiosity, a man carefully licks a woman’s cheek with his tongue. She touches her own wrist with her tongue. Gradually, the whole group gets involved, touching each other, tasting each other, as well as themselves, with a grave neutrality, like a tribe of strangers. Apart from them, a pale, bare-chested man - who suggests an angelic messenger and expresses some kind of mystic yearning - raises his arms, embraces himself, twists and sinks to the ground, covers his face.
There’s more silver rain on the screen. People - all in black - lie around, reclining. A woman walks with the fragile spikiness of a bird; a man grabs her and carries her off. The people begin to wander around with a sense of haste, rushing with arms outstretched, whipping to the floor. Alone or clasped in a partner’s arms, they spin, stagger, tumble down in an accelerating mating frenzy in which they fly to and from indiscriminate partners. While four couples writhe, the modern-day older man and the little girl skip around; he plays at being a child, lays his head in her lap. The couples roll apart as the girl smooths the man’s head. A woman lies in the middle of the floor clenched in a fetal position, as seven people watch. Like a creature from a chrysalis, she emerges from the clenched position clumsily. Two men approach, pick her up, and kneeling, rock back and forth. They roll her to another pair of men who rock her too. Then they separate, pulling and shoving her contemptuously from one to another, and abandoning her. She rolls around frantically, mostly on her own, sometimes being pushed by one of the men. Finally, she lies splayed, exhausted. Apart, a trio of women cavort mildly, like the Graces. The men pick up the first woman by her feet and hands, hoist her high, swing her in huge arcs, throw her from one to another, and carry her limp, dancing body off. The three women become wild as maenads.
With painful slowness, two pairs of men carry a man and woman in white who stand as stiffly as the statues of saints in a religious procession or the bride and groom on a wedding cake. He’s martial in his stance, she douce and prayerful. When they’re brought into proximity, she smiles, they touch fingers, hold hands, and are carried apart. At the end, the older man and the little girl crawl toward each other through the other people, meet and creep toward us with limp paws.
Are they helpless, nearly defeated? In what battle, with what enemy? David Simons’s and Denman Maroney’s live musical score provided a superb, responsive accompaniment. And the cast - which also included Madeleine Higbie, Phyllis Jacobs, Gary Onsum, Annie-B Parsons, David Phillips, and Christopher Caines - is excellent. Matter of Fact is a remarkable work. Hong’s scenes etch themselves powerfully in the mind, yet they don’t have the visceral force you’d expect. Images one doesn’t consciously grasp often invade and grip one’s heart and psyche. They arise out of a world as dire and unforgiving as that of the grand, appalling tragedies of the Greeks. But there’s something dispassionate in Hong’s calculation, and the drama of her work - however spellbinding - is alien enough to keep its distance and permit the observer an undesired objectivity. Like the purely biological horror of masses of lemmings plunging into the sea or the extinction of the dinosaurs, there’s something in Hong’s piece that’s too big and cold to move us.
At La Mama Annex (June 10 to 14).
All Fall Down
May 26
David Zambrano’s structured improvisation, Fabula de Tres Mujeres, for himself and Jackie Shue, Eva Geueke and Linda Mancini, is a low-key piece in a serious vein. Something about the temper of the piece, as well as its title, suggests that it has a theme or some narrative thread, but nothing like that comes across. The three women - in layered clothing of red and black (except for Shue, in a dress in the black-and-white spatter pattern of a school composition book) - sit against the wall during Zambrano’s first solo.
He slides a window open and we notice a casual figure outside - musician Guy Yarden, whose scrippyings and sweet wailing sounds add a whimsical dimension, and whose mere presence out in the yard seems to enlarge the confine of St. Mark’s parish hall. Zambrano (in read and black overlays, too) stares here and there, exhales decisively, makes little piecemeal shifts of his feet and hands. He moves on the phrases of the breath, takes sudden swings with soft strength, flutters his fingers, lets his weight thud as his feet strike the ground. There’s a secretive, cushioned quality in the way he suspends movement, recedes into himself as if quietly gathering force, then thrusts himself forward.
The women follow each other in a series of weight-shifting solos. Geueke curves and swings, plunging heavily to one side and springing vigorously back. There’s a swivel to her walk, a wiggle to her behind; her arms flash loosely overhead and across her chest. Shue looks out a window, while Geueke flings herself around more sharply. Mancini gets up and rocks, does half-hearted dives and recoveries, paddles her arms. Shue - measuring, defining, indicating strangely angled, boxy shapes with her arms - seems to view herself from a slightly skewed perspective. The three women move together, and in pairs, with humor and mild curiosity. Teetering and bobbing, pulling at each other, they swing closely into each other and engage in a couple of very quick, intricate interchanges. Mancini, in a moment of overt humor, slams the window on Yarden, and turns with a gleeful bad-girl smile, but Yarden pops in the door a few moments later. Zambrano, always alone, has an ominous solo of slow velvety turns and brutal slams onto his knees. Geueke races back and forth, Mancini clutch girlishly together whispering secrets. What’s going on?
David Alan Harris’s Uneasy Virtue, for Harris and Scott Smith, was a gloomy, deeply felt, and sometimes beautiful piece about suicide, sickness and death. It’s dedicated to the memories of four men, and a fifth, “facing west.” It represents, I think, a serious struggle to assimilate the pain of loss. But it’s also such an unfocused jumble of material that one gets only a very blurry sense of its real subject. Harris holds a small model bed - maybe a foot long - he licks the edges of the bed, pulls its covers off with his teeth. Smith leans against the wall, and flings himself away from it, like someone ill, rarely but violently driving against his decline.
There are black-and-white images of a waterfall, a bed tumbling over the falls, hospital beds, cots, projected against a screen that fills one of the windows. Fragments of a story about, I think, suicide are projected, too. But it’s difficult to simultaneously attend to the performers and the words. Later, there are slides of textual material about healing the sick taken from Matthew and Luke, with some of it highlighted in red and some crossed out. Outside, we see part of a figure motionless on the staircase of the fire escape - a person pausing, I suppose, on his way out of this world.
I liked the stumbling, leaning, calculated awkwardness of the movement, the half-dreamed, decomposing gestures, and the occasionally tender physicality of the performers - like the way Smith tucks his head into Harris’s waist as he curves his body into him, or Harris collapses softly backward into Smith and both tumble forward, or the way they face each other and toot across the tops of partly filled soda bottles. Smith flings an arm, wipes it across his face, smacks himself hard, and crashes. Harris rushes to slip a mat under Smith’s knees as he falls. I admired Smith’s shameless strength, his sudden, twisting bursts of power. Harris’s own performance is consistently a dance of avoidance: he keeps bending away, breaking at the joints, constantly turning aside as if to remove himself from the focus of activity in his own body. Uneasy Virtue is overloaded with information and gimmicks and intriguing props, but it’s also torn by Harris’s simultaneous attempts to embrace the pain of his subject and to put it at a distance. The efforts at objectification are what fill the piece with clutter.
At Danspace Project St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery Parish Hall (May 2 and 3).
David Zambrano’s structured improvisation, Fabula de Tres Mujeres, for himself and Jackie Shue, Eva Geueke and Linda Mancini, is a low-key piece in a serious vein. Something about the temper of the piece, as well as its title, suggests that it has a theme or some narrative thread, but nothing like that comes across. The three women - in layered clothing of red and black (except for Shue, in a dress in the black-and-white spatter pattern of a school composition book) - sit against the wall during Zambrano’s first solo.
He slides a window open and we notice a casual figure outside - musician Guy Yarden, whose scrippyings and sweet wailing sounds add a whimsical dimension, and whose mere presence out in the yard seems to enlarge the confine of St. Mark’s parish hall. Zambrano (in read and black overlays, too) stares here and there, exhales decisively, makes little piecemeal shifts of his feet and hands. He moves on the phrases of the breath, takes sudden swings with soft strength, flutters his fingers, lets his weight thud as his feet strike the ground. There’s a secretive, cushioned quality in the way he suspends movement, recedes into himself as if quietly gathering force, then thrusts himself forward.
The women follow each other in a series of weight-shifting solos. Geueke curves and swings, plunging heavily to one side and springing vigorously back. There’s a swivel to her walk, a wiggle to her behind; her arms flash loosely overhead and across her chest. Shue looks out a window, while Geueke flings herself around more sharply. Mancini gets up and rocks, does half-hearted dives and recoveries, paddles her arms. Shue - measuring, defining, indicating strangely angled, boxy shapes with her arms - seems to view herself from a slightly skewed perspective. The three women move together, and in pairs, with humor and mild curiosity. Teetering and bobbing, pulling at each other, they swing closely into each other and engage in a couple of very quick, intricate interchanges. Mancini, in a moment of overt humor, slams the window on Yarden, and turns with a gleeful bad-girl smile, but Yarden pops in the door a few moments later. Zambrano, always alone, has an ominous solo of slow velvety turns and brutal slams onto his knees. Geueke races back and forth, Mancini clutch girlishly together whispering secrets. What’s going on?
David Alan Harris’s Uneasy Virtue, for Harris and Scott Smith, was a gloomy, deeply felt, and sometimes beautiful piece about suicide, sickness and death. It’s dedicated to the memories of four men, and a fifth, “facing west.” It represents, I think, a serious struggle to assimilate the pain of loss. But it’s also such an unfocused jumble of material that one gets only a very blurry sense of its real subject. Harris holds a small model bed - maybe a foot long - he licks the edges of the bed, pulls its covers off with his teeth. Smith leans against the wall, and flings himself away from it, like someone ill, rarely but violently driving against his decline.
There are black-and-white images of a waterfall, a bed tumbling over the falls, hospital beds, cots, projected against a screen that fills one of the windows. Fragments of a story about, I think, suicide are projected, too. But it’s difficult to simultaneously attend to the performers and the words. Later, there are slides of textual material about healing the sick taken from Matthew and Luke, with some of it highlighted in red and some crossed out. Outside, we see part of a figure motionless on the staircase of the fire escape - a person pausing, I suppose, on his way out of this world.
I liked the stumbling, leaning, calculated awkwardness of the movement, the half-dreamed, decomposing gestures, and the occasionally tender physicality of the performers - like the way Smith tucks his head into Harris’s waist as he curves his body into him, or Harris collapses softly backward into Smith and both tumble forward, or the way they face each other and toot across the tops of partly filled soda bottles. Smith flings an arm, wipes it across his face, smacks himself hard, and crashes. Harris rushes to slip a mat under Smith’s knees as he falls. I admired Smith’s shameless strength, his sudden, twisting bursts of power. Harris’s own performance is consistently a dance of avoidance: he keeps bending away, breaking at the joints, constantly turning aside as if to remove himself from the focus of activity in his own body. Uneasy Virtue is overloaded with information and gimmicks and intriguing props, but it’s also torn by Harris’s simultaneous attempts to embrace the pain of his subject and to put it at a distance. The efforts at objectification are what fill the piece with clutter.
At Danspace Project St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery Parish Hall (May 2 and 3).
An Urgent Geometry
February 10
How brief and indelible are the early Mary Wigman and Eleanor King solos, presented by Anabelle Gamson/Dance Solos at St. Mark’s! (The program also included a long work by Gamson to Brahms.) Wigman, the great German modern dance pioneer, died in 1973; King, now about 80, was a soloist with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman’s first company.
I just want to talk about the King dances, which I’d never seen. What seems so novel now in these early solos is the striking boldness and bareness of gesture, the plain conviction, the possibility of unambiguous statement. We’d have to be fools to make dances like this nowadays. But what a gift it is to be able to honor the real thing! The body is pulled as a matter of course between the tensions of earth and sky, exaltation and despair, pride and humility. It is never simply a clever kinetic object. The strict economy of poses and gestures is iconic, archetypal, and the physical being - yielding to and resisting gravity - is, in its way, as critically balanced and exposed as Princess Aurora in the Rose Adagio.
In To the West (1944), to music by Roy Harrris, Risa Steinberg, wearing a brown dress, strides with arms curved overhead, clapping. I admire the straight thrust of her leg, the force with which her arms swing and slice, the way her arms bell generously from her sides as she leaps, as if swollen by air. I like the simple geometry of the forms the body takes; it becomes a cone that twists and drives downwards; it balances in a flattened T with the stretched-out limbs marking the body’s own horizon. There’s a matter-of-fact bravery in the dancer’s expansive power and decisiveness, the sense of a world that’s hard but not frightening.
Sometimes she scuffles tightly along the ground, almost digging in. Near the end she smacks her forearm against her thigh, unclenching her fist into an open palm. She forges ahead, running and scooping, swinging her legs, clapping, unimpeded by any serious obstacles. Heavily garbed in a black robe and a brown wimple, Sarah Stackhouse drives energy zigzag through her body in a stylized portrait of anguish and determination in King’s 1933 Mother of Tears (to music of Herman Reutter.) The medieval images the body carves are as direct as a woodcut. Stackhouse twists her torso, covers her head; she drops and smacks the floor heavily. Waling slowly, in plie, she extends a leg forward in affirmation of her own power; though in pain, she is neither crushed nor depleted. She draws flat hands down her cheeks in the tracks of her tears, lets the arms slowly, slowly drop and hang.
From the same year is Song of Earth. Stackhouse wears a blue top and a long, fringed skirt of rusty orange (the handsome costumes, modeled on the originals, are by Frank Garcia). To music of Eugene Goossens, she bends in plie and raises her body up, scoops the air, and spirals into a seated position. There’s a grandeur in the broad turns, the easy force of the outstretched arms, the way she rocks her pliant torso side to side and gladly winds to the floor. It’s not the weightiness of earth or the toil it requires that come through in the dance, so much as its generosity and the light-seeking levity of whatever grows. Stackhouse is a fierce intermediary between the kingdoms of air and earth; a member of both, she weds them solidly together.
At St. Mark’s Church in- the-Bowery (January 22 to 25).
How brief and indelible are the early Mary Wigman and Eleanor King solos, presented by Anabelle Gamson/Dance Solos at St. Mark’s! (The program also included a long work by Gamson to Brahms.) Wigman, the great German modern dance pioneer, died in 1973; King, now about 80, was a soloist with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman’s first company.
I just want to talk about the King dances, which I’d never seen. What seems so novel now in these early solos is the striking boldness and bareness of gesture, the plain conviction, the possibility of unambiguous statement. We’d have to be fools to make dances like this nowadays. But what a gift it is to be able to honor the real thing! The body is pulled as a matter of course between the tensions of earth and sky, exaltation and despair, pride and humility. It is never simply a clever kinetic object. The strict economy of poses and gestures is iconic, archetypal, and the physical being - yielding to and resisting gravity - is, in its way, as critically balanced and exposed as Princess Aurora in the Rose Adagio.
In To the West (1944), to music by Roy Harrris, Risa Steinberg, wearing a brown dress, strides with arms curved overhead, clapping. I admire the straight thrust of her leg, the force with which her arms swing and slice, the way her arms bell generously from her sides as she leaps, as if swollen by air. I like the simple geometry of the forms the body takes; it becomes a cone that twists and drives downwards; it balances in a flattened T with the stretched-out limbs marking the body’s own horizon. There’s a matter-of-fact bravery in the dancer’s expansive power and decisiveness, the sense of a world that’s hard but not frightening.
Sometimes she scuffles tightly along the ground, almost digging in. Near the end she smacks her forearm against her thigh, unclenching her fist into an open palm. She forges ahead, running and scooping, swinging her legs, clapping, unimpeded by any serious obstacles. Heavily garbed in a black robe and a brown wimple, Sarah Stackhouse drives energy zigzag through her body in a stylized portrait of anguish and determination in King’s 1933 Mother of Tears (to music of Herman Reutter.) The medieval images the body carves are as direct as a woodcut. Stackhouse twists her torso, covers her head; she drops and smacks the floor heavily. Waling slowly, in plie, she extends a leg forward in affirmation of her own power; though in pain, she is neither crushed nor depleted. She draws flat hands down her cheeks in the tracks of her tears, lets the arms slowly, slowly drop and hang.
From the same year is Song of Earth. Stackhouse wears a blue top and a long, fringed skirt of rusty orange (the handsome costumes, modeled on the originals, are by Frank Garcia). To music of Eugene Goossens, she bends in plie and raises her body up, scoops the air, and spirals into a seated position. There’s a grandeur in the broad turns, the easy force of the outstretched arms, the way she rocks her pliant torso side to side and gladly winds to the floor. It’s not the weightiness of earth or the toil it requires that come through in the dance, so much as its generosity and the light-seeking levity of whatever grows. Stackhouse is a fierce intermediary between the kingdoms of air and earth; a member of both, she weds them solidly together.
At St. Mark’s Church in- the-Bowery (January 22 to 25).
Baby, You’re No Good
June 16
Dodging, falling, panting, Lisa Kraus in Desert Island (1986) is desperate. She runs madly on a mat that swishes, slides, and buckles under her. She gets quieter, kneels, closes herself off to the world around her, then cautiously peers out under shaded eyes. Her hard gaze softens. She presses her palms against the mat, pushes against one knee to stand herself erect, then paces the edges of the mat like a prisoner confronting the limits of her cage. She rotates her shoulders, twists her torso tightly, moves with a curving, sharp-edged intent. In a sudden, perverse flood of exuberance, she flings herself up, arching back, and the force of her arms knocks her down. I’m with her so far, though her curving exploration of the limits of her space seems overly studied. Sitting with her legs crossed, she speaks with self-conscious, didactic care, and ultimately recognizes that “there isn’t anything here except my imagination.” Ho hum.
Her situation seems deadeningly prosaic. The artist is trapped in the limits of her imagination and patterns of working. She makes some squatting jumps, moves in sinuous, melting phrases linked by brittle transitions “Maybe if I go through everything I know, after that there will be something new,” she concludes. Fat chance, I think.
Then with a secret Eureka! she simply leaves her “island” behind. It’s an exhilarating choice, her dropping the piece’s entire premise at the flicker of a thought. She merely moves off the mat, onto the floor, lies down slowly, and rolls over in a moment of lazy bliss.
Free Speech (1986), tackles the problem of creating work in a much fiercer and funnier fashion tha Desert Island, though the dancing is necessarily sketchy. Kraus does some fragmentary explorations with advice from her alter ego on a video monitor. “I don’t feel very positive about your pulling it off,” says the video Lisa. “I’m thinking abut repetition and the rhythms of the music...things on the beat and things that have nothing to do with the beat,” explains Kraus. The video Lisa’s remarks distract Kraus from what she’s doing. “I appreciate what you’re saying about repetition,” says the video Lisa smugly, “but, frankly, it’s boring to watch you.” The internal critic, video Lisa becomes more and more demonic. Eventually, her face is bathed in green and magenta light and she speaks in a screeching, wheedling voice like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“You’re no good. And you’re no good in many, many ways.” I like that Kraus lets her alter ego speak with the absolute cruelty we reserve for ourselves in the moments when we’re filled with doubt. And watching Kraus squirm is as funny as shooting frogs with a BB gun. She’s so hopelessly outclasssed, so vulnerable to this implacable authority with her own face and voice. Video Lisa condemns Kraus’s body, and goes on to the subject of her mind. “It’s not clever, it’s not precise. You have no future.”
Kraus finally shrouds the monitor in a black cloth and the voice shuts up, like a bird in a cage. She gathers her strength, starts to work by herself, but thinks after awhile that she’d rather begin tomorrow when she has a lot more time. But she doesn’t quite give in - she uncovers the monitor, and the benevolent Lisa appears and tries to encourage her. “Think of the space as a huge open meadow and you’re a cow.” The process is still difficult, the movement unfocused. “You have to pay attention,” says the face on the video. “I really need more structure. This is vague,” says Kraus, beginning again. And so it goes.
Kraus’s group piece, State of Grace - for John Jasperse, Scott Smith, Meg Stuart, Sasha Waltz, and herself) is a thoughtful effort to make a grand sort of piece and there’s lots of lovely material in it. Like a soft and formal duet for Kraus and Waltz that swings, arches, turns in and out. There’s lots of springing up and down, whipping turns, tumbling stuff for the men. But Kraus’s choice of music, Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Hadyn, has a processional splendor that’s uncongenial. It often seems to demand symmetrical hordes of dancers; instead, Kraus’s choreography, which relies on a natural looseness and sense of gravity in the dancers’ bodies, often stiffens them up to match the music’s force.
At P.S. 122 (May 22 to 31).
Dodging, falling, panting, Lisa Kraus in Desert Island (1986) is desperate. She runs madly on a mat that swishes, slides, and buckles under her. She gets quieter, kneels, closes herself off to the world around her, then cautiously peers out under shaded eyes. Her hard gaze softens. She presses her palms against the mat, pushes against one knee to stand herself erect, then paces the edges of the mat like a prisoner confronting the limits of her cage. She rotates her shoulders, twists her torso tightly, moves with a curving, sharp-edged intent. In a sudden, perverse flood of exuberance, she flings herself up, arching back, and the force of her arms knocks her down. I’m with her so far, though her curving exploration of the limits of her space seems overly studied. Sitting with her legs crossed, she speaks with self-conscious, didactic care, and ultimately recognizes that “there isn’t anything here except my imagination.” Ho hum.
Her situation seems deadeningly prosaic. The artist is trapped in the limits of her imagination and patterns of working. She makes some squatting jumps, moves in sinuous, melting phrases linked by brittle transitions “Maybe if I go through everything I know, after that there will be something new,” she concludes. Fat chance, I think.
Then with a secret Eureka! she simply leaves her “island” behind. It’s an exhilarating choice, her dropping the piece’s entire premise at the flicker of a thought. She merely moves off the mat, onto the floor, lies down slowly, and rolls over in a moment of lazy bliss.
Free Speech (1986), tackles the problem of creating work in a much fiercer and funnier fashion tha Desert Island, though the dancing is necessarily sketchy. Kraus does some fragmentary explorations with advice from her alter ego on a video monitor. “I don’t feel very positive about your pulling it off,” says the video Lisa. “I’m thinking abut repetition and the rhythms of the music...things on the beat and things that have nothing to do with the beat,” explains Kraus. The video Lisa’s remarks distract Kraus from what she’s doing. “I appreciate what you’re saying about repetition,” says the video Lisa smugly, “but, frankly, it’s boring to watch you.” The internal critic, video Lisa becomes more and more demonic. Eventually, her face is bathed in green and magenta light and she speaks in a screeching, wheedling voice like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“You’re no good. And you’re no good in many, many ways.” I like that Kraus lets her alter ego speak with the absolute cruelty we reserve for ourselves in the moments when we’re filled with doubt. And watching Kraus squirm is as funny as shooting frogs with a BB gun. She’s so hopelessly outclasssed, so vulnerable to this implacable authority with her own face and voice. Video Lisa condemns Kraus’s body, and goes on to the subject of her mind. “It’s not clever, it’s not precise. You have no future.”
Kraus finally shrouds the monitor in a black cloth and the voice shuts up, like a bird in a cage. She gathers her strength, starts to work by herself, but thinks after awhile that she’d rather begin tomorrow when she has a lot more time. But she doesn’t quite give in - she uncovers the monitor, and the benevolent Lisa appears and tries to encourage her. “Think of the space as a huge open meadow and you’re a cow.” The process is still difficult, the movement unfocused. “You have to pay attention,” says the face on the video. “I really need more structure. This is vague,” says Kraus, beginning again. And so it goes.
Kraus’s group piece, State of Grace - for John Jasperse, Scott Smith, Meg Stuart, Sasha Waltz, and herself) is a thoughtful effort to make a grand sort of piece and there’s lots of lovely material in it. Like a soft and formal duet for Kraus and Waltz that swings, arches, turns in and out. There’s lots of springing up and down, whipping turns, tumbling stuff for the men. But Kraus’s choice of music, Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Hadyn, has a processional splendor that’s uncongenial. It often seems to demand symmetrical hordes of dancers; instead, Kraus’s choreography, which relies on a natural looseness and sense of gravity in the dancers’ bodies, often stiffens them up to match the music’s force.
At P.S. 122 (May 22 to 31).
City Mice
April 14
Last fall, P.S. 122, in cooperation with the New England Foundation for the Arts, shipped a bunch of downtown artists to the provinces - Bennington and Williams colleges, to be precise - for two-week residencies. “Two weeks’ work in the country is like six months in New York,” remarked Gayle Tufts, the evening’s host. “You don’t worry about renting space, you don’t worry about your day job, you don’t worry about your night job...”
The program was a celebration - Bill Obrecht played sax, Tufts sang (accompanied by pianist-composer Curt Meyers, Williams College, class of ‘87), quipped, and changed clothes four or five times to add a touch of glamour to the evening. In silence, as usual, in an oversize black dress, Susan Rethorst performed Mrs. Wand, a soft, introspective solo of adjustments. Lying on her back, she reaches up an arm to weave and circle briefly, then lets it flop gently down. Her hands chatter like shadow puppets, then one hand relaxes to brush through her hair She rubs her fingers, gets halfway up, kneels, comes up all the way. She tries to lug her leg around like a dead weight, slumps back into an oafish, half-sitting position, feels her belly, juts out her behind. Rethorst seems to ask her body, what are you? what am I? and the body responds with its own profound questions.
A master word-fumbler, performance artist Mark Anderson, in 80 Words for Snow, sets phrases spinning and fragmenting and gathering themselves together into larger and larger increments of meaning and feeling. Though most of the movement is limited to his head and hands, he falls backward off a chair with dumbfounded spontaneity. Nearly slap-happy from the ironic tangents his words take off on, he’s frequently busy dodging their ricochets.
Ann Carlson’s beautiful, tender solo, Visit woman move story cat, cat, cat is based on Koko the gorilla. Bare-breasted, Carlson scampers on all fours, squats, twists, scratches, rests her fingertips on the floor as she walks stooped forward. Her attention bounces from this to that to the other, but she never seems like an imitation ape; rather, a human creature, rich in feeling, sharing an unusual number of apelike qualities and limitations. Many of her gestures are beautifully peaceful and gracefully composed in their gentle reaching. Sometimes they suggest a momentary wanting, without any particular expectation of receiving, and without the built-in frustration or hopelessness such gestures usually have. She pounces playfully, jumps with sudden bursts in the music (from Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15, Opus 132), whirls with her body twisted, swings into a metal bar where she’ll hang, perhaps, from one arm, fold her feet together, hold her toes. She gets a distant, quizzical look on her face. A stagehand brings on a small pet carrier. Carlson stares at it, opens it, is fascinated by the tiny black kitten it contains. She holds it close, carries it about, carries it in her mouth Leaping exultantly, she seems filled with joy and confusion by its presence. Then, later, it’s gone, disappeared. She’s mystified. She twists her hands. She draws whiskers with her fingers - sign language for cat. Where? She holds herself, races restlessly. Something inexplicable has happened, a hideous joke that she cannot understand.
There’s a collage of radio sounds and slides of Nicaragua behind Ishmael Houston-Jones as he struggles across the floor on his back with a cinder block on his chest in Radio Managua 25 Septiembre 1984. You could hardly find a more literal illustration of oppression, but it only has the power of a slogan. In Three Folk Dances, however, which starts slow and tentative and grows frustrated and desperate, he takes us further.
The first dance has a kind of thick softness; he waves an arm slowly, sways his hips sleepily, holds his head, takes soft falls. The second is less sluggish. He’s almost about to speak, pauses; he’s trying, changes his mind, can’t. There’s a vague sway to his body, a sense of overpowering indecision. The third dance becomes shrill and brutal; he becomes his own victim. His feet crisscross rapidly; he sways, jumps rope, reaches, collapses, falls. He trips himself into violent falls by knocking his standing leg out from under him. He pulls up his pants so they’re cutting into his groin. He smacks himself hard in the face, then carries the gesture further and lets it melt. Houston-Jones is moved by the world’s events, and they’ve got him smashing himself. Flailing, contorted, he smacks the floor. Right up against the audience, dazed, glistening and dripping with sweat, he reaches and droops in a glaring spotlight. No one can help him.
“Messy, but interesting,” is how Mimi Goese had been described to me. That’s not the half of it. In Tin Foil Sandwich, she clumps onstage as a tinfoil monster, then shreds her costume She sticks out a gleaming black tongue, grins to expose her iridescent emerald teeth. She eats some M & M’s, throws some at the audience; pours some over her head, eats a banana and opens her mouth to show us the smashed glop. She throws food, breaks some records, dribbles chocolate syrup over herself, wags a cigarette between her lips, throws some cigs into the audience. She skips around in a ruffly blue dress, evidently a nice girl gone mad, smears makeup on her face from caches in the dress’s shoulders, dribbles more Hershey’s, cuts the dress off her body with a huge kitchen knife. She’s fiendish with that knife, but I never worried for a second that she would hurt herself, or anyone; so clearly was she in control of her frenzy.
Tin Foil Sandwich becomes a totally manic Jekyll-and-Hyde act. Goese turns amorous and thirsty, a hoarse-voiced Dracula in a seedy black jacket, then wriggles into an Ohio track suit, then into a pink chiffon tutu with silver tinsel and huge clomping shoes. When she minces around, pushing a scrap of tinfoil onto her head, she looks like Pavlova in one of her exotic headdresses. A couple of people walked out with balloons over their heads that read, “This is not my idea of art.” But I thought Goese was utterly charming Her eager, jittery energy is dazzling, and her gleeful delivery like that of a child trying to shock and delighting in being “bad.” But the piece is not an assault, and Goese’s grown-up monster child is terribly endearing. She cannot horrify us. Her zest is enviably ferocious. “Stop staring at me,” she shouts. The person inside her doesn’t mean to be a circus. But she is three rings in one.
Last fall, P.S. 122, in cooperation with the New England Foundation for the Arts, shipped a bunch of downtown artists to the provinces - Bennington and Williams colleges, to be precise - for two-week residencies. “Two weeks’ work in the country is like six months in New York,” remarked Gayle Tufts, the evening’s host. “You don’t worry about renting space, you don’t worry about your day job, you don’t worry about your night job...”
The program was a celebration - Bill Obrecht played sax, Tufts sang (accompanied by pianist-composer Curt Meyers, Williams College, class of ‘87), quipped, and changed clothes four or five times to add a touch of glamour to the evening. In silence, as usual, in an oversize black dress, Susan Rethorst performed Mrs. Wand, a soft, introspective solo of adjustments. Lying on her back, she reaches up an arm to weave and circle briefly, then lets it flop gently down. Her hands chatter like shadow puppets, then one hand relaxes to brush through her hair She rubs her fingers, gets halfway up, kneels, comes up all the way. She tries to lug her leg around like a dead weight, slumps back into an oafish, half-sitting position, feels her belly, juts out her behind. Rethorst seems to ask her body, what are you? what am I? and the body responds with its own profound questions.
A master word-fumbler, performance artist Mark Anderson, in 80 Words for Snow, sets phrases spinning and fragmenting and gathering themselves together into larger and larger increments of meaning and feeling. Though most of the movement is limited to his head and hands, he falls backward off a chair with dumbfounded spontaneity. Nearly slap-happy from the ironic tangents his words take off on, he’s frequently busy dodging their ricochets.
Ann Carlson’s beautiful, tender solo, Visit woman move story cat, cat, cat is based on Koko the gorilla. Bare-breasted, Carlson scampers on all fours, squats, twists, scratches, rests her fingertips on the floor as she walks stooped forward. Her attention bounces from this to that to the other, but she never seems like an imitation ape; rather, a human creature, rich in feeling, sharing an unusual number of apelike qualities and limitations. Many of her gestures are beautifully peaceful and gracefully composed in their gentle reaching. Sometimes they suggest a momentary wanting, without any particular expectation of receiving, and without the built-in frustration or hopelessness such gestures usually have. She pounces playfully, jumps with sudden bursts in the music (from Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15, Opus 132), whirls with her body twisted, swings into a metal bar where she’ll hang, perhaps, from one arm, fold her feet together, hold her toes. She gets a distant, quizzical look on her face. A stagehand brings on a small pet carrier. Carlson stares at it, opens it, is fascinated by the tiny black kitten it contains. She holds it close, carries it about, carries it in her mouth Leaping exultantly, she seems filled with joy and confusion by its presence. Then, later, it’s gone, disappeared. She’s mystified. She twists her hands. She draws whiskers with her fingers - sign language for cat. Where? She holds herself, races restlessly. Something inexplicable has happened, a hideous joke that she cannot understand.
There’s a collage of radio sounds and slides of Nicaragua behind Ishmael Houston-Jones as he struggles across the floor on his back with a cinder block on his chest in Radio Managua 25 Septiembre 1984. You could hardly find a more literal illustration of oppression, but it only has the power of a slogan. In Three Folk Dances, however, which starts slow and tentative and grows frustrated and desperate, he takes us further.
The first dance has a kind of thick softness; he waves an arm slowly, sways his hips sleepily, holds his head, takes soft falls. The second is less sluggish. He’s almost about to speak, pauses; he’s trying, changes his mind, can’t. There’s a vague sway to his body, a sense of overpowering indecision. The third dance becomes shrill and brutal; he becomes his own victim. His feet crisscross rapidly; he sways, jumps rope, reaches, collapses, falls. He trips himself into violent falls by knocking his standing leg out from under him. He pulls up his pants so they’re cutting into his groin. He smacks himself hard in the face, then carries the gesture further and lets it melt. Houston-Jones is moved by the world’s events, and they’ve got him smashing himself. Flailing, contorted, he smacks the floor. Right up against the audience, dazed, glistening and dripping with sweat, he reaches and droops in a glaring spotlight. No one can help him.
“Messy, but interesting,” is how Mimi Goese had been described to me. That’s not the half of it. In Tin Foil Sandwich, she clumps onstage as a tinfoil monster, then shreds her costume She sticks out a gleaming black tongue, grins to expose her iridescent emerald teeth. She eats some M & M’s, throws some at the audience; pours some over her head, eats a banana and opens her mouth to show us the smashed glop. She throws food, breaks some records, dribbles chocolate syrup over herself, wags a cigarette between her lips, throws some cigs into the audience. She skips around in a ruffly blue dress, evidently a nice girl gone mad, smears makeup on her face from caches in the dress’s shoulders, dribbles more Hershey’s, cuts the dress off her body with a huge kitchen knife. She’s fiendish with that knife, but I never worried for a second that she would hurt herself, or anyone; so clearly was she in control of her frenzy.
Tin Foil Sandwich becomes a totally manic Jekyll-and-Hyde act. Goese turns amorous and thirsty, a hoarse-voiced Dracula in a seedy black jacket, then wriggles into an Ohio track suit, then into a pink chiffon tutu with silver tinsel and huge clomping shoes. When she minces around, pushing a scrap of tinfoil onto her head, she looks like Pavlova in one of her exotic headdresses. A couple of people walked out with balloons over their heads that read, “This is not my idea of art.” But I thought Goese was utterly charming Her eager, jittery energy is dazzling, and her gleeful delivery like that of a child trying to shock and delighting in being “bad.” But the piece is not an assault, and Goese’s grown-up monster child is terribly endearing. She cannot horrify us. Her zest is enviably ferocious. “Stop staring at me,” she shouts. The person inside her doesn’t mean to be a circus. But she is three rings in one.
Don’t Fence Me In
March 3
Last year Ed Henry’s concert at St. Mark’s got blown out of the water when he fell and suffered a concussion early the first night. Fortunately, things went handsomely in the program he shared with Peter Pucci in the same space this month.
Henry’s new Safe Harbor starts with one woman, then a second, executing calm, smooth, sweeping gestures in canon, the routine creating almost the sense of an aureole around the upper body. Then their arms wheel; they turn, twist into the space, and press forward softly through the arms. Two men and two women enter with the offhand, take-charge air of a flock of gulls that make themselves perfectly at home on any patch of sand, march up and down on the beach, suddenly leave, and as suddenly return. The dancers - Tamara Bliss, Christiane Chaput, Larry Crabtree, Barbara France, Cynthia Neitz and Henry - seem separate and independent, tending to keep each other at a distance with the breadth of their movement, but they’re creatures of the same mind and habit, and can influence each other instantaneously. The movement tends to be big and plain, contented with the legs passing high and the arms roomy. But intermittently, bent over, leaning on their hands, the dancers bounce their feet to a new place; lunging way forward, they slide their feet against the floor. In Marco D’Ambrosio’s spacious score, the clean, piercing trumpet notes and synthesizer chords that resound with the penetrating authority of a foghorn evoke a grand and lonely - but not dour - seascape.
Henry danced with Viola Farber, and until 1985 with Dan Wagoner, yet none of their idiosyncrasies cling to him. Henry’s Groundwork, from last year, has the same kind of spatial openness and independence as Safe Harbor, but the movement often bends sideways in the torso and arms, and slides out in the other direction with the legs. The footwork has a big, prancing feeling. There’s a neutral, peaceful atmosphere, a sense that all parts of the performing space have special value. Periodically, the four dancers cluster in sculptural poses or friezes - like an odd kind of pieta with Crabtree lightly fallen sideways into Henry’s arms, and a woman on the floor alongside; or one woman passed over head and held, while the other crouches below; or two couples standing in a diagonal double line with their hands resting secure and comfortable on each other’s shoulders; or the two women holding Crabtree upside down and gradually lowering him, while Henry slides in prone behind them. There’s a satisfying quietness in these moments, a sense of summation.
Peter Pucci, a member of Pilobolus since 1980, makes punchier, more dramatic dances. In Celina, four women - Bliss, Chaput, France and Ellen Sirot - bend and sway like some up-to-date harem of glamourpusses, excluding Sheila Lehner, in white, who comes in with a chip on her shoulder. There’s no obvious rejection of her, but eventually Lehner’s anger plainly surfaces: she picks up one of the women, and shoves another The four sit on the floor covering their heads with their skirts and later, after this meditation, form a circle of reconciliation around Lehner from which all five whirl out.
In Scribble, gymnastic Rick Kitts does a sharply punctuated, acrobatic solo full of smacks and tumbles, cute takes and chopped off gestures, pinky exercises and Egyptian walks. Big City is for eight dancers in street clothes. They flinch from the occasional spotlight, from Morton Subotnick’s abrupt musical chords. We’ve seen plenty of this second-hand cliched stuff about the stress and hostility of urban life, but Pucci handles it okay. Suspicious turns of the head, touching injured parts of the body, clutching the head, thunderous pacing around, staggering, frustration, exhaustion.
I always like the sexy imbroglios, in this case parallel duets for two men, and for a man and a woman. Both duets turn instantly violent, with immediate rejection of the advances, and develop into wrestling, kicking struggles. Eventually, the reluctant partners seem to succumb, even to become addicted to the relationship, and one of the aggressors, for example, turns into a slave, crawling after his woman, trying to hang onto her ankle. There are eight million stories in The Naked City, but evidently they’re all the same.
At. St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (February 12 to 15).
Last year Ed Henry’s concert at St. Mark’s got blown out of the water when he fell and suffered a concussion early the first night. Fortunately, things went handsomely in the program he shared with Peter Pucci in the same space this month.
Henry’s new Safe Harbor starts with one woman, then a second, executing calm, smooth, sweeping gestures in canon, the routine creating almost the sense of an aureole around the upper body. Then their arms wheel; they turn, twist into the space, and press forward softly through the arms. Two men and two women enter with the offhand, take-charge air of a flock of gulls that make themselves perfectly at home on any patch of sand, march up and down on the beach, suddenly leave, and as suddenly return. The dancers - Tamara Bliss, Christiane Chaput, Larry Crabtree, Barbara France, Cynthia Neitz and Henry - seem separate and independent, tending to keep each other at a distance with the breadth of their movement, but they’re creatures of the same mind and habit, and can influence each other instantaneously. The movement tends to be big and plain, contented with the legs passing high and the arms roomy. But intermittently, bent over, leaning on their hands, the dancers bounce their feet to a new place; lunging way forward, they slide their feet against the floor. In Marco D’Ambrosio’s spacious score, the clean, piercing trumpet notes and synthesizer chords that resound with the penetrating authority of a foghorn evoke a grand and lonely - but not dour - seascape.
Henry danced with Viola Farber, and until 1985 with Dan Wagoner, yet none of their idiosyncrasies cling to him. Henry’s Groundwork, from last year, has the same kind of spatial openness and independence as Safe Harbor, but the movement often bends sideways in the torso and arms, and slides out in the other direction with the legs. The footwork has a big, prancing feeling. There’s a neutral, peaceful atmosphere, a sense that all parts of the performing space have special value. Periodically, the four dancers cluster in sculptural poses or friezes - like an odd kind of pieta with Crabtree lightly fallen sideways into Henry’s arms, and a woman on the floor alongside; or one woman passed over head and held, while the other crouches below; or two couples standing in a diagonal double line with their hands resting secure and comfortable on each other’s shoulders; or the two women holding Crabtree upside down and gradually lowering him, while Henry slides in prone behind them. There’s a satisfying quietness in these moments, a sense of summation.
Peter Pucci, a member of Pilobolus since 1980, makes punchier, more dramatic dances. In Celina, four women - Bliss, Chaput, France and Ellen Sirot - bend and sway like some up-to-date harem of glamourpusses, excluding Sheila Lehner, in white, who comes in with a chip on her shoulder. There’s no obvious rejection of her, but eventually Lehner’s anger plainly surfaces: she picks up one of the women, and shoves another The four sit on the floor covering their heads with their skirts and later, after this meditation, form a circle of reconciliation around Lehner from which all five whirl out.
In Scribble, gymnastic Rick Kitts does a sharply punctuated, acrobatic solo full of smacks and tumbles, cute takes and chopped off gestures, pinky exercises and Egyptian walks. Big City is for eight dancers in street clothes. They flinch from the occasional spotlight, from Morton Subotnick’s abrupt musical chords. We’ve seen plenty of this second-hand cliched stuff about the stress and hostility of urban life, but Pucci handles it okay. Suspicious turns of the head, touching injured parts of the body, clutching the head, thunderous pacing around, staggering, frustration, exhaustion.
I always like the sexy imbroglios, in this case parallel duets for two men, and for a man and a woman. Both duets turn instantly violent, with immediate rejection of the advances, and develop into wrestling, kicking struggles. Eventually, the reluctant partners seem to succumb, even to become addicted to the relationship, and one of the aggressors, for example, turns into a slave, crawling after his woman, trying to hang onto her ankle. There are eight million stories in The Naked City, but evidently they’re all the same.
At. St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (February 12 to 15).
Freedom in Limits
January 27
For a second, French choreographer Maguy Marin seems severe, with her pale face, her dark brown eyes thinly rimmed with black eyeliner, her short, straight dark hair But the face has a gamine alertness, the eyes a shining liveliness and depth. Below a loose black sweater, Marin’s tights glitter with gold thread, and on her feet are fuzzy, black-and-white speckled shoes.
Marin started studying ballet as a young girl in Toulouse and began her professional dancing career with the Strasbourg Opera. Recognizing that her field of vision and range of skills were too narrow - she wanted to know abut painting, she wanted to sing - she went to Maurice Bejart’s school, Mudra, where various kinds of dance training were combined with other theatre arts. And after performing with Bejart’s Ballet du XXieme Siecle, she won the annual choreographic competition at Bagnolet, got some government money, found a studio and started, with Daniel Ambash, the Ballet Theatre de L’Arche (it became Compagnie Maguy Marin in 1984).
Since 1981, her company has been resident at the Maison des Arts in Creteil, near Paris, and her situation, cross your fingers, is pretty good. Marin’s meaty Samuel Beckett piece, May B (presented at the American Dance Festival in 1983 and at City Center last February) conjures, in movement terms, the authentic atmosphere of Beckett’s grimly humorous world, without trivializing or relying too strongly on the quirks of his particular characters. Cendrillon (Cinderella), her elaborate production for the Lyon Opera Ballet (premiered in Lyon in November 1985) is being presented this week at City Center. In traditional fairy tale ballets, like The Sleeping Beauty, the story is a peg for the dancing: the narrative impulse is often meager. The cruel and tender emotions of the characters are nicely aestheticized. But in the magical, delicate Cendrillon, nothing is pretty, and Marin comes to grips with the conflicts of the story with the most ingenuous directness and clarity.
Francoise Andret, director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, was invited to take over and reorganize that company in 1984 with the idea of presenting works of younger choreographers. She took hold with fierce energy and vision. Her invitation to Marin to choreograph Cendrillon cleverly combined an adventurous choice of choreographer with a very commercial subject. Almost without thinking, Marin said yes. She’d been working steadily with the members of her own company, and was curious and ready for a change. Most modern choreographers, when invited to make a work for a ballet company and, necessarily pressed for time, adapt their style substantially to ballet conventions. Having been trained in ballet since the age of eight, Marin was particularly nervous about being seduced by the opulent Prokofiev score and the ballet steps that came to her naturally. She could too easily imagine dancers flitting and romping to a full orchestra. Perhaps she wouldn’t be strong enough to sustain her ideas in that context.
So she boxed herself in. She conceived of the piece as a ballet of dolls or puppets, with the dancers masked. Because of the way masks limit peripheral vision, they hamper movement, and an appropriate technique had to be felt out. Marin also devised the three-story dollhouse set to restrict the open stage space. She didn’t want, however, to be tied to the pace of the narrative inherent in Prokofiev’s music, so she decided to use it only in big, lush chunks, interspersed with a sound score (by Jean Schwarz) of near-talking gaga baby noises, electronic growls, and rumbles.
From the problems she set herself, new problems arose that eventually helped determine the details of the piece. Marin planned to have dancing on the third level of the set, for example, but, once the set was finished, it was clearly impossible. “There’d have been 10 dancers dead on the floor,” she says, since, with their vision obstructed, they might easily have fallen. The staircase that descends from the ballroom in the second part was designed very steep and shallow in order not to intrude too much onto the stage. But its verticality made it dangerous to the dancers, who couldn’t see to descend it safely. So Marin has them bump down the stairs on their behinds.
Marin conceived of the characters initially in a most basic way. After a fashion, Cendrillon is a kind of lyric battle between the good toys and the wicked ones. Cendrillon and the Prince, practically children, are good - incredibly innocent. Their instantaneous love is full of reverence. Cendrillon’s father is nothing, barely there. The stepmother and stepsisters are bad. And if the stepsisters and stepmother can be part of the court, then the court must also be bad. The movement can often be clumsy, oafish, stiff-jointed, but it is always theatrically apt. The stepsisters are bulldozers, rude and overconfident; Cendrillon is tentative and dreamy. When she’s getting ready for the ball, she tries to practice dancing and keeps toppling hopelessly to the floor. She has to roll over to push herself up; she moves with the jerky stiffness and unpredictability of an infant taking her first steps. As a person, she is hardly formed.
The fairy godmother - who Marin didn’t fully imagine till very late in the development of the piece - is a mysterious being, neither female nor male. “Fairies, like angels, have no sex,” remarks Marin. Born out of the body of a huge, gurgling rag doll, it is perhaps a reincarnation of Cendrillon’s real mother, “but also a creature of the future, an extraterrestrial,” with unmeasured powers. The fairy wears a white costume, almost a military uniform, blinking with electric lights, and it wields a swordlike wand that glows like those of Star Wars. There is something in the shape of the bald head and in the expression that suggests the impenetrable alienness of Olmec jaguar-babies; something in the stances the fairy assumes that suggest the pre-Colombian ceramic figures of western Mexico.
Designer Monserrat Casanova’s costumes for the court are flattened out sideways; they have bulk, but not roundness. Many of the colors - yellow, green, pink - are bright but acid, toothache sweet. The hairdos of the stepmother and stepsisters are mops, and their padded leg and arms make them seem crudely stuffed. Cendrillon’s ball gown is just a hint, a gauzy pink crinoline. Marin wanted the masks (by Monique Luyton) to be not pretty, but sort of old, somehow unclear, as if we’re seeing them through some kind of nostalgic mist. Many are aging baby-faces, puffy and dissipated. The tall stiff perruques of the members of the court suggest disdain and menace in the way they bristle away from the skull.
On the other hand, Cendrillon and the Prince seem puzzled, mystified in expression. On their faces nothing has yet been written. This sweet boy and girl are terribly simple and strangely ethereal. Their stiff embraces are shy and tender. They just sit together at the top of the steps while the guests at the ball riot below. Dragged apart by the jealous mob of guests, they crawl back together as children might while the grownups aren’t looking. Or, when they’re trampled by the guests in a rush for peppermint scepters and lollipops, they have to be picked up and dusted off by the servants. For a moment, then, they’re frozen in position, like windup toys that have run down. Then they breathe again.
“During the first two weeks of work,” says Marin, “I thought it would not work. It was all too difficult - the masks, the set, the dancer. And then when I saw it was taking form, I was surprised. I didn’t expect to get so near the image I had in my head.”
For a second, French choreographer Maguy Marin seems severe, with her pale face, her dark brown eyes thinly rimmed with black eyeliner, her short, straight dark hair But the face has a gamine alertness, the eyes a shining liveliness and depth. Below a loose black sweater, Marin’s tights glitter with gold thread, and on her feet are fuzzy, black-and-white speckled shoes.
Marin started studying ballet as a young girl in Toulouse and began her professional dancing career with the Strasbourg Opera. Recognizing that her field of vision and range of skills were too narrow - she wanted to know abut painting, she wanted to sing - she went to Maurice Bejart’s school, Mudra, where various kinds of dance training were combined with other theatre arts. And after performing with Bejart’s Ballet du XXieme Siecle, she won the annual choreographic competition at Bagnolet, got some government money, found a studio and started, with Daniel Ambash, the Ballet Theatre de L’Arche (it became Compagnie Maguy Marin in 1984).
Since 1981, her company has been resident at the Maison des Arts in Creteil, near Paris, and her situation, cross your fingers, is pretty good. Marin’s meaty Samuel Beckett piece, May B (presented at the American Dance Festival in 1983 and at City Center last February) conjures, in movement terms, the authentic atmosphere of Beckett’s grimly humorous world, without trivializing or relying too strongly on the quirks of his particular characters. Cendrillon (Cinderella), her elaborate production for the Lyon Opera Ballet (premiered in Lyon in November 1985) is being presented this week at City Center. In traditional fairy tale ballets, like The Sleeping Beauty, the story is a peg for the dancing: the narrative impulse is often meager. The cruel and tender emotions of the characters are nicely aestheticized. But in the magical, delicate Cendrillon, nothing is pretty, and Marin comes to grips with the conflicts of the story with the most ingenuous directness and clarity.
Francoise Andret, director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, was invited to take over and reorganize that company in 1984 with the idea of presenting works of younger choreographers. She took hold with fierce energy and vision. Her invitation to Marin to choreograph Cendrillon cleverly combined an adventurous choice of choreographer with a very commercial subject. Almost without thinking, Marin said yes. She’d been working steadily with the members of her own company, and was curious and ready for a change. Most modern choreographers, when invited to make a work for a ballet company and, necessarily pressed for time, adapt their style substantially to ballet conventions. Having been trained in ballet since the age of eight, Marin was particularly nervous about being seduced by the opulent Prokofiev score and the ballet steps that came to her naturally. She could too easily imagine dancers flitting and romping to a full orchestra. Perhaps she wouldn’t be strong enough to sustain her ideas in that context.
So she boxed herself in. She conceived of the piece as a ballet of dolls or puppets, with the dancers masked. Because of the way masks limit peripheral vision, they hamper movement, and an appropriate technique had to be felt out. Marin also devised the three-story dollhouse set to restrict the open stage space. She didn’t want, however, to be tied to the pace of the narrative inherent in Prokofiev’s music, so she decided to use it only in big, lush chunks, interspersed with a sound score (by Jean Schwarz) of near-talking gaga baby noises, electronic growls, and rumbles.
From the problems she set herself, new problems arose that eventually helped determine the details of the piece. Marin planned to have dancing on the third level of the set, for example, but, once the set was finished, it was clearly impossible. “There’d have been 10 dancers dead on the floor,” she says, since, with their vision obstructed, they might easily have fallen. The staircase that descends from the ballroom in the second part was designed very steep and shallow in order not to intrude too much onto the stage. But its verticality made it dangerous to the dancers, who couldn’t see to descend it safely. So Marin has them bump down the stairs on their behinds.
Marin conceived of the characters initially in a most basic way. After a fashion, Cendrillon is a kind of lyric battle between the good toys and the wicked ones. Cendrillon and the Prince, practically children, are good - incredibly innocent. Their instantaneous love is full of reverence. Cendrillon’s father is nothing, barely there. The stepmother and stepsisters are bad. And if the stepsisters and stepmother can be part of the court, then the court must also be bad. The movement can often be clumsy, oafish, stiff-jointed, but it is always theatrically apt. The stepsisters are bulldozers, rude and overconfident; Cendrillon is tentative and dreamy. When she’s getting ready for the ball, she tries to practice dancing and keeps toppling hopelessly to the floor. She has to roll over to push herself up; she moves with the jerky stiffness and unpredictability of an infant taking her first steps. As a person, she is hardly formed.
The fairy godmother - who Marin didn’t fully imagine till very late in the development of the piece - is a mysterious being, neither female nor male. “Fairies, like angels, have no sex,” remarks Marin. Born out of the body of a huge, gurgling rag doll, it is perhaps a reincarnation of Cendrillon’s real mother, “but also a creature of the future, an extraterrestrial,” with unmeasured powers. The fairy wears a white costume, almost a military uniform, blinking with electric lights, and it wields a swordlike wand that glows like those of Star Wars. There is something in the shape of the bald head and in the expression that suggests the impenetrable alienness of Olmec jaguar-babies; something in the stances the fairy assumes that suggest the pre-Colombian ceramic figures of western Mexico.
Designer Monserrat Casanova’s costumes for the court are flattened out sideways; they have bulk, but not roundness. Many of the colors - yellow, green, pink - are bright but acid, toothache sweet. The hairdos of the stepmother and stepsisters are mops, and their padded leg and arms make them seem crudely stuffed. Cendrillon’s ball gown is just a hint, a gauzy pink crinoline. Marin wanted the masks (by Monique Luyton) to be not pretty, but sort of old, somehow unclear, as if we’re seeing them through some kind of nostalgic mist. Many are aging baby-faces, puffy and dissipated. The tall stiff perruques of the members of the court suggest disdain and menace in the way they bristle away from the skull.
On the other hand, Cendrillon and the Prince seem puzzled, mystified in expression. On their faces nothing has yet been written. This sweet boy and girl are terribly simple and strangely ethereal. Their stiff embraces are shy and tender. They just sit together at the top of the steps while the guests at the ball riot below. Dragged apart by the jealous mob of guests, they crawl back together as children might while the grownups aren’t looking. Or, when they’re trampled by the guests in a rush for peppermint scepters and lollipops, they have to be picked up and dusted off by the servants. For a moment, then, they’re frozen in position, like windup toys that have run down. Then they breathe again.
“During the first two weeks of work,” says Marin, “I thought it would not work. It was all too difficult - the masks, the set, the dancer. And then when I saw it was taking form, I was surprised. I didn’t expect to get so near the image I had in my head.”
Girl Talk
June 23
In 1985, Stephan Koplowitz presented I’m Growing, for boys from the Packer Collegiate Institute, and this year he showed its companion, I’m Growing II, with eight girls from 12 to 16, members of the Olga Dunn Dance Company II of Great Barrington. Wonderfully self-assured without being full of themselves, the girls execute easy, vigorous moves with clarity and straightforward pleasure to a collage of music music, Doris Day, whatnot.
I give Koplowitz plenty of credit for making them such suitable material. These aren’t teenagers in pain though I’m sure they suffer the usual teenage agonies. There’s a naturalness and simplicity in the way the girls take to the movement that makes it a fine complement to a text - sometimes personal, sometimes generic - in which the girls speak of their ordinary experiences and thoughts. “Girls have to be perfect, and we can’t be that.” They fix their hair and pose, snap schoolbooks closed as they walk, saunter around each other with innocent smiles. One stomps gleefully on her book in the midst of dancing. They prance in a line, push, dive, roll, reach.
The dancing in this and other of Koplowitz’s work sets the pace, supports the text, and separates its sections, giving it breathing room. In a way it’s like the rhythmic ground of a piece of music; the text is melody, and really contains the meat. I particularly enjoyed the strangely practical, innately humorous quality of much of what they have to say. “I’m not the shortest person in my class,” explains one of the younger girls, “but there are a lot of taller people.”
Famished, with Clare Maxwell, Scot Willingham, Doug Elkins and Kathryn Tufano, is a fast dance of sharp, urgent moves, with snatches of dialogue from the restaurant jungle. “Waiter!” the women call. “Waiter!” The sometimes waiters spring in, with their palms turned up as if carrying trays. Black bow ties are clipped crookedly on the collar bands of their T-shirts. But, “I’m not your waiter,” and “That’s not my table,” they say briskly. “My salad has lettuce, tomato and hair,” notes one of the women meekly to her companion. Between verbal encounters, the men and women handle each other with a sexually deft efficiency. Their dancing moves at a clip, with a tough, smacking quality.
Koplowitz’s major new piece, The Crowd...Action and Mass Emotion, with a cast of 14, including members of the Irondale Ensemble Project, is a tightly designed piece in which the group - from which people depart to verbally express their specialness or haplessness - keeps reforming as a swaying clump, as a neatly raging circle of crawling bodies. The Crowd pressed forward with a wrought-up intensity, but it sometimes seemed overly clever, like a machine that has too many fancy features and is likely, therefore, to go on the fritz at any moment. It was difficult for anything simple to emerge through the stylization and momentum of the performances. Because the acting was too pushy, I wasn’t often convinced of the humanity of the characters who kept emerging only to be swallowed up or carried off. Instead, I saw unintentional caricatures.
On the other hand, To My Anatomy, a new piece for four women, aged 12 (Kyra Himmelbaum), 17 (Brynn Eden), 35 (Kathleen Hill) and 50 (Claudia Gitelman), expertly explores with wit and tenderness the qualities of four women of different ages and experiences. Again, the dance element is largely backup, smooths the transitions, breaks up the brief episodes. This is not to diminish its importance, because, in its plain, matter-of-fact way it sets the tone. The women introspectively caress their own faces, and talk about what it means to grow older. “What is it,” asks Hill (I think), "I keep getting older and older and I don’t get any more mature?” When they announce their ages, Edyn, 17, seems conflicted, maybe angry. Hill, next, gently wrestles her to the floor. Gitelman, announcing her 50 years, turns cartwheels.
At Dance Theater Workshop (June 4 to 7).
In 1985, Stephan Koplowitz presented I’m Growing, for boys from the Packer Collegiate Institute, and this year he showed its companion, I’m Growing II, with eight girls from 12 to 16, members of the Olga Dunn Dance Company II of Great Barrington. Wonderfully self-assured without being full of themselves, the girls execute easy, vigorous moves with clarity and straightforward pleasure to a collage of music music, Doris Day, whatnot.
I give Koplowitz plenty of credit for making them such suitable material. These aren’t teenagers in pain though I’m sure they suffer the usual teenage agonies. There’s a naturalness and simplicity in the way the girls take to the movement that makes it a fine complement to a text - sometimes personal, sometimes generic - in which the girls speak of their ordinary experiences and thoughts. “Girls have to be perfect, and we can’t be that.” They fix their hair and pose, snap schoolbooks closed as they walk, saunter around each other with innocent smiles. One stomps gleefully on her book in the midst of dancing. They prance in a line, push, dive, roll, reach.
The dancing in this and other of Koplowitz’s work sets the pace, supports the text, and separates its sections, giving it breathing room. In a way it’s like the rhythmic ground of a piece of music; the text is melody, and really contains the meat. I particularly enjoyed the strangely practical, innately humorous quality of much of what they have to say. “I’m not the shortest person in my class,” explains one of the younger girls, “but there are a lot of taller people.”
Famished, with Clare Maxwell, Scot Willingham, Doug Elkins and Kathryn Tufano, is a fast dance of sharp, urgent moves, with snatches of dialogue from the restaurant jungle. “Waiter!” the women call. “Waiter!” The sometimes waiters spring in, with their palms turned up as if carrying trays. Black bow ties are clipped crookedly on the collar bands of their T-shirts. But, “I’m not your waiter,” and “That’s not my table,” they say briskly. “My salad has lettuce, tomato and hair,” notes one of the women meekly to her companion. Between verbal encounters, the men and women handle each other with a sexually deft efficiency. Their dancing moves at a clip, with a tough, smacking quality.
Koplowitz’s major new piece, The Crowd...Action and Mass Emotion, with a cast of 14, including members of the Irondale Ensemble Project, is a tightly designed piece in which the group - from which people depart to verbally express their specialness or haplessness - keeps reforming as a swaying clump, as a neatly raging circle of crawling bodies. The Crowd pressed forward with a wrought-up intensity, but it sometimes seemed overly clever, like a machine that has too many fancy features and is likely, therefore, to go on the fritz at any moment. It was difficult for anything simple to emerge through the stylization and momentum of the performances. Because the acting was too pushy, I wasn’t often convinced of the humanity of the characters who kept emerging only to be swallowed up or carried off. Instead, I saw unintentional caricatures.
On the other hand, To My Anatomy, a new piece for four women, aged 12 (Kyra Himmelbaum), 17 (Brynn Eden), 35 (Kathleen Hill) and 50 (Claudia Gitelman), expertly explores with wit and tenderness the qualities of four women of different ages and experiences. Again, the dance element is largely backup, smooths the transitions, breaks up the brief episodes. This is not to diminish its importance, because, in its plain, matter-of-fact way it sets the tone. The women introspectively caress their own faces, and talk about what it means to grow older. “What is it,” asks Hill (I think), "I keep getting older and older and I don’t get any more mature?” When they announce their ages, Edyn, 17, seems conflicted, maybe angry. Hill, next, gently wrestles her to the floor. Gitelman, announcing her 50 years, turns cartwheels.
At Dance Theater Workshop (June 4 to 7).
Group Soup
September 29
Lillo Way, who co-directed Greenhouse Dance Ensemble for 11 years before establishing her own group, demonstrated a very deft hand with dramatic vignettes in her recent concert at Marymount. But Remember When, her signature solo, dates from 1982, and I Am Rose and Other Songs, a string of six solos and duets to poem settings by Ned Rorem, is from 1981. The particular narrow but expressive distinctions of her style are muddied in the two recent group works, Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes (1986) and the new Boundary: White. Boundary: White, set to excerpts from Bach’s six piano partitas, is a playfully scooting, skipping quartet that has a nonchalant, strolling pace and spirit often too reminiscent of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade (also to Bach).
The dancers, all in white (try not to think of Taylor’s classic Aureole), start off in size places moving together, following the leader, spinning apart into variations, and reconnecting. Their initial movements are academic, balletic and unison, though done in a lighthearted way, and they wind up looping through space, with scooping arms and vining footwork. Boundary: White’s neat and just a bit giddy - too bad it’s so much of a knockoff. Last year’s Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes, which received its New York premiere, juxtaposes a trio of mock sophisticates in tuxedos (Jeff Rigby, Francie Huber and Way) against a couple (Roger Tolle and Katherine J. Smith) in bright, motley fabrics who make their first appearance as a colorful heap out of which an arm eventually pokes. To a collage sound score, the trio bends into various fleur-de-lis designs, flicking their cigarette holders and frequently tossing them away. They do some drill with three red, yellow and green chairs - flipping or spinning them, sitting, lounging, lying on the floor and sticking their feet through to push them around, sitting around lazily fidgeting. At first entwined, then sliding smoothly over each other toward the trio, Tolle and Smith seem amphibious; but when they begin to mix with the others, the differences between the two groups blur as they wander into various bland embraces.
Some sections of I am Rose and Other Songs seemed cute and dated in the glowing, overeager way they amplified the emotions or narrative suggested in the poems. Roger Tolle clasps the world to himself with unutterable happiness in “Early in the Morning,” and, quite taken with her, persistently steals close to a doubtful Francie Huber in Walt Whitman’s “Oh You,” startling her when he leans his head on her shoulder from behind at the very end. Expertly drawn little episodes, in their blithe innocence they recalled a sentimental, white-bread American Brigadoon that somehow missed the Depression and World War II.
But Katherine J. Smith was powerful, unpredictable, in Gertrude Stein’s I Am Rose,” flipping characters and moods from a child struck with shyness, to a tough, sassy woman whose whole body declares “show me!” In Whitman’s “To You,” Tolle and Huber cruise each other, reel backward; when they’re drawn together, she touches his cheek tenderly. And Jeff Rigby and Smith throw themselves drunkenly around in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” Smith pounces on Rigby like a monkey; he swings her rudely off. Every move, gesture, glance, is telling in these economical pieces. Way’s Remember When is a sharp-edged series of portraits to six tart and urbane songs by Leiber and Stoller, as sung on tape by Joan Morris, whose musical wit is perfectly gauged.
Way’s equally acute in her dancing. Wearing a low-waisted ‘20s-ish party dress, she twines graciously, pushes an imaginary swing, and appears to swing herself, to a jaundiced song that punctures our nostalgia for the good old days. In the subsequent tango, she dips into quasi-oriental profile poses and gets mugged by her own treacherous hand. In another, recalling “when you loved me,” she presses her hands against her cheeks and wrenches her face out of shape. She starts out dragging a dress underfoot in “I’m Ready to Begin Again” (the opening lyrics have her teeth in a glass, and her hair in a drawer, so she’s no spring chicken). Gradually, determinedly, she creeps into the dress, assembles herself in elegance, lifts her arms and sweeps around. It has a bitter, triumphant edge.
I admire the pungency and trim eloquence of Way’s dramatic miniatures. She’s savvy about conveying character through movement without sacrificing dance values, but that talent doesn’t serve her in the recent group pieces - maybe because there’s no one to care about. Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes is lumpy and unfocused; I’m not sure it has a subject. And Boundary:White is too much of a simpleminded diversion for happy campers.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (September 10 to 17).
Lillo Way, who co-directed Greenhouse Dance Ensemble for 11 years before establishing her own group, demonstrated a very deft hand with dramatic vignettes in her recent concert at Marymount. But Remember When, her signature solo, dates from 1982, and I Am Rose and Other Songs, a string of six solos and duets to poem settings by Ned Rorem, is from 1981. The particular narrow but expressive distinctions of her style are muddied in the two recent group works, Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes (1986) and the new Boundary: White. Boundary: White, set to excerpts from Bach’s six piano partitas, is a playfully scooting, skipping quartet that has a nonchalant, strolling pace and spirit often too reminiscent of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade (also to Bach).
The dancers, all in white (try not to think of Taylor’s classic Aureole), start off in size places moving together, following the leader, spinning apart into variations, and reconnecting. Their initial movements are academic, balletic and unison, though done in a lighthearted way, and they wind up looping through space, with scooping arms and vining footwork. Boundary: White’s neat and just a bit giddy - too bad it’s so much of a knockoff. Last year’s Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes, which received its New York premiere, juxtaposes a trio of mock sophisticates in tuxedos (Jeff Rigby, Francie Huber and Way) against a couple (Roger Tolle and Katherine J. Smith) in bright, motley fabrics who make their first appearance as a colorful heap out of which an arm eventually pokes. To a collage sound score, the trio bends into various fleur-de-lis designs, flicking their cigarette holders and frequently tossing them away. They do some drill with three red, yellow and green chairs - flipping or spinning them, sitting, lounging, lying on the floor and sticking their feet through to push them around, sitting around lazily fidgeting. At first entwined, then sliding smoothly over each other toward the trio, Tolle and Smith seem amphibious; but when they begin to mix with the others, the differences between the two groups blur as they wander into various bland embraces.
Some sections of I am Rose and Other Songs seemed cute and dated in the glowing, overeager way they amplified the emotions or narrative suggested in the poems. Roger Tolle clasps the world to himself with unutterable happiness in “Early in the Morning,” and, quite taken with her, persistently steals close to a doubtful Francie Huber in Walt Whitman’s “Oh You,” startling her when he leans his head on her shoulder from behind at the very end. Expertly drawn little episodes, in their blithe innocence they recalled a sentimental, white-bread American Brigadoon that somehow missed the Depression and World War II.
But Katherine J. Smith was powerful, unpredictable, in Gertrude Stein’s I Am Rose,” flipping characters and moods from a child struck with shyness, to a tough, sassy woman whose whole body declares “show me!” In Whitman’s “To You,” Tolle and Huber cruise each other, reel backward; when they’re drawn together, she touches his cheek tenderly. And Jeff Rigby and Smith throw themselves drunkenly around in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” Smith pounces on Rigby like a monkey; he swings her rudely off. Every move, gesture, glance, is telling in these economical pieces. Way’s Remember When is a sharp-edged series of portraits to six tart and urbane songs by Leiber and Stoller, as sung on tape by Joan Morris, whose musical wit is perfectly gauged.
Way’s equally acute in her dancing. Wearing a low-waisted ‘20s-ish party dress, she twines graciously, pushes an imaginary swing, and appears to swing herself, to a jaundiced song that punctures our nostalgia for the good old days. In the subsequent tango, she dips into quasi-oriental profile poses and gets mugged by her own treacherous hand. In another, recalling “when you loved me,” she presses her hands against her cheeks and wrenches her face out of shape. She starts out dragging a dress underfoot in “I’m Ready to Begin Again” (the opening lyrics have her teeth in a glass, and her hair in a drawer, so she’s no spring chicken). Gradually, determinedly, she creeps into the dress, assembles herself in elegance, lifts her arms and sweeps around. It has a bitter, triumphant edge.
I admire the pungency and trim eloquence of Way’s dramatic miniatures. She’s savvy about conveying character through movement without sacrificing dance values, but that talent doesn’t serve her in the recent group pieces - maybe because there’s no one to care about. Quintet with Chairs and Cigarettes is lumpy and unfocused; I’m not sure it has a subject. And Boundary:White is too much of a simpleminded diversion for happy campers.
At Marymount Manhattan Theater (September 10 to 17).
High as a Kite
April 28
I don’t see any good reason why I should moderate my enthusiasm for Randy Warshaw’s Fragile Anchor to a reasonable level. I’m still a little giddy from the experience, and, frankly, I’d like to keep it going.
In Fragile Anchor, Warshaw, a beautifully silky dancer - until recently a member of Trisha Brown’s company and a founding member of the improvising group, Channel Z - put together a most satisfying and exhilarating whole, set to a rhythmically hypnotic, richly melodic score by Andy Teistein. Commissioned for the piece, the Teirstein Quartet for Strings and Marimba is one of the finest pieces of music for dance I’ve heard lately, but Warshaw never wallowed in its rhythms or was compelled by them, but allowed them to buoy the dancing.
Mariateresa Grilli provided loose, flowing costumes of white and gold; their rippling action ornamented the movement without hiding it. Miran Mohar, of Yugoslavia, designed a painted floor of white, red and gold that suggested the inlaid marble of some Barouqe palace. He side-projected faint, geometric designs across a rough-edged, white oval backdrop that echoed the floor in a cloudier form and evoked the visual frame of myriad painterly Ascensions (all handsomely lit by Rick Pettit).
But it was the audience that was in heaven. The dancers - Frey Faust, Irene Hultman, Joseph Lennon, Susan Milani, Meg Stuart and Warshaw - didn’t need to be lifted up; they had to be high already on their own glorious dancing. Technically, the performers danced at the very edge of possibility - sometimes, I think, beyond what they thought they could do - and with a fullness of being that’s rare anywhere, anytime Strikingly individual, they made a beautifully honed ensemble, tuned to a thrilling pitch.
Though the women were excellent, the men absolutely took your breath away. Frey Faust, who seems to be dancing everywhere these days, moves with astonishingly controlled power and finesse. Joseph Lennon, who used to dance with Merce Cunningham, and whom I admired very much for his avidity and flamboyance in Regine Chopinot’s vulgar fashion freak show, Le Defile, danced with warmth and subtle brilliance. Warshaw himself is incredibly bold and easy.
In Fragile Anchor, Warshaw washes the dancers on and off the stage with the utmost facility, creating a flood of dancing that, by virtue of the vital breath that shapes its structure and the enthusiasm that carries it onward, creates a wonderful sense of freedom, superbly modulated and phrased. These dancers seem to be doing exactly what we would choose to do at any moment. Warshaw weaves a fabric of inventive, often spectacular, partnering, dizzy swirls and rushes, quiet moments of solemn contact that rapidly evaporate but whose auras linger like the memory of a favored scent. With Lennon slowly dropping, and Warshaw standing, but pulling away, for example, they gradually let their hands trail apart; at the instant of separation, Warshaw wheels around and grabs Lennon as he’s about to topple.
One of the remarkable things in this dancing is the articulateness of the whole body and the intelligence with which it is used, the instantaneous democracy that’s inherent in the movement. One senses the body alive in all its parts, the sensorial information constantly flowing, the freedom of any part to take the lead. There is no abandonment of authority to some obvious physical center from which control radiates; the center is everywhere. This produces an inherent playfulness in the movement that has nothing to do with thinking. Joy is what Warshaw’s piece is about, as far as I’m concerned, and how various and complex are the ways of feeling good. It’s not all smooth and gentle, but fiery, full of bumps and little explosions - like the split-second way Warshaw whips Milani off the floor and catches her against his chest. Even when the dancers are grounded - crouching, scooting, tangling - there’s length in their bodies. But it is surprising, without any show-off jumps and leaps, how much of the dancing happens off the floor. It seems to glide and swoop, supported on streams of energy the way a hawk soars on updrafts. I wanted it never to end.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 2 to 5).
I don’t see any good reason why I should moderate my enthusiasm for Randy Warshaw’s Fragile Anchor to a reasonable level. I’m still a little giddy from the experience, and, frankly, I’d like to keep it going.
In Fragile Anchor, Warshaw, a beautifully silky dancer - until recently a member of Trisha Brown’s company and a founding member of the improvising group, Channel Z - put together a most satisfying and exhilarating whole, set to a rhythmically hypnotic, richly melodic score by Andy Teistein. Commissioned for the piece, the Teirstein Quartet for Strings and Marimba is one of the finest pieces of music for dance I’ve heard lately, but Warshaw never wallowed in its rhythms or was compelled by them, but allowed them to buoy the dancing.
Mariateresa Grilli provided loose, flowing costumes of white and gold; their rippling action ornamented the movement without hiding it. Miran Mohar, of Yugoslavia, designed a painted floor of white, red and gold that suggested the inlaid marble of some Barouqe palace. He side-projected faint, geometric designs across a rough-edged, white oval backdrop that echoed the floor in a cloudier form and evoked the visual frame of myriad painterly Ascensions (all handsomely lit by Rick Pettit).
But it was the audience that was in heaven. The dancers - Frey Faust, Irene Hultman, Joseph Lennon, Susan Milani, Meg Stuart and Warshaw - didn’t need to be lifted up; they had to be high already on their own glorious dancing. Technically, the performers danced at the very edge of possibility - sometimes, I think, beyond what they thought they could do - and with a fullness of being that’s rare anywhere, anytime Strikingly individual, they made a beautifully honed ensemble, tuned to a thrilling pitch.
Though the women were excellent, the men absolutely took your breath away. Frey Faust, who seems to be dancing everywhere these days, moves with astonishingly controlled power and finesse. Joseph Lennon, who used to dance with Merce Cunningham, and whom I admired very much for his avidity and flamboyance in Regine Chopinot’s vulgar fashion freak show, Le Defile, danced with warmth and subtle brilliance. Warshaw himself is incredibly bold and easy.
In Fragile Anchor, Warshaw washes the dancers on and off the stage with the utmost facility, creating a flood of dancing that, by virtue of the vital breath that shapes its structure and the enthusiasm that carries it onward, creates a wonderful sense of freedom, superbly modulated and phrased. These dancers seem to be doing exactly what we would choose to do at any moment. Warshaw weaves a fabric of inventive, often spectacular, partnering, dizzy swirls and rushes, quiet moments of solemn contact that rapidly evaporate but whose auras linger like the memory of a favored scent. With Lennon slowly dropping, and Warshaw standing, but pulling away, for example, they gradually let their hands trail apart; at the instant of separation, Warshaw wheels around and grabs Lennon as he’s about to topple.
One of the remarkable things in this dancing is the articulateness of the whole body and the intelligence with which it is used, the instantaneous democracy that’s inherent in the movement. One senses the body alive in all its parts, the sensorial information constantly flowing, the freedom of any part to take the lead. There is no abandonment of authority to some obvious physical center from which control radiates; the center is everywhere. This produces an inherent playfulness in the movement that has nothing to do with thinking. Joy is what Warshaw’s piece is about, as far as I’m concerned, and how various and complex are the ways of feeling good. It’s not all smooth and gentle, but fiery, full of bumps and little explosions - like the split-second way Warshaw whips Milani off the floor and catches her against his chest. Even when the dancers are grounded - crouching, scooting, tangling - there’s length in their bodies. But it is surprising, without any show-off jumps and leaps, how much of the dancing happens off the floor. It seems to glide and swoop, supported on streams of energy the way a hawk soars on updrafts. I wanted it never to end.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 2 to 5).
Honeymoon Hotel
September 22
Seattle-based Llory Wilson presented two works of cool intimacy on the final programs of Dance Theater Workshop’s “Out of Towners” series. The major piece, Twin Falls, is in three parts, choreographed with Wilson’s long-time friend Rachel Brumer, and was originally presented as a collaboration between six Seattle artists (including a 23-minute film by Lisa Farnham, a set by Beliz Brother, live music and text performed in sign language). It may be quite a step down from the original to the bare-bones version brought to New York, but I didn’t mind the empty stage or the taped music.
Beautifully executed, the opening quartet, Wilson’s Nocturnal House, was very much in tune with the unison activities of Twin Falls in the quiet way the two pairs of women fit themselves together in slowly evolving sequences of sculptural poses and interlocking, embracing forms. In Twin Falls, performed by Wilson and Kathleen Kelly, I guessed that Kelly was the choreographer - because she’s sometimes a hair’s breadth sharper in her attack, slightly more independent. So much for my detective instincts.
Though they’re both blond and about the same height, Wilson and Kelly aren’t look-alikes. But you definitely see them as twins; they move in perfect synchrony, with similar clarity and smoothness, and with, I imagine, the same idea in their heads. It seems quite natural that they should share the same gestures, since you imagine they share the same backlog of experiences. They’re bonded as if through the common routines and habits of everyday life - like friends who live in each other’s pockets. In the first section, they’re wearing loose, handsome shirts that curve down behind into a longer pleated tail. The look is at once plain and fancy, workmanlike and fine. The shirts are quite modest, even prim, in their tailored look (particularly around the neckline), but the way they come down just below the belly in front but cover the buttocks fully curiously suggests a sexual vulnerability that’s otherwise absent from the piece.
The stiffness in Wilson’s use of the straight leg sometimes gives the performers the remoteness and stalky, elongated look of giraffes nibbling on the topmost leaves. Their hands gesture in delicate but finicky ways that contrast with their bodies’ more simply designed moves. There’s a little twisting, scooping motion that brings hand to mouth. Or the index finger may be inserted in the mouth and tasted; then it pushes away the fingers of the other hand. Legs flick back, kick, swivel, and extend with a kind of thoughtfulness. Their bodies swing, rock, shake, twist and fall, as their heads nod. They take slow, tilted turns or walk stooped over, dowdy as storks. Bent over, weight on their hands, they drag their lagging feet along. The substance of all this is in their harmony, in the firmness of their accord. In the second section the women, wearing slips, with foreheads pressed into their hands, sit on white wooden chairs. Their parallel gesture are punctuated by noisy, sharply expelled breaths that I thought of as gasps (though that’s the reverse), and that reminded a neighbor of the panting practiced in natural childbirth classes. Wilson and Kelly pull themselves up, drop, clench their hands, mingling those fierce, spasmodic breaths with angular gestures of the hands and head. They stretch, clutch, shoot their arms out, convulse, bounce their heads, clench their stomachs, lift their arms or wrap them around, thrust with swinging fists, piston their arms, let the motion smooth out and then peer through their hands. Mild, even ladylike gestures are interspersed. They grasp their thighs, leg, ankles and stamp their feet, deliver a sequence of snapping diagonal signals and waves.
Eventually, they slip into canon, leaning and rocking just one step apart. But instead of dividing them, this carries the sense of unity they generate into a new rhythmic scheme. The transition makes them stronger. But Twin Falls has an extreme quality of self-absorption, a mesmerizing sense that there is no world beyond these two women. Ultimately, the total lack of stress between them seems too wishful, though they prove its authenticity in their dancing. In the final section, which is much less strict in design - more like fooling around - the women wear tights and tops in two shades of blue, and dance to boppity music with sweet vocals. When one falls the other catches her and lowers her softly. They get caught on each other, jump into each other’s arms, and take turns supporting each other in various ways while reviewing some of the material of the first section in a context of greater mutual dependency and manipulation.
The quality of their friendship and cooperation is nearly instinctive, but there are no surprises in it. Their persistent comradeliness is touching and almost too complete. I overprized the very minimal interpretive differences I saw between Kelly and Wilson - those differences were all that gave me the sense that I was watching individuals, not clones. The only conflict in Twin Falls seems internal, in the second section, but none of its stridency and edginess is transferred between the women or into the final section. Between Wilson and Kelly everything is smooth and ideal. Whatever is rough, tough, hard to bear is hidden from view, even from consciousness. In Twin Falls, unlike the rest of the world, the honeymoon’s never over.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 27 to 29).
Seattle-based Llory Wilson presented two works of cool intimacy on the final programs of Dance Theater Workshop’s “Out of Towners” series. The major piece, Twin Falls, is in three parts, choreographed with Wilson’s long-time friend Rachel Brumer, and was originally presented as a collaboration between six Seattle artists (including a 23-minute film by Lisa Farnham, a set by Beliz Brother, live music and text performed in sign language). It may be quite a step down from the original to the bare-bones version brought to New York, but I didn’t mind the empty stage or the taped music.
Beautifully executed, the opening quartet, Wilson’s Nocturnal House, was very much in tune with the unison activities of Twin Falls in the quiet way the two pairs of women fit themselves together in slowly evolving sequences of sculptural poses and interlocking, embracing forms. In Twin Falls, performed by Wilson and Kathleen Kelly, I guessed that Kelly was the choreographer - because she’s sometimes a hair’s breadth sharper in her attack, slightly more independent. So much for my detective instincts.
Though they’re both blond and about the same height, Wilson and Kelly aren’t look-alikes. But you definitely see them as twins; they move in perfect synchrony, with similar clarity and smoothness, and with, I imagine, the same idea in their heads. It seems quite natural that they should share the same gestures, since you imagine they share the same backlog of experiences. They’re bonded as if through the common routines and habits of everyday life - like friends who live in each other’s pockets. In the first section, they’re wearing loose, handsome shirts that curve down behind into a longer pleated tail. The look is at once plain and fancy, workmanlike and fine. The shirts are quite modest, even prim, in their tailored look (particularly around the neckline), but the way they come down just below the belly in front but cover the buttocks fully curiously suggests a sexual vulnerability that’s otherwise absent from the piece.
The stiffness in Wilson’s use of the straight leg sometimes gives the performers the remoteness and stalky, elongated look of giraffes nibbling on the topmost leaves. Their hands gesture in delicate but finicky ways that contrast with their bodies’ more simply designed moves. There’s a little twisting, scooping motion that brings hand to mouth. Or the index finger may be inserted in the mouth and tasted; then it pushes away the fingers of the other hand. Legs flick back, kick, swivel, and extend with a kind of thoughtfulness. Their bodies swing, rock, shake, twist and fall, as their heads nod. They take slow, tilted turns or walk stooped over, dowdy as storks. Bent over, weight on their hands, they drag their lagging feet along. The substance of all this is in their harmony, in the firmness of their accord. In the second section the women, wearing slips, with foreheads pressed into their hands, sit on white wooden chairs. Their parallel gesture are punctuated by noisy, sharply expelled breaths that I thought of as gasps (though that’s the reverse), and that reminded a neighbor of the panting practiced in natural childbirth classes. Wilson and Kelly pull themselves up, drop, clench their hands, mingling those fierce, spasmodic breaths with angular gestures of the hands and head. They stretch, clutch, shoot their arms out, convulse, bounce their heads, clench their stomachs, lift their arms or wrap them around, thrust with swinging fists, piston their arms, let the motion smooth out and then peer through their hands. Mild, even ladylike gestures are interspersed. They grasp their thighs, leg, ankles and stamp their feet, deliver a sequence of snapping diagonal signals and waves.
Eventually, they slip into canon, leaning and rocking just one step apart. But instead of dividing them, this carries the sense of unity they generate into a new rhythmic scheme. The transition makes them stronger. But Twin Falls has an extreme quality of self-absorption, a mesmerizing sense that there is no world beyond these two women. Ultimately, the total lack of stress between them seems too wishful, though they prove its authenticity in their dancing. In the final section, which is much less strict in design - more like fooling around - the women wear tights and tops in two shades of blue, and dance to boppity music with sweet vocals. When one falls the other catches her and lowers her softly. They get caught on each other, jump into each other’s arms, and take turns supporting each other in various ways while reviewing some of the material of the first section in a context of greater mutual dependency and manipulation.
The quality of their friendship and cooperation is nearly instinctive, but there are no surprises in it. Their persistent comradeliness is touching and almost too complete. I overprized the very minimal interpretive differences I saw between Kelly and Wilson - those differences were all that gave me the sense that I was watching individuals, not clones. The only conflict in Twin Falls seems internal, in the second section, but none of its stridency and edginess is transferred between the women or into the final section. Between Wilson and Kelly everything is smooth and ideal. Whatever is rough, tough, hard to bear is hidden from view, even from consciousness. In Twin Falls, unlike the rest of the world, the honeymoon’s never over.
At Dance Theater Workshop (August 27 to 29).
Knock, Knock