1988 CONTINUED
Meeting Monet
June 19
The Asia Society had to lay on an extra performance by Kazuo Ohno because the ticket demand was so great, and the callers were so aggressive the box office person threatened to quit. All this for a feeble, 81-year-old man whose dances are mostly in his mind? Not quite - although sometimes you wonder.
Ohno is amazing, tottering around the stage in ashen makeup, his black hair like Chopin's or like a formal Japanese coiffure in the early stages of collapse, and garbed, perhaps, in a thrift-shop treasure of a ball gown. His use of feminine attire is fascinating; clearly, he adores the fine dresses, the flowered hats. I'm sure if you went shopping with him you'd lose him among the clothes racks in no time. but for him, dress up isn't camp or even disguise; it's more nearly revelation, but not merely of his own feminine aspect. He has said that he is showing the feminine and masculine aspects of the universe. Ohno's style of Butoh is not the post-nuclear, theatrical super-primitivism of Sankai Juku or Dai Rakuda Kan. It's very personal, a microcosmic exploration deep into his own soul, his private memory, not into the Japanese unconscious. His dances seem full of delicate, nearly forgotten aromas, and watching them is more like inhaling than seeing. You can feel the truth in his performance, though explanations are hopeless.
Even the unusually rational program notes for Suiren - Ohno's reflections on Monet and Giverny, which are at the root of the piece - can rarely be directly connected to what happens on stage. Suiren is a duet work, with Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito usually appearing alternately. to a very quiet sound of crickets, Ohno enters in a fragile white gown carrying a white lace parasol that behaves as if it might lift off if he didn't hang onto it. Wearing a garland on his head like some mid-nineteenth century sylphide, he sets the parasol aside and moves in slightly crumpled body postures that are both sad and eager, gesturing with limp, floating hands. Trembling, vulnerable, he peers at an invisible world with extraordinary inquisitiveness and awe.
His choice of occasional music is shamelessly, though elegantly, sentimental; he picks the kind of stuff that makes you moony (like Schubert and Listz piano works played by Horowitz; Kathleen Battle singing Schubert's "Nacht und Traum"), but Pink Floyd's bass punches in the first interlude. Yoshito Ohno, in a champagne suit, appears in back while his father's wilted figure bends its head, lets its hands go slack. Yoshito raises his arms halfway, a little like Dracula, deliberate and threatening, but as he approaches Ohno he softens. Putting his hands on Ohno's waist, he sways him from side to side. Ohno falls to the ground. Lying on his back, he's like an infant - expectant, full of questions.
Yoshito is also a beautiful performer, as a suave Edwardian samurai in his linen suit. He brings his hands to his face as if cowering, kneels and presses his hands to the floor. He turns away, one shoulder pulled high with tension, and raises his clawed hands. Whatever is stern, knotted up in him, erupts with erratic force. In one of the most exquisite sections, Ohno, wearing a loose yellow kimono, comes on like a blind man, with a cane whose tip he slides along the floor. His bare, whitened legs, poking out of the robe, seem almost pitiful, though they also look strong and well-toned. Yoshito is crouching fearful, locked in his own inner world. Ohno looks upwards and the light bathes his face. Yoshito looks up too. There's the sound of rain, a gentle rumble of thunder, then soft, nasal, tremulous singing. Ohno kneels to polish the cane with the edge of his robe. He kisses it, I think. Despite his incredible gentleness and fragility, you sense Martha Graham's determination and majesty in him. Crouching, the robe half on, half off, he clings to the cane like a beggar to his last possession.
The end is formal, but stunning. Ohno, now wearing a tux and looking rather dapper, moves as if his body's been gutted. His clawed hands curve and pat the air. Yoshito enters from an upstage corner in a modest velvet dress of brownish maroon. With a red rose pinned to his bosom, an elaborately feathered hat that partly shields one cheek, and the parasol that was Ohno's in scene one. The sense of mystery is huge. It's one of those mind-fucking frozen moments, when too many inexpressible things are about to coincide. He walks very slowly downstage, then partly turns towards Ohno, without any recognition of his presence. Ohno seems almost to melt with tenderness. Nearly overcome, he walks in Yoshito's direction. But it's a little like those ballets where the hero just misses his dead love and grasps handfuls of air instead. Ohno winds up several feet away from Yoshito. There's an immeasurable distance between them; one may not even know the other is there, though Ohno's desire is enormous. He touches his heart, bows. Both solemnly turn front.
At Asia Society (June 28 through July 1).
The Asia Society had to lay on an extra performance by Kazuo Ohno because the ticket demand was so great, and the callers were so aggressive the box office person threatened to quit. All this for a feeble, 81-year-old man whose dances are mostly in his mind? Not quite - although sometimes you wonder.
Ohno is amazing, tottering around the stage in ashen makeup, his black hair like Chopin's or like a formal Japanese coiffure in the early stages of collapse, and garbed, perhaps, in a thrift-shop treasure of a ball gown. His use of feminine attire is fascinating; clearly, he adores the fine dresses, the flowered hats. I'm sure if you went shopping with him you'd lose him among the clothes racks in no time. but for him, dress up isn't camp or even disguise; it's more nearly revelation, but not merely of his own feminine aspect. He has said that he is showing the feminine and masculine aspects of the universe. Ohno's style of Butoh is not the post-nuclear, theatrical super-primitivism of Sankai Juku or Dai Rakuda Kan. It's very personal, a microcosmic exploration deep into his own soul, his private memory, not into the Japanese unconscious. His dances seem full of delicate, nearly forgotten aromas, and watching them is more like inhaling than seeing. You can feel the truth in his performance, though explanations are hopeless.
Even the unusually rational program notes for Suiren - Ohno's reflections on Monet and Giverny, which are at the root of the piece - can rarely be directly connected to what happens on stage. Suiren is a duet work, with Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito usually appearing alternately. to a very quiet sound of crickets, Ohno enters in a fragile white gown carrying a white lace parasol that behaves as if it might lift off if he didn't hang onto it. Wearing a garland on his head like some mid-nineteenth century sylphide, he sets the parasol aside and moves in slightly crumpled body postures that are both sad and eager, gesturing with limp, floating hands. Trembling, vulnerable, he peers at an invisible world with extraordinary inquisitiveness and awe.
His choice of occasional music is shamelessly, though elegantly, sentimental; he picks the kind of stuff that makes you moony (like Schubert and Listz piano works played by Horowitz; Kathleen Battle singing Schubert's "Nacht und Traum"), but Pink Floyd's bass punches in the first interlude. Yoshito Ohno, in a champagne suit, appears in back while his father's wilted figure bends its head, lets its hands go slack. Yoshito raises his arms halfway, a little like Dracula, deliberate and threatening, but as he approaches Ohno he softens. Putting his hands on Ohno's waist, he sways him from side to side. Ohno falls to the ground. Lying on his back, he's like an infant - expectant, full of questions.
Yoshito is also a beautiful performer, as a suave Edwardian samurai in his linen suit. He brings his hands to his face as if cowering, kneels and presses his hands to the floor. He turns away, one shoulder pulled high with tension, and raises his clawed hands. Whatever is stern, knotted up in him, erupts with erratic force. In one of the most exquisite sections, Ohno, wearing a loose yellow kimono, comes on like a blind man, with a cane whose tip he slides along the floor. His bare, whitened legs, poking out of the robe, seem almost pitiful, though they also look strong and well-toned. Yoshito is crouching fearful, locked in his own inner world. Ohno looks upwards and the light bathes his face. Yoshito looks up too. There's the sound of rain, a gentle rumble of thunder, then soft, nasal, tremulous singing. Ohno kneels to polish the cane with the edge of his robe. He kisses it, I think. Despite his incredible gentleness and fragility, you sense Martha Graham's determination and majesty in him. Crouching, the robe half on, half off, he clings to the cane like a beggar to his last possession.
The end is formal, but stunning. Ohno, now wearing a tux and looking rather dapper, moves as if his body's been gutted. His clawed hands curve and pat the air. Yoshito enters from an upstage corner in a modest velvet dress of brownish maroon. With a red rose pinned to his bosom, an elaborately feathered hat that partly shields one cheek, and the parasol that was Ohno's in scene one. The sense of mystery is huge. It's one of those mind-fucking frozen moments, when too many inexpressible things are about to coincide. He walks very slowly downstage, then partly turns towards Ohno, without any recognition of his presence. Ohno seems almost to melt with tenderness. Nearly overcome, he walks in Yoshito's direction. But it's a little like those ballets where the hero just misses his dead love and grasps handfuls of air instead. Ohno winds up several feet away from Yoshito. There's an immeasurable distance between them; one may not even know the other is there, though Ohno's desire is enormous. He touches his heart, bows. Both solemnly turn front.
At Asia Society (June 28 through July 1).
Moo
March 16
Anthony Morgan introduces Cows (1983) with dancers in Holstein-splotched costumes holding flat cow masks before their faces. They slowly swing their torsos, take stiff-legged, flat-backed walks, let their hands flick across their backs like tails swishing at flies. The two-D masks on three-D bodies bend perspective in an intriguing way. After the introductory family portrait, wide-eyed “lonesome cow” Judith Garay (a long time associate of Morgan’s and until recently, a principal with the Martha Graham company) in quiet misery plays with a small red heart, lies down shivering mightily, and tosses it away. Two cows lumber across, paying her no mind. Three yokels (Morgan, Joseph McLaughlin and Christopher Strauss) shove each other around happily, tackling and leapfrogging one another. Then they knife Garay, carve her up and walk off. Just another fun day.
The sudden, blithe, all-in-a-days-work ruthlessness is quite a little shock. And the next section follows it up with a bovine fiesta – they roll over, twist, and kick up their hooves. When the fellas join the party, leaping and turning (their rigorous gestures include the motions of milking) the cows come after them in a playful spirit, chasing them with pointy fingers like horns. Then the guys wrap their slim red bandanas around the throat-level handles of the cow masks. The cows drop as the red cloths fly gaily upward like streams of blood.
Canadian-born Morgan trained at the Graham-oriented London School of Contemporary Dance, he performed with Graham, Pearl Lang and Bertram Ross, among others; and, not surprisingly, the presumptions of a Grahamesque dramatic style are evident in the tone and shape of his more emotional dances. Three Solitudes (1981) is set to pungent songs by Mikia Theodorakis that Morgan uses crudely relying too heavily on their continuity and urgent feeling. His solo links together images of pained striving – arms shooting out, clenched swings, hands pressing against his body, fierce rolls across the stage – but the emotion generated is merely pictorial. Starting at the peak of frustration, emotionally Solitudes has nowhere to go. In Garay’s part she’s restrained, serious, reaching into sweeping turns out of a core of a deep hurt. In the dust that closes the piece the reaches are softer. The dancers sway and heave together briefly, but their twisted reaching gestures pull them elsewhere. They hardly see each other.
At Nikolais/Louis ChoreoSpace (March 3 to 6).
Anthony Morgan introduces Cows (1983) with dancers in Holstein-splotched costumes holding flat cow masks before their faces. They slowly swing their torsos, take stiff-legged, flat-backed walks, let their hands flick across their backs like tails swishing at flies. The two-D masks on three-D bodies bend perspective in an intriguing way. After the introductory family portrait, wide-eyed “lonesome cow” Judith Garay (a long time associate of Morgan’s and until recently, a principal with the Martha Graham company) in quiet misery plays with a small red heart, lies down shivering mightily, and tosses it away. Two cows lumber across, paying her no mind. Three yokels (Morgan, Joseph McLaughlin and Christopher Strauss) shove each other around happily, tackling and leapfrogging one another. Then they knife Garay, carve her up and walk off. Just another fun day.
The sudden, blithe, all-in-a-days-work ruthlessness is quite a little shock. And the next section follows it up with a bovine fiesta – they roll over, twist, and kick up their hooves. When the fellas join the party, leaping and turning (their rigorous gestures include the motions of milking) the cows come after them in a playful spirit, chasing them with pointy fingers like horns. Then the guys wrap their slim red bandanas around the throat-level handles of the cow masks. The cows drop as the red cloths fly gaily upward like streams of blood.
Canadian-born Morgan trained at the Graham-oriented London School of Contemporary Dance, he performed with Graham, Pearl Lang and Bertram Ross, among others; and, not surprisingly, the presumptions of a Grahamesque dramatic style are evident in the tone and shape of his more emotional dances. Three Solitudes (1981) is set to pungent songs by Mikia Theodorakis that Morgan uses crudely relying too heavily on their continuity and urgent feeling. His solo links together images of pained striving – arms shooting out, clenched swings, hands pressing against his body, fierce rolls across the stage – but the emotion generated is merely pictorial. Starting at the peak of frustration, emotionally Solitudes has nowhere to go. In Garay’s part she’s restrained, serious, reaching into sweeping turns out of a core of a deep hurt. In the dust that closes the piece the reaches are softer. The dancers sway and heave together briefly, but their twisted reaching gestures pull them elsewhere. They hardly see each other.
At Nikolais/Louis ChoreoSpace (March 3 to 6).
Mystery Woman
March 23
In her solos, Phoebe Neville, who has been choreographing since the early '60's, is a performer of distinctive and quietly assertive presence, solemn and mysteriously serene. In Ladydance 1974), her soft steps, cagey, glances, the economy with which she lifts or flicks her hands, her abrupt stamps or jumps, the way she snaps her limbs around, give a feeling of slightly teasing severity. When she suddenly loosens a little (her bound-up hair comes free) and throws herself about with zest, peppering her dancing with hard little jumps, her gestures remain contained, insistent rather than spacious. As a character, she's got a big secret that her gestures and glances dispense hints of. But basically she keeps mum. Woman as mystery.
Wearing a long glittering, blue gown in her new Watch This Space, she has a peculiar, chaste authority. Though her smooth, deliberate gestures give way to vaguer, more open turns, twists, sudden dives, and a fluttery stumble-and-recovery, her arms weave a protective field that makes her untouchable, like Aurora guarded by the bramble hedge. Neville's rare humor is sly, ironic, subterranean, and some cases to the fore in a coy new duet with long-time associate Tryntje Shapli. Set to music by Josef Wittman, "Anitergum II Hohodowndownho",not surprisingly has a chipper, country dancing quality - but Neville and Shapli spend the entire piece sitting on the floor. In flouncy print dresses and blouses with puffed shoulders, they behave with a period charm (circa Meet Me In St. Louis), like best friends at a picnic. Lying about, in close, usually symmetrical poses, they look at each other and look away, They crisscross their feet, roll lazily, circle their toes. Neville awkwardly rests her chin on Shapli's forehead and pushes down in a clumsy, friendly challenge that's like something a chimpanzee might do. The innocent insinuations of their relationship are delivered in an idle conversation of modest poses. Sternness, outrage, flicker momentarily; only their arms are allowed to be really expansive.
In her recently completed 5 Movements, Neville demonstrates her flair for refinement and detail and her ability to move dancers in clear, effective, designs. She keeps the space alive. But the piece's smooth, minimalist style is too flat and inexpressive, its impetus too mechanical. Set to a guitar and harmonizer score by Scott Johnson, and with motley, semi-punk costumes (by Sally Ann Parsons, painted by Julianne Kroboth), 5 Movements is intended (according to the press release), at least partly, as an evocation of the city. There's nothing urban about it except spurts of restlessness and numbness and some very literal episodes of imitation spray-paint shaking and graffiti writing. It's Neville doing scales.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 10 to 19).
Turn out the lights, and Jo Andres makes magic with a fluid, intuitive interplay of film and slide projections on moving panels, dancers' bodies, and on swirling, shifting sheets of thin fabric skillfully manipulated by the dancers in the dark. She paces her image sequences deftly, and her characteristic quasi-primitive drawings of fish or bones or dancing dead men add an ominous yet piquant flavor. Andres creates a three-dimensional realm of rippling, changeable images, and the culminating sequence in Lucid Possession is a bubbling cauldron of transformations. A trio of dancers (Ellen Sirot, Cynthia Meyers, Rebecca Morre) or, sometimes, Andrews alone alternates with the projections and in these priestess choruses there's an aggressive hocus-pocus going on that seems almost willfully naive. Here Andres's wit dries up; these passages seem bullying, bluntly contemporary, and vapid. The contrast with the fantastic, low-tech sophistication of Andres's imagery is particularly disappointing. I don't know to what degree the form of the piece - switching between live action and projection, with some intermingling - is dictated by technical requirements, but whatever the reason, there seems to be no significance in the relation of one section to another. No matter where the visuals carry us - and they're much richer than MTV surrealism or bubbling psychedelics - the dancing dumps us back in Cleveland.
At LaMama E.T.C. (March 4 to 19).
In her solos, Phoebe Neville, who has been choreographing since the early '60's, is a performer of distinctive and quietly assertive presence, solemn and mysteriously serene. In Ladydance 1974), her soft steps, cagey, glances, the economy with which she lifts or flicks her hands, her abrupt stamps or jumps, the way she snaps her limbs around, give a feeling of slightly teasing severity. When she suddenly loosens a little (her bound-up hair comes free) and throws herself about with zest, peppering her dancing with hard little jumps, her gestures remain contained, insistent rather than spacious. As a character, she's got a big secret that her gestures and glances dispense hints of. But basically she keeps mum. Woman as mystery.
Wearing a long glittering, blue gown in her new Watch This Space, she has a peculiar, chaste authority. Though her smooth, deliberate gestures give way to vaguer, more open turns, twists, sudden dives, and a fluttery stumble-and-recovery, her arms weave a protective field that makes her untouchable, like Aurora guarded by the bramble hedge. Neville's rare humor is sly, ironic, subterranean, and some cases to the fore in a coy new duet with long-time associate Tryntje Shapli. Set to music by Josef Wittman, "Anitergum II Hohodowndownho",not surprisingly has a chipper, country dancing quality - but Neville and Shapli spend the entire piece sitting on the floor. In flouncy print dresses and blouses with puffed shoulders, they behave with a period charm (circa Meet Me In St. Louis), like best friends at a picnic. Lying about, in close, usually symmetrical poses, they look at each other and look away, They crisscross their feet, roll lazily, circle their toes. Neville awkwardly rests her chin on Shapli's forehead and pushes down in a clumsy, friendly challenge that's like something a chimpanzee might do. The innocent insinuations of their relationship are delivered in an idle conversation of modest poses. Sternness, outrage, flicker momentarily; only their arms are allowed to be really expansive.
In her recently completed 5 Movements, Neville demonstrates her flair for refinement and detail and her ability to move dancers in clear, effective, designs. She keeps the space alive. But the piece's smooth, minimalist style is too flat and inexpressive, its impetus too mechanical. Set to a guitar and harmonizer score by Scott Johnson, and with motley, semi-punk costumes (by Sally Ann Parsons, painted by Julianne Kroboth), 5 Movements is intended (according to the press release), at least partly, as an evocation of the city. There's nothing urban about it except spurts of restlessness and numbness and some very literal episodes of imitation spray-paint shaking and graffiti writing. It's Neville doing scales.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 10 to 19).
Turn out the lights, and Jo Andres makes magic with a fluid, intuitive interplay of film and slide projections on moving panels, dancers' bodies, and on swirling, shifting sheets of thin fabric skillfully manipulated by the dancers in the dark. She paces her image sequences deftly, and her characteristic quasi-primitive drawings of fish or bones or dancing dead men add an ominous yet piquant flavor. Andres creates a three-dimensional realm of rippling, changeable images, and the culminating sequence in Lucid Possession is a bubbling cauldron of transformations. A trio of dancers (Ellen Sirot, Cynthia Meyers, Rebecca Morre) or, sometimes, Andrews alone alternates with the projections and in these priestess choruses there's an aggressive hocus-pocus going on that seems almost willfully naive. Here Andres's wit dries up; these passages seem bullying, bluntly contemporary, and vapid. The contrast with the fantastic, low-tech sophistication of Andres's imagery is particularly disappointing. I don't know to what degree the form of the piece - switching between live action and projection, with some intermingling - is dictated by technical requirements, but whatever the reason, there seems to be no significance in the relation of one section to another. No matter where the visuals carry us - and they're much richer than MTV surrealism or bubbling psychedelics - the dancing dumps us back in Cleveland.
At LaMama E.T.C. (March 4 to 19).
Now, Sonny
August 16
The Prospect Park Bandshell is a fine place to see dance - with a spacious stage, decent lighting setup, good sound, nearby trees for natural air-conditioning, and even chairs that aren’t torture to sit on. A healthy crowd showed up at the Celebrate Brooklyn festival for David Parsons' and Iso’s longish, mixed-together program of mostly small, lively works, liked it all, and stuck around for the whole show. But it’s worthwhile to contrast these two young, small-scale, very active companies.
Parson’s is clearly developing a serviceable body of dances for himself and his six excellent dancers. His signature solo, Caught (1982), in which flashes of light catch him midair, like a creature that miraculously never touches the ground, is a solid hit that he can adapt for the most recalcitrant spaces (at the Guggenheim Museum he was all over the auditorium). He has tightened the business of Envelope (1984) and made it a much sharper and funnier piece. Three Courtesies (1987) to Bach’s Cello Sonata No. 1, is a lightweight, quick-moving, Paul Tayorish piece for three couples, in which the women daintily carry the men’s coattails, trot lightly over their backs, and happily perch on their shoulders, innocently arranging their skirts over the men's heads.
In Scrutiny, a more ambitious dance made last summer at Jacob’s Pillow, Parsons keeps the space fluid and the movement racing with soft leaps and quicksilver acrobatics. The section that I‘d guess gave rise to the title is humorously sinister and skulking in its action and has the peculiar pointedness of the several-years-old Envelope. Parsons is building repertory like a thorough professional.
Iso, a collaborative formed in 1986 by Momix (brainchild of Moses Pendleton and Alison Chase of Pilobolus) members - Daniel Ezralow, who like Parsons, danced with Paul Taylor, and also danced with Pilobolus), Jamey Hampton (also ex-Pilobolus), Ashley Roland and Morleigh Steinberg - operates on a more simpleminded level, though the audience was enthusiastic about them also. They’re clever enough, with million-dollar bodies but lazy and juvenile. The opening piece, to a rendition of Talking Heads’s “Psycho Killer” performed by the Bobs, features the four dancer-choreographers clomping and jumping rhythmically in astronaut suits and sunglasses, ends in a humping pile-up and looks like they worked it up 15 minutes before show time.
In Helter Skelter, the men press their fists against a silvery elastic cloth stretched tight by the women who are entirely wrapped in the ends. In Scare Myself, Hampton and Roland enter to engine sounds, behind mounts that support glaring headlights, then leave their “cars” and dance in a sultry, swinging style, and at the end get back in the “cars” and drive off. This is lowest-common-denominator material. Iso’s seasoned members are confident of their skills and their appeal and they must think they can afford to coast. But if they’re capable of better than this, they didn’t trouble to give much evidence of it on stage.
Ezralow and Roland’s DNA, a teasing, dance-team homage set to three oldies sung by the Hi-Lo’s, was the only piece with real dance sophistication in its development. Mr. Seawater’s Pool, qasi-East Indian in its costuming and snaky armwork, turns aquatic with paddling hands and fishlike wriggling, and next explores Neanderthal amours. Then it moves into Pilobolus’s shape-changing territory: arms become peering periscopes, arms are folded across chests with the elbows pointing front so they can open and close like the gaping beaks of baby birds; the women, costumed to obliterate their faces and weirdly elongate their bodes, cup their sculptured “heads” (by Robert Faust) high overhead in their hands or scroll their bodies around them.
The careless overall form of the piece, too - unconnected sections butted together - is characteristic of the structured sloppiness that has frequently marred Pilobolus’s work. Pilobous isn’t guilty here, but it established the model, and Iso is in the direct line of descent. One gimmicky idea seems to be sufficient on the whole to inspire and justify Iso’s dances, and fooling around with that gimmick is all there is by way of content. I get the feeling that Iso’s members, untroubled by the slightest cynicism, formed their company because they had good credentials, knew there was a market open to them, and they could sling out adequate dances without too much trouble and keep the customers contented. Judging from this program, their product is purely commercial without any artistic aspirations whatsoever. Since they’re having success with their schlock dances, maybe they don’t feel any pressing need to do better.
At Celebrate Brooklyn (July 20).
The Prospect Park Bandshell is a fine place to see dance - with a spacious stage, decent lighting setup, good sound, nearby trees for natural air-conditioning, and even chairs that aren’t torture to sit on. A healthy crowd showed up at the Celebrate Brooklyn festival for David Parsons' and Iso’s longish, mixed-together program of mostly small, lively works, liked it all, and stuck around for the whole show. But it’s worthwhile to contrast these two young, small-scale, very active companies.
Parson’s is clearly developing a serviceable body of dances for himself and his six excellent dancers. His signature solo, Caught (1982), in which flashes of light catch him midair, like a creature that miraculously never touches the ground, is a solid hit that he can adapt for the most recalcitrant spaces (at the Guggenheim Museum he was all over the auditorium). He has tightened the business of Envelope (1984) and made it a much sharper and funnier piece. Three Courtesies (1987) to Bach’s Cello Sonata No. 1, is a lightweight, quick-moving, Paul Tayorish piece for three couples, in which the women daintily carry the men’s coattails, trot lightly over their backs, and happily perch on their shoulders, innocently arranging their skirts over the men's heads.
In Scrutiny, a more ambitious dance made last summer at Jacob’s Pillow, Parsons keeps the space fluid and the movement racing with soft leaps and quicksilver acrobatics. The section that I‘d guess gave rise to the title is humorously sinister and skulking in its action and has the peculiar pointedness of the several-years-old Envelope. Parsons is building repertory like a thorough professional.
Iso, a collaborative formed in 1986 by Momix (brainchild of Moses Pendleton and Alison Chase of Pilobolus) members - Daniel Ezralow, who like Parsons, danced with Paul Taylor, and also danced with Pilobolus), Jamey Hampton (also ex-Pilobolus), Ashley Roland and Morleigh Steinberg - operates on a more simpleminded level, though the audience was enthusiastic about them also. They’re clever enough, with million-dollar bodies but lazy and juvenile. The opening piece, to a rendition of Talking Heads’s “Psycho Killer” performed by the Bobs, features the four dancer-choreographers clomping and jumping rhythmically in astronaut suits and sunglasses, ends in a humping pile-up and looks like they worked it up 15 minutes before show time.
In Helter Skelter, the men press their fists against a silvery elastic cloth stretched tight by the women who are entirely wrapped in the ends. In Scare Myself, Hampton and Roland enter to engine sounds, behind mounts that support glaring headlights, then leave their “cars” and dance in a sultry, swinging style, and at the end get back in the “cars” and drive off. This is lowest-common-denominator material. Iso’s seasoned members are confident of their skills and their appeal and they must think they can afford to coast. But if they’re capable of better than this, they didn’t trouble to give much evidence of it on stage.
Ezralow and Roland’s DNA, a teasing, dance-team homage set to three oldies sung by the Hi-Lo’s, was the only piece with real dance sophistication in its development. Mr. Seawater’s Pool, qasi-East Indian in its costuming and snaky armwork, turns aquatic with paddling hands and fishlike wriggling, and next explores Neanderthal amours. Then it moves into Pilobolus’s shape-changing territory: arms become peering periscopes, arms are folded across chests with the elbows pointing front so they can open and close like the gaping beaks of baby birds; the women, costumed to obliterate their faces and weirdly elongate their bodes, cup their sculptured “heads” (by Robert Faust) high overhead in their hands or scroll their bodies around them.
The careless overall form of the piece, too - unconnected sections butted together - is characteristic of the structured sloppiness that has frequently marred Pilobolus’s work. Pilobous isn’t guilty here, but it established the model, and Iso is in the direct line of descent. One gimmicky idea seems to be sufficient on the whole to inspire and justify Iso’s dances, and fooling around with that gimmick is all there is by way of content. I get the feeling that Iso’s members, untroubled by the slightest cynicism, formed their company because they had good credentials, knew there was a market open to them, and they could sling out adequate dances without too much trouble and keep the customers contented. Judging from this program, their product is purely commercial without any artistic aspirations whatsoever. Since they’re having success with their schlock dances, maybe they don’t feel any pressing need to do better.
At Celebrate Brooklyn (July 20).
On Your Toes
August 30
The women, gorgeous as Sophia Loren or Linda Gray of Dallas glide effortlessly like fairy-tale princesses in their long, shining gowns, with waist-length braids, as they smoothly curve their open arms in invitation. You almost never notice their feet; it’s very likely they’re equipped with ball bearings instead. The sexes never touch (well, once they linked arms in a wedding dance); even the fabrics of their costumes don’t touch! And if the women are cool and regal, the men, in their knee-length military coats and fur hats, are usually in a dither, gleefully whirling in the air and crashing down on their knees or leaping around making sparks fly by whacking at each other with short swords and little round shields.
Not that the men aren’t smashing, but - without knowing anything about the reality of women’s traditional status in Georgia, and despite suspicions about the downside of sexual idealization - I got the impression from the 75-member Georgian State Dance Company’s performance that women have definitely put something over on the men. How silly these hot, frantic men seem, whose violent exercise and proud posture shriek, “Me, me, me, me, me,” compared to their swanny princesses, who radiate a queenly power and hardly deign to lift a finger. In Kartuli, a partner dance, the man - body erect, chest thrust out, arms held stiffly - shows off with tight scissor steps and low, rapid, flat-footed kicks in front of the woman he admires. In Invitation, a very restrained dance for three couples, the men hold their arms aloft, and flick the long, drooping aristocratic sleeves of their peal gray coats, walking slowly on point all the time. The loose sleeves almost seem like wings, and then men’s feet in the soft boot, are curved, almost like claws. Under the elegance, there’s a clear message: look what Im prepared to go through for you. The choreography makes much use of the usual, circular symmetrical, and frontal patterns for large groups that open to highlight series of competitive specialty solos in the center. Often, the men’s and women’s ensembles face each other, parade and interweave with an energized, pristine formality.
For a fight in Dances of the Khevsuri, the men execute and intricate display of swordplay, patty-cake; they leap, turn, duck, vault, spin onto their knees with coat skirts flying. I liked the assertive, angular, zigzag motion of knees, ankles, and elbows in Kabetsky Dance, the jabbing attack of the legs, and the hard, flicking thrust of the hands that are now open, now in fists. In Narnari, the women glide in satiny white gowns and little domed hats with trailing veils, while they hypnotically swoop their arms and gently manipulate their long chiffon sleeves. In a fast-paced, agitated cavalrymen’s dance, the men whirl, clash their swords, execute rebounding drops to the floor, and imitate the motions of galloping horseback on their toes. A couple of terrific boys join the men in this, and they’re just as eager and flamboyant.
A warrior dance, Khandjuri, features the men - wearing square-shouldered black capes, fur hats and red coats - entering in a line shoulder to shoulder (and bolder and bolder) and revving up to the usual feats, with twisting legwork, snapping elbows, whipping spins and slashing gestures with daggers which they throw into the floor. The lighting is amateurish, and the cyclorama was almost as limp as a sheet. But the costumes are impressive, not gaudy, often in warm secondary colors - plums, russets, sea greens and blues - and decorated with embroidery, though usually the women wear white. The men wear fur hats of various shapes and sizes, pointy cloth caps, and in the first few dances, red scarves bound around their heads in a kind of Bedouin style that looks terrible, authentic or not. The women wear pillboxes on their heads, little domes, crowns, usually with veils.
Just a little way into the second half of the program, I lost track of which piece was which, though there was a fine ceremonial dance which I thought was Davluri. and, in an ancient wedding dance, the splendid visual arrogance of men in black and women in white executing formal, geometric patterns like the wheeling lines skaters and Rockettes do. Of course, it all culminated in one of those finales that rolls on and on with everybody grinning madly, the women turning smoothly, every man and boy doing whatever bone-crushing, death-defying jump on the toes or plunge into the knees or squat-jump or dizzying spin he does best while everyone claps wildly.
At the Mark Hellinger Theater (August 16 through September 4).
The women, gorgeous as Sophia Loren or Linda Gray of Dallas glide effortlessly like fairy-tale princesses in their long, shining gowns, with waist-length braids, as they smoothly curve their open arms in invitation. You almost never notice their feet; it’s very likely they’re equipped with ball bearings instead. The sexes never touch (well, once they linked arms in a wedding dance); even the fabrics of their costumes don’t touch! And if the women are cool and regal, the men, in their knee-length military coats and fur hats, are usually in a dither, gleefully whirling in the air and crashing down on their knees or leaping around making sparks fly by whacking at each other with short swords and little round shields.
Not that the men aren’t smashing, but - without knowing anything about the reality of women’s traditional status in Georgia, and despite suspicions about the downside of sexual idealization - I got the impression from the 75-member Georgian State Dance Company’s performance that women have definitely put something over on the men. How silly these hot, frantic men seem, whose violent exercise and proud posture shriek, “Me, me, me, me, me,” compared to their swanny princesses, who radiate a queenly power and hardly deign to lift a finger. In Kartuli, a partner dance, the man - body erect, chest thrust out, arms held stiffly - shows off with tight scissor steps and low, rapid, flat-footed kicks in front of the woman he admires. In Invitation, a very restrained dance for three couples, the men hold their arms aloft, and flick the long, drooping aristocratic sleeves of their peal gray coats, walking slowly on point all the time. The loose sleeves almost seem like wings, and then men’s feet in the soft boot, are curved, almost like claws. Under the elegance, there’s a clear message: look what Im prepared to go through for you. The choreography makes much use of the usual, circular symmetrical, and frontal patterns for large groups that open to highlight series of competitive specialty solos in the center. Often, the men’s and women’s ensembles face each other, parade and interweave with an energized, pristine formality.
For a fight in Dances of the Khevsuri, the men execute and intricate display of swordplay, patty-cake; they leap, turn, duck, vault, spin onto their knees with coat skirts flying. I liked the assertive, angular, zigzag motion of knees, ankles, and elbows in Kabetsky Dance, the jabbing attack of the legs, and the hard, flicking thrust of the hands that are now open, now in fists. In Narnari, the women glide in satiny white gowns and little domed hats with trailing veils, while they hypnotically swoop their arms and gently manipulate their long chiffon sleeves. In a fast-paced, agitated cavalrymen’s dance, the men whirl, clash their swords, execute rebounding drops to the floor, and imitate the motions of galloping horseback on their toes. A couple of terrific boys join the men in this, and they’re just as eager and flamboyant.
A warrior dance, Khandjuri, features the men - wearing square-shouldered black capes, fur hats and red coats - entering in a line shoulder to shoulder (and bolder and bolder) and revving up to the usual feats, with twisting legwork, snapping elbows, whipping spins and slashing gestures with daggers which they throw into the floor. The lighting is amateurish, and the cyclorama was almost as limp as a sheet. But the costumes are impressive, not gaudy, often in warm secondary colors - plums, russets, sea greens and blues - and decorated with embroidery, though usually the women wear white. The men wear fur hats of various shapes and sizes, pointy cloth caps, and in the first few dances, red scarves bound around their heads in a kind of Bedouin style that looks terrible, authentic or not. The women wear pillboxes on their heads, little domes, crowns, usually with veils.
Just a little way into the second half of the program, I lost track of which piece was which, though there was a fine ceremonial dance which I thought was Davluri. and, in an ancient wedding dance, the splendid visual arrogance of men in black and women in white executing formal, geometric patterns like the wheeling lines skaters and Rockettes do. Of course, it all culminated in one of those finales that rolls on and on with everybody grinning madly, the women turning smoothly, every man and boy doing whatever bone-crushing, death-defying jump on the toes or plunge into the knees or squat-jump or dizzying spin he does best while everyone claps wildly.
At the Mark Hellinger Theater (August 16 through September 4).
Slap Happy
December 6
“Body musician” Keith Terry does what you’d expect: he claps his hands, rubs his palms, fingerpops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, sings, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slide, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations. He exploits the contrasting sound qualities of muscle and bone, soft and hard, hollow and solid, striking with his hands held rigid or floppy. Eager, affable, able to read the audience as accurately as a cardsharp, Terry is a one-man circus.
Ten pieces were listed in the program, but he performed well over a dozen by my count - and not one too many. Terry’s bio describes him as a percussionist and rhythm dancer too (he’s worked with the old Jazz Tap Ensemble, the Pickle Family Circle, Bobby McFerrin, Honi Coles, to name a few), and he combined all three in multifarious ways in his giddy solo show. He plays a punchy “Proud Mary” with four little boxes that moo or bah when turned over. What other toys came out of his shopping bag of goodies? A seal, a frog, a white dove, and a gummy octopus that squeak when he treads on them accompany his tooting along with a little plastic carousel that whistles and spins. Another piece, Balls, he does mostly sitting on a white chair, snapping his fingers, grunting, tapping, and bouncing white balls between and around his legs in challenging patterns. Even physically restricted, as in this piece, Terry exults in constructing sharp, tricky movement sequences upon whose precision the music depends. Terry’s got a down-home delivery, but, make no mistake, this is sophisticated stuff. The music makes the dancing and the dancing creates the music. Neither element is subordinate, and the result, however bright and amusing, is solid clear through.
The c & w Glory of Love, choreographed by Kimi Okada (who ably directed the show), has some of the most forceful, burst-open dancing. Terry’s got his arms flapping and hot feet skipping onto a sheet of amplified bubble wrap that blats out shots of rifle fire. And when he’s done, he quietly opens two musical wedding cards on a music stand and “for your listening pleasure,” lets them play their tiny melodies in counterpoint. He made a marvelous recitation piece out of sayings printed in English on Balinese T-shirts made by non-English speakers, inspired by their eerie Zen-like sorties from sense into idiocy, their way of squeezing phrases into blurts of delectable, fast-forward gibberish. Using these for text, Terry lifts you to a philosophical plane of exquisite lucidity usually reached only by means of controlled substances.
The four sections of T-Shirts are separated by small, witty compositions: a vaguely West Side Storyish piece with kettledrum and cowbells played live against a recorded one-two thump; a bluesy one in which he blows something like panpipes against the skin of a kettledrum; another where a yellow rubber glove puffed up with air and with colored whistles clamped on its fingers expels gentle moans. In the impressive two-part Stick Dance, which nearly closes the program, Terry is almost pure percussionist. He twirls two sticks slowly around his body, raps them, scrapes them together, smacks them on the floor, rolls them one at a time along the floor and punctuates their dull rattling with rhythmic strikes. Then he uses them for a smashing display, running them along the huge, upturned comb of sticks that’s been arranged onstage behind him all night, swinging and smacking and battering sticks against sticks with the fervor and accurate violence of Ondeko-za’s obsessed drummers. Next, with a red kiddie cowboy hat perched on his head, Terry lets his speech revert to his native Texas twang and strums chords on a cassette player that makes like a guitar. “I feel like a buz-zard when no-bo-dy dies,” he sings dismally, welcoming us back to the world where nothing works right.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 11 through 19).
“Body musician” Keith Terry does what you’d expect: he claps his hands, rubs his palms, fingerpops, stamps his feet, brushes his soles, sings, slaps his butt and belly, pops his cheek, whomps his chest, skips and slide, sings and babbles and coughs, building his music out of a surprisingly varied register of sounds and clever rhythmic variations. He exploits the contrasting sound qualities of muscle and bone, soft and hard, hollow and solid, striking with his hands held rigid or floppy. Eager, affable, able to read the audience as accurately as a cardsharp, Terry is a one-man circus.
Ten pieces were listed in the program, but he performed well over a dozen by my count - and not one too many. Terry’s bio describes him as a percussionist and rhythm dancer too (he’s worked with the old Jazz Tap Ensemble, the Pickle Family Circle, Bobby McFerrin, Honi Coles, to name a few), and he combined all three in multifarious ways in his giddy solo show. He plays a punchy “Proud Mary” with four little boxes that moo or bah when turned over. What other toys came out of his shopping bag of goodies? A seal, a frog, a white dove, and a gummy octopus that squeak when he treads on them accompany his tooting along with a little plastic carousel that whistles and spins. Another piece, Balls, he does mostly sitting on a white chair, snapping his fingers, grunting, tapping, and bouncing white balls between and around his legs in challenging patterns. Even physically restricted, as in this piece, Terry exults in constructing sharp, tricky movement sequences upon whose precision the music depends. Terry’s got a down-home delivery, but, make no mistake, this is sophisticated stuff. The music makes the dancing and the dancing creates the music. Neither element is subordinate, and the result, however bright and amusing, is solid clear through.
The c & w Glory of Love, choreographed by Kimi Okada (who ably directed the show), has some of the most forceful, burst-open dancing. Terry’s got his arms flapping and hot feet skipping onto a sheet of amplified bubble wrap that blats out shots of rifle fire. And when he’s done, he quietly opens two musical wedding cards on a music stand and “for your listening pleasure,” lets them play their tiny melodies in counterpoint. He made a marvelous recitation piece out of sayings printed in English on Balinese T-shirts made by non-English speakers, inspired by their eerie Zen-like sorties from sense into idiocy, their way of squeezing phrases into blurts of delectable, fast-forward gibberish. Using these for text, Terry lifts you to a philosophical plane of exquisite lucidity usually reached only by means of controlled substances.
The four sections of T-Shirts are separated by small, witty compositions: a vaguely West Side Storyish piece with kettledrum and cowbells played live against a recorded one-two thump; a bluesy one in which he blows something like panpipes against the skin of a kettledrum; another where a yellow rubber glove puffed up with air and with colored whistles clamped on its fingers expels gentle moans. In the impressive two-part Stick Dance, which nearly closes the program, Terry is almost pure percussionist. He twirls two sticks slowly around his body, raps them, scrapes them together, smacks them on the floor, rolls them one at a time along the floor and punctuates their dull rattling with rhythmic strikes. Then he uses them for a smashing display, running them along the huge, upturned comb of sticks that’s been arranged onstage behind him all night, swinging and smacking and battering sticks against sticks with the fervor and accurate violence of Ondeko-za’s obsessed drummers. Next, with a red kiddie cowboy hat perched on his head, Terry lets his speech revert to his native Texas twang and strums chords on a cassette player that makes like a guitar. “I feel like a buz-zard when no-bo-dy dies,” he sings dismally, welcoming us back to the world where nothing works right.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 11 through 19).
Slav to the Rhythm
February 16
Seven Slavic folk dance ensembles and two choral groups joined forces for a concert at Tully Hall, under the auspices of the Slavic Heritage Council of America, that demonstrated the most exuberant stylistic variety. Accompaniment was mostly recorded, but augmented by the rapping and stamping of feet, the jingling of coin jewelry, the shrill yips and squeals of the women. There were the heavily embroidered and multilayered costumes in bright, elaborate patterns. The numbers ranged from the hopping, skipping couple dances of Poland; to the brilliant show-off dances of the Ukraine with their extraordinary low-to-the-ground whirls, spectacular squat-kicks, and flamboyant, arching leaps; to the long lines, open circles, and aggressive short lines of Yugoslavian dances.
What intense flavor, what pride and sassy humor they reflect! The best of a people's character seem to be distilled into these dances that demonstrate their identity in a public way. Crudely sorted, perhaps the most obvious differences are between the dances in boots or heeled shoes, like those of the equestrian cultures of Poland and the Ukraine, with their erect, open-chested postures and grand arms, and those done in flat-bottomed leather slippers and the surge and sway back and forth with the dancers' bodies slightly bent or leaning and arms linked or clutching neighbors’ belts. Men and women are often segregated in the same dances, specifically when the women's neatly reined-in steps contrast with the men's bounding vigor. But whatever the regional style, from Byelorussia to Slovakia to Croatia, the footwork tends to be snappy, tight, deliriously intricate.
What's most appealing in a skillful but nonprofessional production like this is what's ordinary: that the dancers are regular people, tall and short, thin and plump, mostly young but with a few older faces, happy to be here, sometimes a little shy. Syzokryli Ukrainian Dancers opened the program with a traditional dance that welcomed the audience with loaves of crusty bread. I was deeply tickled by Prodpolianska, performed by Limbora Slovak Folk Ensemble, a juicy, sinuous, good humored dance in which couples rock roughly side-to-side, with wiggling hips, shoulder shakes, twisting motions of the hands and elbows. One man's immensely long shoelace--the kind that wraps the calf--came untied and lashed the stage, but never tripped him up or slowed him down. Back in the wings, a little girl was bouncing irrepressibly.
The Tomov Yugoslav Folk Dance Ensemble presented Glamoc, a stern dance that was performed silently--as it was during the Turkish occupation of Bosnia when native music and dance were banned--except for the shushing and stamping of feet and the rattle of the silver coins on the women's breastplates. I like the cleverly-knit patterns of quick-shuffling, scissoring steps in a suite of Moravian dances performed by Koo Serbian Folklore Ensemble in swaying lines and circles that pulled tight then blossomed outwards. in a medley from the Rzeszow region of Poland, couples from the Polish American Folk Dance Company skipped and reeled with whirling skirts and heavy stamping steps. Bosiek Bulgarian Folk Dance Company performed Tanc Iz Varnesko, from the Black Sea coast, with live music (drum, accordion, clarinet, and a stubby bowed instrument), a sedate wedding dance for women featuring marvelously light, flicking hand gestures.
Who'd I miss? I don't mean to slight Vasilok Byelorussian Dance Company or the Russian Choral Society. Fatje Na Vasi, a men's Slovenian singing froup, was particularly fine, and Bohdan Andrusyshyn, a singer of Byelorussian songs, melted the audience with his warm, sweet tenor.
At Alice Tully Hall (January 30).
Virsky's Ukrainian State Dance Company had ended its run at the Mark Hellinger just a week previously. The Ukrainians were purely dazzling; the happy peasants were represented by a uniform, youthful community of near perfection. The women were long-legged balletic beautifies with gleaming smiles, and the men were gorgeous as well. Can't complain about that.
It was a beautifully paced spectacle in which the kaleidoscopic symmetries of successive dance formations were unfolded with great skill. There weren't any artsy "modern" numbers, and the very few vignettes--like the four guys sharing a single pair of boots that are too big or too small for three of them, or an imitation puppet play about a young girl and her pushy elderly suitor--were surprisingly charming . I loved the galloping wheels of dancers in The Carpathians and the fierce cavalry charge that was one of the many climaxes of Dance of Zaporozhian Cossacks. The women elegantly parading like Ziegfeld showgirls in white gowns and tiaras in Russian Dance, seemed to be wondering which one of them Prince Siegfried would choose for his bride. In The Embroiderers, they smoothly wove a cat's cradle of colored yarn.
Generally, as the men got bolder, the women got more gracious in their demeanor and tighter and finer in their quick, springy footwork. The teenier and more delicate it got, the more fiercely they seemed to tease with it. It's impossible to describe all the playful and arrogant ways the men displayed themselves--the amazing squat-kicks, squat-turns, squat-funs, the cartwheels, flips, barrel, turns, foot-smacking jumps with the legs straight out in midair, springs with the dancer's body flat as a saucer. The vertical drama the men enacted between the tricks that flew and those that scraped the floor were pretty astounding. "They're always claiming to invent things," remarked my neighbor, casually lumping the Ukrainians with the Soviet government, "but I really think they invented break dancing."
Seven Slavic folk dance ensembles and two choral groups joined forces for a concert at Tully Hall, under the auspices of the Slavic Heritage Council of America, that demonstrated the most exuberant stylistic variety. Accompaniment was mostly recorded, but augmented by the rapping and stamping of feet, the jingling of coin jewelry, the shrill yips and squeals of the women. There were the heavily embroidered and multilayered costumes in bright, elaborate patterns. The numbers ranged from the hopping, skipping couple dances of Poland; to the brilliant show-off dances of the Ukraine with their extraordinary low-to-the-ground whirls, spectacular squat-kicks, and flamboyant, arching leaps; to the long lines, open circles, and aggressive short lines of Yugoslavian dances.
What intense flavor, what pride and sassy humor they reflect! The best of a people's character seem to be distilled into these dances that demonstrate their identity in a public way. Crudely sorted, perhaps the most obvious differences are between the dances in boots or heeled shoes, like those of the equestrian cultures of Poland and the Ukraine, with their erect, open-chested postures and grand arms, and those done in flat-bottomed leather slippers and the surge and sway back and forth with the dancers' bodies slightly bent or leaning and arms linked or clutching neighbors’ belts. Men and women are often segregated in the same dances, specifically when the women's neatly reined-in steps contrast with the men's bounding vigor. But whatever the regional style, from Byelorussia to Slovakia to Croatia, the footwork tends to be snappy, tight, deliriously intricate.
What's most appealing in a skillful but nonprofessional production like this is what's ordinary: that the dancers are regular people, tall and short, thin and plump, mostly young but with a few older faces, happy to be here, sometimes a little shy. Syzokryli Ukrainian Dancers opened the program with a traditional dance that welcomed the audience with loaves of crusty bread. I was deeply tickled by Prodpolianska, performed by Limbora Slovak Folk Ensemble, a juicy, sinuous, good humored dance in which couples rock roughly side-to-side, with wiggling hips, shoulder shakes, twisting motions of the hands and elbows. One man's immensely long shoelace--the kind that wraps the calf--came untied and lashed the stage, but never tripped him up or slowed him down. Back in the wings, a little girl was bouncing irrepressibly.
The Tomov Yugoslav Folk Dance Ensemble presented Glamoc, a stern dance that was performed silently--as it was during the Turkish occupation of Bosnia when native music and dance were banned--except for the shushing and stamping of feet and the rattle of the silver coins on the women's breastplates. I like the cleverly-knit patterns of quick-shuffling, scissoring steps in a suite of Moravian dances performed by Koo Serbian Folklore Ensemble in swaying lines and circles that pulled tight then blossomed outwards. in a medley from the Rzeszow region of Poland, couples from the Polish American Folk Dance Company skipped and reeled with whirling skirts and heavy stamping steps. Bosiek Bulgarian Folk Dance Company performed Tanc Iz Varnesko, from the Black Sea coast, with live music (drum, accordion, clarinet, and a stubby bowed instrument), a sedate wedding dance for women featuring marvelously light, flicking hand gestures.
Who'd I miss? I don't mean to slight Vasilok Byelorussian Dance Company or the Russian Choral Society. Fatje Na Vasi, a men's Slovenian singing froup, was particularly fine, and Bohdan Andrusyshyn, a singer of Byelorussian songs, melted the audience with his warm, sweet tenor.
At Alice Tully Hall (January 30).
Virsky's Ukrainian State Dance Company had ended its run at the Mark Hellinger just a week previously. The Ukrainians were purely dazzling; the happy peasants were represented by a uniform, youthful community of near perfection. The women were long-legged balletic beautifies with gleaming smiles, and the men were gorgeous as well. Can't complain about that.
It was a beautifully paced spectacle in which the kaleidoscopic symmetries of successive dance formations were unfolded with great skill. There weren't any artsy "modern" numbers, and the very few vignettes--like the four guys sharing a single pair of boots that are too big or too small for three of them, or an imitation puppet play about a young girl and her pushy elderly suitor--were surprisingly charming . I loved the galloping wheels of dancers in The Carpathians and the fierce cavalry charge that was one of the many climaxes of Dance of Zaporozhian Cossacks. The women elegantly parading like Ziegfeld showgirls in white gowns and tiaras in Russian Dance, seemed to be wondering which one of them Prince Siegfried would choose for his bride. In The Embroiderers, they smoothly wove a cat's cradle of colored yarn.
Generally, as the men got bolder, the women got more gracious in their demeanor and tighter and finer in their quick, springy footwork. The teenier and more delicate it got, the more fiercely they seemed to tease with it. It's impossible to describe all the playful and arrogant ways the men displayed themselves--the amazing squat-kicks, squat-turns, squat-funs, the cartwheels, flips, barrel, turns, foot-smacking jumps with the legs straight out in midair, springs with the dancer's body flat as a saucer. The vertical drama the men enacted between the tricks that flew and those that scraped the floor were pretty astounding. "They're always claiming to invent things," remarked my neighbor, casually lumping the Ukrainians with the Soviet government, "but I really think they invented break dancing."
Snakebite
August 9
A powerful, evocative set by John Macfarlane, superbly lit by Jennifer Tipton was the high point of
Glen Tetley’s La Ronde, a nothing version of Schnitzler’s 1900 lay of sexual dalliance and turn-of the century- Viennese society’s wormy mores presented on the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed bill at the Met. Macfarlane’s looming visual design - with its grand, disintegrating moldings, its transparent walls and arched doorways, its rear projections of halls and rooms - has a magnificence and emptiness that lend substance to Tetley’s string of erotic duets.
The way Tetley sketches his characters gives them only sufficient distinction to earn their labels: prostitute, soldier, parlor maid, etc. There’s a kind of scorn in how he depicts them: typically, he uses his immense skill at manipulating passionate limbs and torsos into fancy tangles to make the ways of flesh meaningless. The form of the piece, too is tedious: 10 sequential duets, followed by the dancers running and changing partners in a circle, a quickie reprise by every couple, and a lonesome solo by the Prostitute, our muse of love. The second-cast performers were excellent, particularly the wonderfully articulate Ronda Nychka, who appeared as the Prostitute in all performances. Tetley’s dancers are almost always mechanical creatures without self-knowledge, without power of choice, without souls. Schnitzler’s play reveals how we exploit one another; but Tetley collapses that acerb perspective because he can’t conceive relationships that are about anything except physical manipulation. La Ronde, like most of his choreography, leaves you with the taste of dust in your mouth.
The second half of the program, Robert Desrosier’s Blue Snake (1985), was a feast for the imagination even though the choreography paled before Desrosier’s extravagant concept and its flamboyant and witty realization in designs by Jerard Smith. Full of delectable visual notions, Blue Snake has a lot of the esoteric wit and fantasy that Parade perhaps had when it was brand new. At times, it called to mind Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus, Oskar Schlemmer, Peking Opera, you name it.
A group of arcane, faceless black-and-white creatures called Zebras in the program but mre like the stylized, antelope-like animals drawn on ancient pottery, wheel and leap, run on all fours, bend backwards, hop around, snag together to serviceable music (by Ahmed Hassan and John Lang) that yowls and blats here but generally is as catchall in style as Desrosier’s vision. A stage-sized caged, man-monster sweeps the space with huge arms, catches up dancers in his fingers, and stuffs them, legs kicking, into his chomping mouth. Who cares what those dancers are doing before he gobbles them up? Somebody brave comes along with a big red triangle on a pole and bops him on the forehead. Big triangular chunks fall out of his head, a bolt of red cloth spills out of the hole, the arms stop dead. Half a dozen red, fringy creatures pop out as well.
I wouldn’t try to make too strong a case for Blue Snake’s logic or its rationale or its mystical, moral weight, but its exuberance and odd warmth enable it to make its own kind of sense. Four black figures with red hip wraps and very tall pointy hats, whom I think of as witches, weave and sway in a ring. Three blue, spiny creatures flex their yellow dorsals and undulate alongside a pinkish man with tricorn headgear and triangles sprinkled down one side of his body. Later, Triangle Man and his pink Double dance a sinuous, supportive and acrobatic duet that melds into unison. Behind them all, a backdrop features geometric figures in a whimsical, Miro-like spatial arrangement. Throughout, Blue Snake’s world is an essentially peaceable kingdom of outlandish, quasi-human creatures. The bright play of color in the costumes and sets is one of its innocent pleasures. There is intermittent uncompromising evil in the chomping monster, and later, in huge heads that range from the upper corners of the stage and whose vast arms smite the stage to smash whatever creatures can’t get out of their way. All of these are giant powers who cannot be appeased and whose only appetite is for destruction. On the other hand, these ravages may just be playroom tantrums.
I don’t remember how an immense coiled cobra with glowing red eyes comes to fill the rear of the stage, but it does, and its jaws open to reveal a many- horned, white figure perched in deep plie fifth in its mouth, bathed in white light, as if the snake were a spaceship debouching a favored passenger, a benevolent majesty. As the stage darkens, the cobra’s burning eyes take possession of it, until, under black light, the gleaming snake floats free of its discarded skin, lofted by masses of unseen dancers, and writhes around the stage like a ghostly Chinese New Year’s dragon.
At Metropolitan Opera House (July ).
A powerful, evocative set by John Macfarlane, superbly lit by Jennifer Tipton was the high point of
Glen Tetley’s La Ronde, a nothing version of Schnitzler’s 1900 lay of sexual dalliance and turn-of the century- Viennese society’s wormy mores presented on the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed bill at the Met. Macfarlane’s looming visual design - with its grand, disintegrating moldings, its transparent walls and arched doorways, its rear projections of halls and rooms - has a magnificence and emptiness that lend substance to Tetley’s string of erotic duets.
The way Tetley sketches his characters gives them only sufficient distinction to earn their labels: prostitute, soldier, parlor maid, etc. There’s a kind of scorn in how he depicts them: typically, he uses his immense skill at manipulating passionate limbs and torsos into fancy tangles to make the ways of flesh meaningless. The form of the piece, too is tedious: 10 sequential duets, followed by the dancers running and changing partners in a circle, a quickie reprise by every couple, and a lonesome solo by the Prostitute, our muse of love. The second-cast performers were excellent, particularly the wonderfully articulate Ronda Nychka, who appeared as the Prostitute in all performances. Tetley’s dancers are almost always mechanical creatures without self-knowledge, without power of choice, without souls. Schnitzler’s play reveals how we exploit one another; but Tetley collapses that acerb perspective because he can’t conceive relationships that are about anything except physical manipulation. La Ronde, like most of his choreography, leaves you with the taste of dust in your mouth.
The second half of the program, Robert Desrosier’s Blue Snake (1985), was a feast for the imagination even though the choreography paled before Desrosier’s extravagant concept and its flamboyant and witty realization in designs by Jerard Smith. Full of delectable visual notions, Blue Snake has a lot of the esoteric wit and fantasy that Parade perhaps had when it was brand new. At times, it called to mind Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus, Oskar Schlemmer, Peking Opera, you name it.
A group of arcane, faceless black-and-white creatures called Zebras in the program but mre like the stylized, antelope-like animals drawn on ancient pottery, wheel and leap, run on all fours, bend backwards, hop around, snag together to serviceable music (by Ahmed Hassan and John Lang) that yowls and blats here but generally is as catchall in style as Desrosier’s vision. A stage-sized caged, man-monster sweeps the space with huge arms, catches up dancers in his fingers, and stuffs them, legs kicking, into his chomping mouth. Who cares what those dancers are doing before he gobbles them up? Somebody brave comes along with a big red triangle on a pole and bops him on the forehead. Big triangular chunks fall out of his head, a bolt of red cloth spills out of the hole, the arms stop dead. Half a dozen red, fringy creatures pop out as well.
I wouldn’t try to make too strong a case for Blue Snake’s logic or its rationale or its mystical, moral weight, but its exuberance and odd warmth enable it to make its own kind of sense. Four black figures with red hip wraps and very tall pointy hats, whom I think of as witches, weave and sway in a ring. Three blue, spiny creatures flex their yellow dorsals and undulate alongside a pinkish man with tricorn headgear and triangles sprinkled down one side of his body. Later, Triangle Man and his pink Double dance a sinuous, supportive and acrobatic duet that melds into unison. Behind them all, a backdrop features geometric figures in a whimsical, Miro-like spatial arrangement. Throughout, Blue Snake’s world is an essentially peaceable kingdom of outlandish, quasi-human creatures. The bright play of color in the costumes and sets is one of its innocent pleasures. There is intermittent uncompromising evil in the chomping monster, and later, in huge heads that range from the upper corners of the stage and whose vast arms smite the stage to smash whatever creatures can’t get out of their way. All of these are giant powers who cannot be appeased and whose only appetite is for destruction. On the other hand, these ravages may just be playroom tantrums.
I don’t remember how an immense coiled cobra with glowing red eyes comes to fill the rear of the stage, but it does, and its jaws open to reveal a many- horned, white figure perched in deep plie fifth in its mouth, bathed in white light, as if the snake were a spaceship debouching a favored passenger, a benevolent majesty. As the stage darkens, the cobra’s burning eyes take possession of it, until, under black light, the gleaming snake floats free of its discarded skin, lofted by masses of unseen dancers, and writhes around the stage like a ghostly Chinese New Year’s dragon.
At Metropolitan Opera House (July ).
Strike Up the Bland
February 9
Amy Duncan's 10-piece jazz band, Brass Tacks, lines up across the back of the stage for Danny Buraczeski's Out of the Blues, one of three new pieces in Jazzdance's week-long engagement at the Joyce. Against them, Buraczeski maneuvers his dancers in handy groups, opening them out, folding them up, breaking them apart, and remixing them with facility. Though the movement Buraczeski choreographs is bold and legible, it's very much one size -- the effect is unsubtle, undetailed. He doesn't fool much with the music, hitting hard on the beat with conventional regularity. Oddly, his dancers use much less flexibility in the torso than you'd expect. Not much wiggle in the middle, either.
I was impressed with the way Buraczeski's Night Vision almost worked. Didactic in tis schematic drama, it's set to three dark-hued, wrenching modern tangos (by the very modish Astor Piazzola) that deliver much of the piece's emotional punch. A military officer (Buraczeski) -- a solid, aggresive, centaurlike presence -- confronts each of three couples (Karla Kaye Larsen and Les Johnson, Abby Levine and Yloy Ybarra, Jane Blount and Robert Smith). He shoves the first man offstage, and pursues his unwilling partner. They push against each other's palms and their arms tremble with the pressure. The second couple tries to avoid the officer at first, but he inevitably throws the man offstage, then pushes against the woman's gripping hands. It's clearly the women who are the tougher, sturdier, stronger-willed; yet their struggles with the officer don't seriously begin until it's too late, until their men have been "disappeared." Buraczeski's officer has the solidity and unswerving determination of the figure of Death in Kurt Jooss's The Green Table, but he's meaner and ruder. He wrests apart the third couple; he and the man push against each other like bulls, with all the powerof their backs and shoulders, and whirl off together. She backs away into a downspot, where she stubbornly, morosely, stalks its perimeter. Then, shirt half open, her resurrected lover approaches, follows her like a shadow creeping over her mind. She sees him. They embrace and, to a violin's keening and the aching of a sour bandoneon, find a new, curving suppleness in their dreamed love. The officer reappears with a red scarf, and as the man drifts away, he binds the bandana around the man's eyes. At this point, what's left of the drama goes away because everyone else is entitled to a flashback, too.
Pithecanthropus Erectus (1987) to Charles Mingus's "tone poem" of the same title, is closest to a typical Broadway jazz style. Its opening is a treat; seven dancers roll into postures representing the ascent of man from crouching to fully erect Homo sapien. And Robin Klingensmith's amusing costumes -- brown tights and tops with big cartoon bones painted here and there -- are a nice touch. But when Mingus's music gets dense and dizzy, the cautious choreography can't keep up. Susan Weil's backdrop for the final work, Soulop, a night sky with stars and bright birds, and a spherical moon in front that gradually turns from crescent to full as it crosses the stage, is fresh and surprising. And it's easy to love French horn player Willie Ruff's serene presence and mellow playing of traditional spirituals. Ruff and Buraczeski balance each other at opposite sides of the stage, one moving slowly forward as the other moves back. Eventually, Ruff circles the space, by way of backstage, with his horn sounding very distant for a while, and Buraczeski takes the space alone, till they rejoin at the end and gaze in a comradely way at Weill's golden moon.
There's lots of give and take in the movement, but it seem too thoughtful and balanced. In its automatic reactions -- in the way an easy swing outwards is pinched back into a cringed inwards, for example -- it keeps answering its own potential questions. Buraczeski's leisurely dancing grows more complex through the five or so sections, but it seems more rubbery than expressive. I rather like the careful way he places his weight, and stretches over it. But I'm too comfortable with the logical way the swinging, rocking movement expands into increasingly large spirals and gets bumpier, eventually erupting into lively hopping, scissoring moves, and turning leaps. Finally, the dancing is too incurious and dull.
At the Joyce Theater (January 19 to 24).
Amy Duncan's 10-piece jazz band, Brass Tacks, lines up across the back of the stage for Danny Buraczeski's Out of the Blues, one of three new pieces in Jazzdance's week-long engagement at the Joyce. Against them, Buraczeski maneuvers his dancers in handy groups, opening them out, folding them up, breaking them apart, and remixing them with facility. Though the movement Buraczeski choreographs is bold and legible, it's very much one size -- the effect is unsubtle, undetailed. He doesn't fool much with the music, hitting hard on the beat with conventional regularity. Oddly, his dancers use much less flexibility in the torso than you'd expect. Not much wiggle in the middle, either.
I was impressed with the way Buraczeski's Night Vision almost worked. Didactic in tis schematic drama, it's set to three dark-hued, wrenching modern tangos (by the very modish Astor Piazzola) that deliver much of the piece's emotional punch. A military officer (Buraczeski) -- a solid, aggresive, centaurlike presence -- confronts each of three couples (Karla Kaye Larsen and Les Johnson, Abby Levine and Yloy Ybarra, Jane Blount and Robert Smith). He shoves the first man offstage, and pursues his unwilling partner. They push against each other's palms and their arms tremble with the pressure. The second couple tries to avoid the officer at first, but he inevitably throws the man offstage, then pushes against the woman's gripping hands. It's clearly the women who are the tougher, sturdier, stronger-willed; yet their struggles with the officer don't seriously begin until it's too late, until their men have been "disappeared." Buraczeski's officer has the solidity and unswerving determination of the figure of Death in Kurt Jooss's The Green Table, but he's meaner and ruder. He wrests apart the third couple; he and the man push against each other like bulls, with all the powerof their backs and shoulders, and whirl off together. She backs away into a downspot, where she stubbornly, morosely, stalks its perimeter. Then, shirt half open, her resurrected lover approaches, follows her like a shadow creeping over her mind. She sees him. They embrace and, to a violin's keening and the aching of a sour bandoneon, find a new, curving suppleness in their dreamed love. The officer reappears with a red scarf, and as the man drifts away, he binds the bandana around the man's eyes. At this point, what's left of the drama goes away because everyone else is entitled to a flashback, too.
Pithecanthropus Erectus (1987) to Charles Mingus's "tone poem" of the same title, is closest to a typical Broadway jazz style. Its opening is a treat; seven dancers roll into postures representing the ascent of man from crouching to fully erect Homo sapien. And Robin Klingensmith's amusing costumes -- brown tights and tops with big cartoon bones painted here and there -- are a nice touch. But when Mingus's music gets dense and dizzy, the cautious choreography can't keep up. Susan Weil's backdrop for the final work, Soulop, a night sky with stars and bright birds, and a spherical moon in front that gradually turns from crescent to full as it crosses the stage, is fresh and surprising. And it's easy to love French horn player Willie Ruff's serene presence and mellow playing of traditional spirituals. Ruff and Buraczeski balance each other at opposite sides of the stage, one moving slowly forward as the other moves back. Eventually, Ruff circles the space, by way of backstage, with his horn sounding very distant for a while, and Buraczeski takes the space alone, till they rejoin at the end and gaze in a comradely way at Weill's golden moon.
There's lots of give and take in the movement, but it seem too thoughtful and balanced. In its automatic reactions -- in the way an easy swing outwards is pinched back into a cringed inwards, for example -- it keeps answering its own potential questions. Buraczeski's leisurely dancing grows more complex through the five or so sections, but it seems more rubbery than expressive. I rather like the careful way he places his weight, and stretches over it. But I'm too comfortable with the logical way the swinging, rocking movement expands into increasingly large spirals and gets bumpier, eventually erupting into lively hopping, scissoring moves, and turning leaps. Finally, the dancing is too incurious and dull.
At the Joyce Theater (January 19 to 24).
Sucre Babies
May 3
American Ballet Theater's gala created a perfect occasion for witnessing the revival of Gaîté Parisienne, Leonide Massine's immensely popular 1938 piece of puffery to giddy Offenbach tunes. Fully a match for the circusy flamboyance onstage, the fashion victims in the audience were decked out in outré styles that made them look like post-nuclear toadstools. Flouncy, three-foot wide hips had to be squooshed into the velvet seats. Anyway, ABT did go whole hog with this festive production, and the costuming, by the notorious Christian Lacroix (guilty of some of the offenses sitting in the audience) was unrestrained in its extravagance.
Set between evening and dawn in an opulent cream, red, and gold Belle Epoque cafe (designed by Zack Brown) in this production hot pink and chartreuse, orange and yellow, bright red and blue and emerald, stripes and dots, feathers and spangles arrived to do battle. By the time all the characters - the waiters, the nobles, the military, the available ladies - are introduced and have a chance to mix it up (and ham it up) together, it's almost time for the finale- the de rigeur can-can that still climaxes revues in Paris nightclubs: cartwheels, teasing ronds de jambes, high kicks, hopping turns with one leg in the air, and the screaming (in this case, squeaking) girls falling like dominoes into splits.
The ballet is full of little amorous incidents and jealous fussing as the various women and men likely pursue each other. But any redolence of a decadent reality has been thoroughly illuminated. A wealthy, in inept Peruvian (Johan Renvall) is so eager for a good time that he arrives with his red valises in hand. He's like a dancerly version of Erik Rhode's Alberto Beddini - Ginger Roger's "fiancé" in Top Hat - and has a gift for creating confusion around him. Enraptured by the Glove-Seller (Susan Jaffe), he drops his luggage when he first spies her, but she falls for the Baron (Victor Barbee), so he's fated for all his fumbling enthusiasm and incessant flirting, to end up alone. But his intoxication with the charming talent reaches such heights that it merely accomplishes the gratification of his desire by itself. The Glove-Seller and the Baron are of course the center of the ballet; we accept the notion that their infatuation is more serious than any other, although there's nothing particularly convincing or individual about their pas de deux. The waiters waltz with the demure but saucy girls who scrub the floors (in French-made outfits with big white bows in their hair). The Flower-Girl coyly rolls her shoulders, gives flowers to the waiters, and starts them whirling. Guys in plaid suits and derbies pair with happy hookers in feathered hats and short fluffy skirts that look too much like undergarments. The Glove-Seller is exultantly flaunted in overhead lifts by four admirers. One waiter instinctively stoops to brush up the gloss on the Baron's shoes when he first appears, peacock proud, but, when he's smitten with the Glove-Seller, he's not too good to go spinning behind her as she shows off her extension. The soldiers, with their shrimpy, strutting leader, lunge and take aim to announce themselves. Fights break out.
Everybody's temporarily chased out by the waiters, and the lovers return for a moment alone. In one of the ballet's best and most subdued sections (set to the barcarole from Tales of Hoffman), people prepare to leave as dawn comes up. Cloaked like Venetian characters in a Tiepolo and carnival scene, they seem to sway in masses with a bold, wavelike motion, and gradually break up and disperse. Then the Peruvian, with his valises, turns up in a White Rabitty kind of dither, sees the Glove-Seller and the Baron kissing, and is desolated.
Gaîté is a trifle, the kind of dessert you'd wish you'd eaten less of. The stunner of the program was the opening ballet, Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto which ABT performs more voluptuously than New York City Ballet but with equal authority. It's common place to disparage any interpretations of Balanchine other than NYCB's. But ABT's dancers - Jaffe, Robert Hill, Leslie Browne, and Ricardo Bustamante were the leads - vividly articulated the meaning of this intricate angular work with its in-and-out twists, flexed hands and feet, its heavy sags and swings. Jaffe and Hill, particularly in the third section, Aria II, brought to their roles a shinning clarity and heroic scale. They achieved intimacy and poignancy, too, without overstating their relationship or sinking too deeply into the introspection of the music.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (April 18 through June 11).
American Ballet Theater's gala created a perfect occasion for witnessing the revival of Gaîté Parisienne, Leonide Massine's immensely popular 1938 piece of puffery to giddy Offenbach tunes. Fully a match for the circusy flamboyance onstage, the fashion victims in the audience were decked out in outré styles that made them look like post-nuclear toadstools. Flouncy, three-foot wide hips had to be squooshed into the velvet seats. Anyway, ABT did go whole hog with this festive production, and the costuming, by the notorious Christian Lacroix (guilty of some of the offenses sitting in the audience) was unrestrained in its extravagance.
Set between evening and dawn in an opulent cream, red, and gold Belle Epoque cafe (designed by Zack Brown) in this production hot pink and chartreuse, orange and yellow, bright red and blue and emerald, stripes and dots, feathers and spangles arrived to do battle. By the time all the characters - the waiters, the nobles, the military, the available ladies - are introduced and have a chance to mix it up (and ham it up) together, it's almost time for the finale- the de rigeur can-can that still climaxes revues in Paris nightclubs: cartwheels, teasing ronds de jambes, high kicks, hopping turns with one leg in the air, and the screaming (in this case, squeaking) girls falling like dominoes into splits.
The ballet is full of little amorous incidents and jealous fussing as the various women and men likely pursue each other. But any redolence of a decadent reality has been thoroughly illuminated. A wealthy, in inept Peruvian (Johan Renvall) is so eager for a good time that he arrives with his red valises in hand. He's like a dancerly version of Erik Rhode's Alberto Beddini - Ginger Roger's "fiancé" in Top Hat - and has a gift for creating confusion around him. Enraptured by the Glove-Seller (Susan Jaffe), he drops his luggage when he first spies her, but she falls for the Baron (Victor Barbee), so he's fated for all his fumbling enthusiasm and incessant flirting, to end up alone. But his intoxication with the charming talent reaches such heights that it merely accomplishes the gratification of his desire by itself. The Glove-Seller and the Baron are of course the center of the ballet; we accept the notion that their infatuation is more serious than any other, although there's nothing particularly convincing or individual about their pas de deux. The waiters waltz with the demure but saucy girls who scrub the floors (in French-made outfits with big white bows in their hair). The Flower-Girl coyly rolls her shoulders, gives flowers to the waiters, and starts them whirling. Guys in plaid suits and derbies pair with happy hookers in feathered hats and short fluffy skirts that look too much like undergarments. The Glove-Seller is exultantly flaunted in overhead lifts by four admirers. One waiter instinctively stoops to brush up the gloss on the Baron's shoes when he first appears, peacock proud, but, when he's smitten with the Glove-Seller, he's not too good to go spinning behind her as she shows off her extension. The soldiers, with their shrimpy, strutting leader, lunge and take aim to announce themselves. Fights break out.
Everybody's temporarily chased out by the waiters, and the lovers return for a moment alone. In one of the ballet's best and most subdued sections (set to the barcarole from Tales of Hoffman), people prepare to leave as dawn comes up. Cloaked like Venetian characters in a Tiepolo and carnival scene, they seem to sway in masses with a bold, wavelike motion, and gradually break up and disperse. Then the Peruvian, with his valises, turns up in a White Rabitty kind of dither, sees the Glove-Seller and the Baron kissing, and is desolated.
Gaîté is a trifle, the kind of dessert you'd wish you'd eaten less of. The stunner of the program was the opening ballet, Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto which ABT performs more voluptuously than New York City Ballet but with equal authority. It's common place to disparage any interpretations of Balanchine other than NYCB's. But ABT's dancers - Jaffe, Robert Hill, Leslie Browne, and Ricardo Bustamante were the leads - vividly articulated the meaning of this intricate angular work with its in-and-out twists, flexed hands and feet, its heavy sags and swings. Jaffe and Hill, particularly in the third section, Aria II, brought to their roles a shinning clarity and heroic scale. They achieved intimacy and poignancy, too, without overstating their relationship or sinking too deeply into the introspection of the music.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (April 18 through June 11).
Sunshine
June 21 In
Cirque du Soleil's blue and yellow tents just to the right of Battery Park, there was decent popcorn but no hot dogs. Clowns practicing the art of intimidation whipped up the audience, chasing one another, spritzing the innocent with "Canadian" water, berating us for lateness - and people loved being bullied and embarrassed. A lady "cop" accused one man of dropping a newspaper in the ring and insisted that he get up and remove it. He wouldn't budge, so his wife got it. I pretended to be invisible and was successful. Then, thanks to sponsors like Dominion Textile whose chairman is here tonight with pals, and to the Vista Hotel up the street, and thanks to the governments of Canada and Quebec. I hate those sucky acknowledgments.
I was sour about the magical beginning too, when puffy-cheeked "tourist" clowns from some Canadian Dogpatch emerge from the entrances amid rolling smoke, like sentimental visitors from the world of Cats. Once that was out of the way, things improved. No hysterical dogs in baby clothes. No sad elephants. In the dark, the performers whirl colored lights into rings and figure eights. Acrobatics balance on chairs, delicately stacked to fan out higher and higher, to, apparently, shift the center of gravity of the structure well beyond the base. Even without upside down humans poised atop the chairs, the whole thing should collapse, shouldn't it?
The mountain theme returns again with ten? 12? people of various sizes stacked up and hooked onto one another, and riding around on a bicycle. Dennis Lacombe, as a mildly gaga, inquisitive wind-up clown, discovers what we know cream pies are for. He pours green dish washing liquid into his mouth, throws his head back, and foams bubbles. As a mad conductor, he sways and swivels madly out of kilter, nearly sweeping the floor with his chest as he conducts a tiny Walkman, playing into a giant mike and creates a fountain out of a zillion batons that were stuck in his pants. Contortionist Angelo Laurier slithers into unnervingly odd positions, treating her legs as friendly but alien creatures, and smiling a perennial shit-eating smile that assures us she's ever so comfortable. The faces of Agatha Olivier and Antoine Rigot are fascinating to watch, close on the tightrope. Hers is tight, with a smile of achievement occasionally plastered over tension. His changes every second with concentration, delight, relief. You could love someone whose moves seem so ephemeral and whose feelings float so innocently to the surface.
I'm mad as usual for the jugglers - for Daniel LeBateleur breaking patterns even before you realize he's established them, creating the illusion that he's pushing the balls down, not bouncing them up, and for three Asian jugglers, especially the guy whirling the tennis rackets. Well, not to forget the guy tossing three rings at a time and getting them to land over the head and arms of each of his partners. The Andrews opened their act like a dance adagio team, but then climbed hand over hand to the top of the tent where they dangled upside down, spinning and swinging, usually hooked onto another by means of equipment that looks like an s&m dream of slings and nooses.
My favorite moment was a slow one in which he hangs onto her - upside down, of course - by wrapping his feet around her knees. Then they spin. It seems as if only the slightest curve of pressure keeps his head from klunking many feet below. But I guess the carefully studied yet sensuous hand-balancing act of Eric Varelas and Amelie DeMay was my favorite. First, he balances upside down on her, head to head. Later, she's upside down; he's got her head in one hand, as he moves to the ground, rolls over, twists himself inside out, and gradually de-pretzels. The skill and endurance required, the absence of flash, the unswerving images of dependency and support, create an ideal meshing of passion with steadiness. I'd pass up a frank for that.
At Battery Park City (May 25 through June 19).
Cirque du Soleil's blue and yellow tents just to the right of Battery Park, there was decent popcorn but no hot dogs. Clowns practicing the art of intimidation whipped up the audience, chasing one another, spritzing the innocent with "Canadian" water, berating us for lateness - and people loved being bullied and embarrassed. A lady "cop" accused one man of dropping a newspaper in the ring and insisted that he get up and remove it. He wouldn't budge, so his wife got it. I pretended to be invisible and was successful. Then, thanks to sponsors like Dominion Textile whose chairman is here tonight with pals, and to the Vista Hotel up the street, and thanks to the governments of Canada and Quebec. I hate those sucky acknowledgments.
I was sour about the magical beginning too, when puffy-cheeked "tourist" clowns from some Canadian Dogpatch emerge from the entrances amid rolling smoke, like sentimental visitors from the world of Cats. Once that was out of the way, things improved. No hysterical dogs in baby clothes. No sad elephants. In the dark, the performers whirl colored lights into rings and figure eights. Acrobatics balance on chairs, delicately stacked to fan out higher and higher, to, apparently, shift the center of gravity of the structure well beyond the base. Even without upside down humans poised atop the chairs, the whole thing should collapse, shouldn't it?
The mountain theme returns again with ten? 12? people of various sizes stacked up and hooked onto one another, and riding around on a bicycle. Dennis Lacombe, as a mildly gaga, inquisitive wind-up clown, discovers what we know cream pies are for. He pours green dish washing liquid into his mouth, throws his head back, and foams bubbles. As a mad conductor, he sways and swivels madly out of kilter, nearly sweeping the floor with his chest as he conducts a tiny Walkman, playing into a giant mike and creates a fountain out of a zillion batons that were stuck in his pants. Contortionist Angelo Laurier slithers into unnervingly odd positions, treating her legs as friendly but alien creatures, and smiling a perennial shit-eating smile that assures us she's ever so comfortable. The faces of Agatha Olivier and Antoine Rigot are fascinating to watch, close on the tightrope. Hers is tight, with a smile of achievement occasionally plastered over tension. His changes every second with concentration, delight, relief. You could love someone whose moves seem so ephemeral and whose feelings float so innocently to the surface.
I'm mad as usual for the jugglers - for Daniel LeBateleur breaking patterns even before you realize he's established them, creating the illusion that he's pushing the balls down, not bouncing them up, and for three Asian jugglers, especially the guy whirling the tennis rackets. Well, not to forget the guy tossing three rings at a time and getting them to land over the head and arms of each of his partners. The Andrews opened their act like a dance adagio team, but then climbed hand over hand to the top of the tent where they dangled upside down, spinning and swinging, usually hooked onto another by means of equipment that looks like an s&m dream of slings and nooses.
My favorite moment was a slow one in which he hangs onto her - upside down, of course - by wrapping his feet around her knees. Then they spin. It seems as if only the slightest curve of pressure keeps his head from klunking many feet below. But I guess the carefully studied yet sensuous hand-balancing act of Eric Varelas and Amelie DeMay was my favorite. First, he balances upside down on her, head to head. Later, she's upside down; he's got her head in one hand, as he moves to the ground, rolls over, twists himself inside out, and gradually de-pretzels. The skill and endurance required, the absence of flash, the unswerving images of dependency and support, create an ideal meshing of passion with steadiness. I'd pass up a frank for that.
At Battery Park City (May 25 through June 19).
The Human Comedy
February 2
Raul Ruiz’s film version of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s Mammame just keeps popping up - most recently a few months ago at the Alliance Francaise’s Ruiz tribute. I had almost seen it last June in Montpellier, were it was screened commercially at a big Odeon seven-plex in conjunction with the city’s international dance festival. But the publicity stills looked too serious - so I opted for live performances in the evenings, and slothful days baking in the Mediterranean sun.
In July, however, in Chateauvallon, Gallota’s fizzy trio, Daphnis et Chloe, danced at a giddy pitch, made me high. Gallotta, who now heads the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble (an unheard of post for a choreographer), is much admired throughout France, though some people here despised his droll, oddball, sometimes willfully “tasteless” work when his company, Groupe Emile Dubois, performed two pieces - Les Survivants and Les Aventures d’Ivan Vaffan - at City Center in early 1985.
Gallottta’s choreography is strikingly un-American in its confirmed eccentricity and the quality of constriction in the movement. It’s never pretty, never expansive. The vocabulary itself is a narrow one. In Mammame, the dancers never reach beyond themselves, never seek to take possession of the space with their energy. Their bodies seem ungiving - hard and tight by design. The individual is assertive in a way that doesn’t impact seriously on his or her surroundings. It seems to me that this is a cultural choice, not just a stylistic one. Gallotta’s dancers are not like us. They’re a kind of tribe and there’s a special, brittle intensity to their relationships. A man, embracing a woman, abruptly collapses. Is her touch poison? Is the thrill of contact as dangerous as a power surge? Though she has the power to drain him in an instant, there’s no malice in the act. Maybe it’s a blessing. The rare tender moments are extremely simple, ordinary, and slow paced, as plain as a couple walking in unison with a brushing step.
A great deal of French dance - like that of Dominque Bagouet - derives its fascination from the refinement and force of its gestural elements; they are not ornamental, but key. Though the gestures and steps Gallotta organizes are often abstract, pedestrian, or curt distortions of the academic, they’re always delivered with specific intention, instead of - as Americans would tend to realize them - open-ended and ambiguous, even non-committal. Because of this, there’s a strong narrative thrust to the movement, however puzzling the sequence of particular occurrences may be.
Ruiz’s filmic space is a wonderfully strange interior wilderness, surreal in its looming power - a maze of huge subaqueous rooms in blue and green, narrow corridors peopled with shadows. The feeling is as monumental and impersonal as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or some futuristic city whose real inhabitants have been cleanly obliterated. (But there’s a flexibility to the proportions of the space: as the camera moves, it sometimes seems as if the room itself were inflating and changing shape while its denizens shrink.) It’s alien in its scale and cool geometry, but not ominous; the dancers are perfectly at home. And a mattress on the floor, an open refrigerator exposing three lemons on a door shelf, a telephone on a long cord, indicate that this is inhabited space in which some kind of ordinary life goes on. The adventurousness of the camerawork, which busily sweeps us up - shooting from above and below, distancing activity with close up interferences, invading sealed enclosures, giving the dancers’ cavorting shadows the same expressive authority as the dancers themselves - makes it hard to imagine the shape of Mammame on stage. And I can’t conceive of it being any more absorbing live than the film, which fascinates with such a weird intimacy.
For example, when the men lie stunned on the floor and the women execute some precise legwork around them, we’re drawn to the alertness of the men’s eyes, darting nervously in their temporarily helpless bodies - as if they might get kicked or stepped on. Sexual encounters are sudden and blunt, the culmination of bullheaded routines as appealing as bonking heads; no pleasure is involved. Women leap urgently against the men’s chests, and briefly stick there. Then they drop off; momentary paralysis is followed by relief. In a long duet for two men, the same basic sequence occurs repeatedly.
The dancers, in gray undershirts and gym shorts, are Coppertone bronze. They murmur and utter sounds that approach language and have its desperate fluency. They cry and moan and grunt. Sometimes the dancers behave as automatically as whirligig figures, sometimes they might be cousins of Larry, Moe and Curly. Their eager voyeurism exemplifies the mutual fascination that operates among the members of this queer family and gives it its vitality and perhaps its raison d’etre. Something of an outsider, the impish, zany Gallota is very white. Terribly curious too, he’s a kind of clown; but though he’s often alone, he’s never exiled. Henri Torque and Serge Houppin’s sonorous score sails us through Mammame’s atmospheric transitions, and provides tacit commentary -- like when a bit of Brahms accompanies a solemn parade of crawling dancers. Ruiz fully embraces the dottiness of the choreography, its moody and startling shifts of tone. Beyond a telephone which seems as monumental as the Great Pyramid, we obesrve one man hurling himself against another’s chest and crying out. We catch dancers grappling in a corner, their limbs chopped off by intervening walls. When two women enter a blue-walled cell where they bend and bounce energetically, two men view them from above and gabble incomprehensibly in near-language. We watch the women from above and below, and we watch the watchers. An orange incandescent bulb descends past mushroom suddenly sprouted on the smooth walls. More people gather above to watch the bouncing women. At last, one clasps the other against her, back to front. It’s a moment of completion, with more sense of satisfaction for the onlookers than the two women locked in their exhausted embrace. Ruiz carries the action to the edge of the world, to a cliff top picnic around a table spilling with lemons set against a blue sea and purple sky as unnatural as the huge interiors. The men and women, on opposite benches, dither with sharp unison twisting and pushing gestures and shriek with the childhood fear and orphan loneliness they share. Then, after dusk, isolated couples linger on a pebbled beach. They have each other, for whatever solace that may be. Beyond them, the world lies empty.
At Film Forum 2 (January 29 and 30).
Raul Ruiz’s film version of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s Mammame just keeps popping up - most recently a few months ago at the Alliance Francaise’s Ruiz tribute. I had almost seen it last June in Montpellier, were it was screened commercially at a big Odeon seven-plex in conjunction with the city’s international dance festival. But the publicity stills looked too serious - so I opted for live performances in the evenings, and slothful days baking in the Mediterranean sun.
In July, however, in Chateauvallon, Gallota’s fizzy trio, Daphnis et Chloe, danced at a giddy pitch, made me high. Gallotta, who now heads the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble (an unheard of post for a choreographer), is much admired throughout France, though some people here despised his droll, oddball, sometimes willfully “tasteless” work when his company, Groupe Emile Dubois, performed two pieces - Les Survivants and Les Aventures d’Ivan Vaffan - at City Center in early 1985.
Gallottta’s choreography is strikingly un-American in its confirmed eccentricity and the quality of constriction in the movement. It’s never pretty, never expansive. The vocabulary itself is a narrow one. In Mammame, the dancers never reach beyond themselves, never seek to take possession of the space with their energy. Their bodies seem ungiving - hard and tight by design. The individual is assertive in a way that doesn’t impact seriously on his or her surroundings. It seems to me that this is a cultural choice, not just a stylistic one. Gallotta’s dancers are not like us. They’re a kind of tribe and there’s a special, brittle intensity to their relationships. A man, embracing a woman, abruptly collapses. Is her touch poison? Is the thrill of contact as dangerous as a power surge? Though she has the power to drain him in an instant, there’s no malice in the act. Maybe it’s a blessing. The rare tender moments are extremely simple, ordinary, and slow paced, as plain as a couple walking in unison with a brushing step.
A great deal of French dance - like that of Dominque Bagouet - derives its fascination from the refinement and force of its gestural elements; they are not ornamental, but key. Though the gestures and steps Gallotta organizes are often abstract, pedestrian, or curt distortions of the academic, they’re always delivered with specific intention, instead of - as Americans would tend to realize them - open-ended and ambiguous, even non-committal. Because of this, there’s a strong narrative thrust to the movement, however puzzling the sequence of particular occurrences may be.
Ruiz’s filmic space is a wonderfully strange interior wilderness, surreal in its looming power - a maze of huge subaqueous rooms in blue and green, narrow corridors peopled with shadows. The feeling is as monumental and impersonal as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or some futuristic city whose real inhabitants have been cleanly obliterated. (But there’s a flexibility to the proportions of the space: as the camera moves, it sometimes seems as if the room itself were inflating and changing shape while its denizens shrink.) It’s alien in its scale and cool geometry, but not ominous; the dancers are perfectly at home. And a mattress on the floor, an open refrigerator exposing three lemons on a door shelf, a telephone on a long cord, indicate that this is inhabited space in which some kind of ordinary life goes on. The adventurousness of the camerawork, which busily sweeps us up - shooting from above and below, distancing activity with close up interferences, invading sealed enclosures, giving the dancers’ cavorting shadows the same expressive authority as the dancers themselves - makes it hard to imagine the shape of Mammame on stage. And I can’t conceive of it being any more absorbing live than the film, which fascinates with such a weird intimacy.
For example, when the men lie stunned on the floor and the women execute some precise legwork around them, we’re drawn to the alertness of the men’s eyes, darting nervously in their temporarily helpless bodies - as if they might get kicked or stepped on. Sexual encounters are sudden and blunt, the culmination of bullheaded routines as appealing as bonking heads; no pleasure is involved. Women leap urgently against the men’s chests, and briefly stick there. Then they drop off; momentary paralysis is followed by relief. In a long duet for two men, the same basic sequence occurs repeatedly.
The dancers, in gray undershirts and gym shorts, are Coppertone bronze. They murmur and utter sounds that approach language and have its desperate fluency. They cry and moan and grunt. Sometimes the dancers behave as automatically as whirligig figures, sometimes they might be cousins of Larry, Moe and Curly. Their eager voyeurism exemplifies the mutual fascination that operates among the members of this queer family and gives it its vitality and perhaps its raison d’etre. Something of an outsider, the impish, zany Gallota is very white. Terribly curious too, he’s a kind of clown; but though he’s often alone, he’s never exiled. Henri Torque and Serge Houppin’s sonorous score sails us through Mammame’s atmospheric transitions, and provides tacit commentary -- like when a bit of Brahms accompanies a solemn parade of crawling dancers. Ruiz fully embraces the dottiness of the choreography, its moody and startling shifts of tone. Beyond a telephone which seems as monumental as the Great Pyramid, we obesrve one man hurling himself against another’s chest and crying out. We catch dancers grappling in a corner, their limbs chopped off by intervening walls. When two women enter a blue-walled cell where they bend and bounce energetically, two men view them from above and gabble incomprehensibly in near-language. We watch the women from above and below, and we watch the watchers. An orange incandescent bulb descends past mushroom suddenly sprouted on the smooth walls. More people gather above to watch the bouncing women. At last, one clasps the other against her, back to front. It’s a moment of completion, with more sense of satisfaction for the onlookers than the two women locked in their exhausted embrace. Ruiz carries the action to the edge of the world, to a cliff top picnic around a table spilling with lemons set against a blue sea and purple sky as unnatural as the huge interiors. The men and women, on opposite benches, dither with sharp unison twisting and pushing gestures and shriek with the childhood fear and orphan loneliness they share. Then, after dusk, isolated couples linger on a pebbled beach. They have each other, for whatever solace that may be. Beyond them, the world lies empty.
At Film Forum 2 (January 29 and 30).
Warming Scenes of Winter
April 5
Leviathan roars in the music of James Baker and a huge sheet of white cloth drops to the open
Tere O'Connor's Heaven Up North. It's a strange, sacramental, utterly fanciful journey that culminates in a meeting between three civilized beings (O'Connor, Christopher Batenhorst, Nancy Coenen) and a trio of women living closer to nature who initiate the first group into their native wisdom. If it sounds straightforward, it isn't: nothing by O'Connor would be.
Heaven Up North is almost Jesuitical in its intricate deviousness, yet its intellectual passion is distilled to uncommon purity. O'Connor creates an arcane, stripped-down, dream place bent to reflect our own in peculiar ways. It's one of extraordinarily refined movement and gesture with the life and elegance of ballet, its illusory fragility and boldness in space, combined with a kind of decadent ornamentation - like drooping hands, tapping feet, seal-flipper arms - that smacks slightly of the ridiculous. The first trio's high-waisted pants that cut off at mid calf (a characteristic costume choice for O'Connor) seems childish too, suggesting that the wearer - man or woman - is psychologically prepubescent, trapped literally between short pants and long pants. Two exhibits at the back of the stage are like minimalist arctic dioramas. Each scene is of waves of snow: in one, three small silvery cutouts shaped like stretched animals hides are suspended like snowflakes in a Christmas window; in the other hang three plastic bags containing mossy bunches of dark yarn. The beginning is ritual and exposition of the dance's precise vocabulary. Perhaps seeking her blessing or protection Coenen bows to Chrysa Parkinson, who is clad in a hooded denim parka and stands still as a statue. O'Connor and Batenhorst take big attitude leaps in unison, rapping their toes against the floor between leaps, stretch one arm up and tremble fiercely, then come to Parkinson and stoop to solemnly press their lips against her fingertips.
Early on, it's often hard to know what's significant (probably everything) and what's not. Incidents seem to accrue with only tangential reverence--like the various diversions of a baroque opera or a Jacobean masque. Heaven Up North is baroque too in its weird, stringent quaintness, and in the rigorous, almost legalistic way O'Connor uses his dance vocabulary. The dance levitates into the wild, deadpan humor with first contact. The three arctic women (Parkinson, Sarah Perron, Dara Van Laanen), wearing black shifts, move in their greeting with a light, sinuous quality, holding their hips, twisting their fists, dodging around. Their unspoiled quality, an innate confidence in the perfection of their own world, makes them seem like a demi-goddesses and allows them to be inviting without being particularly sexual. They run off, but return with gift-wrapped presents that look like blocks of ice tied with blue ribbon. The women set the gifts down, lounge like odalisques beside them, then quickly wind up the ribbons and retreat momentarily. The visitors facing these nymphs are stiff, locked in immobile, boxy-chested parkas. With gracious formality, the women show the visitors three blue fish. then they pour black powder out of the fishes' mouths. They solemnly show framed paintings of animals - owl, wolf, faun, --then flip the pictures over to show images of stretched furry hides. The trio shakes violently. The women give away their wisdom first chance they get in these droll, cautionary lessons about the world's vulnerability. Exhibit three consists of Ziploc bags of dark, contaminated water.
O'Connor's vision is fascinating and unique. The dancing is superb; James Backer's virile score and Michael Stiller's lighting enrich the atmosphere immeasurably. Though cause and effect are rarely evident, nothing is vague or uncertain. Watching Heaven Up North, you succumb to its general narrative motion and the exhilarating, piquant clarity of its particular elements. Looking back on the piece, its precision and literalness on its own terms, its furious moral authority, it seems even more imposing. Heaven Up North is like an elaborately interlocking puzzle with a built-in key. I expect the penny to drop any day now.
At Danspace Project St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (March 17-20).
Leviathan roars in the music of James Baker and a huge sheet of white cloth drops to the open
Tere O'Connor's Heaven Up North. It's a strange, sacramental, utterly fanciful journey that culminates in a meeting between three civilized beings (O'Connor, Christopher Batenhorst, Nancy Coenen) and a trio of women living closer to nature who initiate the first group into their native wisdom. If it sounds straightforward, it isn't: nothing by O'Connor would be.
Heaven Up North is almost Jesuitical in its intricate deviousness, yet its intellectual passion is distilled to uncommon purity. O'Connor creates an arcane, stripped-down, dream place bent to reflect our own in peculiar ways. It's one of extraordinarily refined movement and gesture with the life and elegance of ballet, its illusory fragility and boldness in space, combined with a kind of decadent ornamentation - like drooping hands, tapping feet, seal-flipper arms - that smacks slightly of the ridiculous. The first trio's high-waisted pants that cut off at mid calf (a characteristic costume choice for O'Connor) seems childish too, suggesting that the wearer - man or woman - is psychologically prepubescent, trapped literally between short pants and long pants. Two exhibits at the back of the stage are like minimalist arctic dioramas. Each scene is of waves of snow: in one, three small silvery cutouts shaped like stretched animals hides are suspended like snowflakes in a Christmas window; in the other hang three plastic bags containing mossy bunches of dark yarn. The beginning is ritual and exposition of the dance's precise vocabulary. Perhaps seeking her blessing or protection Coenen bows to Chrysa Parkinson, who is clad in a hooded denim parka and stands still as a statue. O'Connor and Batenhorst take big attitude leaps in unison, rapping their toes against the floor between leaps, stretch one arm up and tremble fiercely, then come to Parkinson and stoop to solemnly press their lips against her fingertips.
Early on, it's often hard to know what's significant (probably everything) and what's not. Incidents seem to accrue with only tangential reverence--like the various diversions of a baroque opera or a Jacobean masque. Heaven Up North is baroque too in its weird, stringent quaintness, and in the rigorous, almost legalistic way O'Connor uses his dance vocabulary. The dance levitates into the wild, deadpan humor with first contact. The three arctic women (Parkinson, Sarah Perron, Dara Van Laanen), wearing black shifts, move in their greeting with a light, sinuous quality, holding their hips, twisting their fists, dodging around. Their unspoiled quality, an innate confidence in the perfection of their own world, makes them seem like a demi-goddesses and allows them to be inviting without being particularly sexual. They run off, but return with gift-wrapped presents that look like blocks of ice tied with blue ribbon. The women set the gifts down, lounge like odalisques beside them, then quickly wind up the ribbons and retreat momentarily. The visitors facing these nymphs are stiff, locked in immobile, boxy-chested parkas. With gracious formality, the women show the visitors three blue fish. then they pour black powder out of the fishes' mouths. They solemnly show framed paintings of animals - owl, wolf, faun, --then flip the pictures over to show images of stretched furry hides. The trio shakes violently. The women give away their wisdom first chance they get in these droll, cautionary lessons about the world's vulnerability. Exhibit three consists of Ziploc bags of dark, contaminated water.
O'Connor's vision is fascinating and unique. The dancing is superb; James Backer's virile score and Michael Stiller's lighting enrich the atmosphere immeasurably. Though cause and effect are rarely evident, nothing is vague or uncertain. Watching Heaven Up North, you succumb to its general narrative motion and the exhilarating, piquant clarity of its particular elements. Looking back on the piece, its precision and literalness on its own terms, its furious moral authority, it seems even more imposing. Heaven Up North is like an elaborately interlocking puzzle with a built-in key. I expect the penny to drop any day now.
At Danspace Project St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (March 17-20).
Water Babies
June 7
The main appeal of Australia's Sydney Dance Company is the likable company, composed of dancers with a full-hearted, pleasurable, essentially uncomplicated approach to movement, and a grand feel for space and spaciousness. I have mixed feelings about artistic director Graeme Murphy's Shining, a congratulatory piece made in 1986 to celebrate his 10 years with the company. In a lush balletomodern style, Shining is a sprawling, opulent, and immensely pretty work that seems lacking in structural bone and sinew. It serves the dancers well, but it has no stringency. It wants a surgeon to snip away the excess.
Murphy set his dancers flinging and surging across the stage in this uncharacteristically plotless, abstract piece in three sections - "Dawn," "Pre-Dawn," and "Night" - set to three works (or parts thereof) by Karol Szymanowski: his First Violin Concerto; Mythes, Opus 30; and his Fourth Symphony. The first and last sections are for large groups and various combinations of dancers from solos to sextets; the second part is a substantial duet for long-limbed Andrea Toy and Alfred Williams. Szymanowski's music seems a puzzling choice.
The first selection is demanding, complex, full of fitful borrowings, too agitated for the lyricism of the dance. In the third part, too, the emotional content of the music seems inflated in relation to the movement. Often, the dancing seems to arbitrarily switch mood according to the whim of the music, discarding its own momentum as if that had no direction of its own. Handsomely lit by John Drummond Montgomery, the main feature of the set by Andrew Carter is a low ramp that sweeps upward on the right side of the stage and exaggerates the surge of the choreography. Dancers rush up or down it, or poise at its upper edge, waiting for the cue to push them over the top. It dramatizes their expectancy, yet it adds, too, an element of self-consciousness and affectation. The men wear black pants, white formal shirts, and untied bow-ties, the women short black dresses with glittering beaded fronts (the elegant costumes are by Jennifer Irwin).
The choreography is full of curling bodies, curling arms. Tidal images govern its mass ebbs and flows, rushings and flingings, and birds are evoked in the fluttering or exultantly upraised arms. Murphy's eye for arresting shapes is keen, and he can get his dancers in and out of a contrived pose in a split second. The floor is part of the dancers' natural habitat: their plies unfold so the knees dip right down to it; they slide and drag each smoothly around. Often the whole company reacts like dominoes in sequence. Duets, quartets, trios, and group sections feed into or follow each other with no fuss. In a trio, Paul Mercurio and Kim Walker lift Janet Vernon high by her calves, pull her around, and let her soar. Rangy Alfred Willams has a soft, undulating solo, that, in its lazy soulfulness, accents the amplitude of his limbs, and in this instance, a kind of appealing gaucheness. One hand on the floor, he pivots like the circling hand of a clock, pushes up, and springs into juicy turning leaps, till Andrea Toy locks herself onto him. A sort of petit allegro solo for Nina Veretenikova that darts and turns every which way with the urgent music becomes giddy with Swan Lake paraphrases, with fluttering and flapping arms and bright cygnet feet. A couple runs across. A mass of dancers rushes down the ramp, back up, floods down one side. The women crouch, then fling themselves backward into the men's arms. Curving, arching, sweeping, swooping: that's what's happening. Williams and Toy are succulent in the long duet that anchors Shining. He's in formal wear, she's in a gleaming, backless gown and point shoes. Around the edge of the stage are street lamps, and black cafe tables and chairs.
I think of the theme as "There may be trouble ahead, but while there's music and movement and love and romance, let's face the music and dance," partly because of the arching movements that recall those Astaire/Rogers romantic adagios, as well as for the troubled moodiness that ripples this duet's surface. Toy wraps himself over William's back; he grips her as she coils over his knee; they move in synchrony, spoon-fashion; he pulls her body over his. There's a whiff of "reality"--he adjusts his jacket a bit pettishly, she touche his face. In the middle of the duet, he discards his jacket, she takes off her point shoes, and then they do pretty much the same thing as before. He holds her in front of him, legs and arms wide, and rocks her. He runs his hand possessively along the side of her body. From behind, she presses her hands against his eyes and sinks to the floor as if the contact melts her. For the third section, everyone's in black evening clothes. The couples rushed together, then off. Two men, Darren Spowart and Glenn Murray, have a stiffly precise, intricately dovetailed duet that's almost doll-like in its precision. Four women swirl around like demure little girls in their nightgowns. Six men line up, hands in pockets, like the romantic gangsters of your dreams, moving with sharp knee jerks, little stamps, twists, with footwork that's tight and hard. Six women joined them and the dancing bursts with leaps, lifts, and twirls to the floor. From the ramp, the men dive to the stage in arabesque, roll over, and the women, also in arabesque, plunge forward, leaning on the men's upthrust hands. It all culminates in a long swooping, reeling cresendo.
At City Center, 131 West 55th Street, 246-8999, May 24 through June 5.
Simone Forti and four dancers rendered into movement aspects of a landscape with its geology, cartography, and bits of history in Green Mountain, a place developed in situ, in Vermont in a workshop in a performance with K.J. Holmes, David Zambrano, David Rosenmiller, Lauri Nagel, and Forti. Calm, and oddly literal, with the dancers falling into or delineating shapes, or acting out images as they they describe them, the piece piece was curiously neutral, unsensual, and submissive, as if its performers/creators were afraid to break the meditative spell. Reflecting their observations, they rarely managed to transcend the exposition.
Green Mountain was the kind of essay that, interesting enough to show among friends and sympathetic colleagues - frankly, I enjoyed many parts of it - but in which, on the whole, imagination doesn't seem to be operating in a lively way. The directness, the nakedness of their method, is disarming; there are no tricks, no mannerisms, no exaggerations. Contrarily, for example, their flat renderings of the textural episodes, are too monotone, too affectless to be natural. The dancers locate themselves in a rural scene that seems special and particular to them, but which seems generalized and overly benevolent. I see their portrait as a product of the city dweller escaping to an undemanding paradise that delicately thrills the senses with the pristine romance of snow crystals of collapsing at the onset of spring, clear, rushing melt waters, and young green shoots.
There are some moments of special vividness; Forti, crouched down, talking about fresh water running off an embankment, sucks the tips of her fingers with the utmost delight. Holmes whooshes a bare branch several times through the air. Then, she cruelly snaps off some of its twigs, then breaks all of them so what remains is a whip. Nagel talks of losing her too-big boots in the snow, while trying to walk through a snarl of friendly rolling bodies and hands grabbing at her feet. David Zambrano - as some animal I can't identify, but believe in completely- hops neatly, shifting his arms daintily in front of his chest, and occasionally emits a strange bark, while the others very gradually close in on him. He jumps, and in an instant, his body hangs limp over Rosenmiller's shoulder. Two black-and-white videos of rushing streams are played on monitors which are move around in pitch darkness. (Technology, even this basic, is a bit of a shock.) Then, in very faint light, three dancers, lying down one after another, form a kind of conveyor belt, slowly tumble one monitor with its flooding images down the line, like a real creak over its rocky bed.
With the help of an old stuffed doll, Manheim the Rabbit, Forti turned her improvised solo News Animation awry, because " the level of into it I've been getting is thinner and thinner." Instead, she tried to interview someone from the audience and attempted to translate parts of the conversation in to movement, but couldn't get focused. She seemed to be waiting for some material to crop up that she could dig into, but she kept wandering. Because she's so unaffected and innocently wise, the audience was amazingly patient, though they became absurdly grateful for the tiniest crumb. It was rather satisfying to remain so exposed, trying to make something work that just wouldn't, and not bury herself in anxiety. I wonder, however, how this differs, if at all from what Johnny Carson does almost every night.
At Dance Theater Workshop. April 26 to May 17.
The main appeal of Australia's Sydney Dance Company is the likable company, composed of dancers with a full-hearted, pleasurable, essentially uncomplicated approach to movement, and a grand feel for space and spaciousness. I have mixed feelings about artistic director Graeme Murphy's Shining, a congratulatory piece made in 1986 to celebrate his 10 years with the company. In a lush balletomodern style, Shining is a sprawling, opulent, and immensely pretty work that seems lacking in structural bone and sinew. It serves the dancers well, but it has no stringency. It wants a surgeon to snip away the excess.
Murphy set his dancers flinging and surging across the stage in this uncharacteristically plotless, abstract piece in three sections - "Dawn," "Pre-Dawn," and "Night" - set to three works (or parts thereof) by Karol Szymanowski: his First Violin Concerto; Mythes, Opus 30; and his Fourth Symphony. The first and last sections are for large groups and various combinations of dancers from solos to sextets; the second part is a substantial duet for long-limbed Andrea Toy and Alfred Williams. Szymanowski's music seems a puzzling choice.
The first selection is demanding, complex, full of fitful borrowings, too agitated for the lyricism of the dance. In the third part, too, the emotional content of the music seems inflated in relation to the movement. Often, the dancing seems to arbitrarily switch mood according to the whim of the music, discarding its own momentum as if that had no direction of its own. Handsomely lit by John Drummond Montgomery, the main feature of the set by Andrew Carter is a low ramp that sweeps upward on the right side of the stage and exaggerates the surge of the choreography. Dancers rush up or down it, or poise at its upper edge, waiting for the cue to push them over the top. It dramatizes their expectancy, yet it adds, too, an element of self-consciousness and affectation. The men wear black pants, white formal shirts, and untied bow-ties, the women short black dresses with glittering beaded fronts (the elegant costumes are by Jennifer Irwin).
The choreography is full of curling bodies, curling arms. Tidal images govern its mass ebbs and flows, rushings and flingings, and birds are evoked in the fluttering or exultantly upraised arms. Murphy's eye for arresting shapes is keen, and he can get his dancers in and out of a contrived pose in a split second. The floor is part of the dancers' natural habitat: their plies unfold so the knees dip right down to it; they slide and drag each smoothly around. Often the whole company reacts like dominoes in sequence. Duets, quartets, trios, and group sections feed into or follow each other with no fuss. In a trio, Paul Mercurio and Kim Walker lift Janet Vernon high by her calves, pull her around, and let her soar. Rangy Alfred Willams has a soft, undulating solo, that, in its lazy soulfulness, accents the amplitude of his limbs, and in this instance, a kind of appealing gaucheness. One hand on the floor, he pivots like the circling hand of a clock, pushes up, and springs into juicy turning leaps, till Andrea Toy locks herself onto him. A sort of petit allegro solo for Nina Veretenikova that darts and turns every which way with the urgent music becomes giddy with Swan Lake paraphrases, with fluttering and flapping arms and bright cygnet feet. A couple runs across. A mass of dancers rushes down the ramp, back up, floods down one side. The women crouch, then fling themselves backward into the men's arms. Curving, arching, sweeping, swooping: that's what's happening. Williams and Toy are succulent in the long duet that anchors Shining. He's in formal wear, she's in a gleaming, backless gown and point shoes. Around the edge of the stage are street lamps, and black cafe tables and chairs.
I think of the theme as "There may be trouble ahead, but while there's music and movement and love and romance, let's face the music and dance," partly because of the arching movements that recall those Astaire/Rogers romantic adagios, as well as for the troubled moodiness that ripples this duet's surface. Toy wraps himself over William's back; he grips her as she coils over his knee; they move in synchrony, spoon-fashion; he pulls her body over his. There's a whiff of "reality"--he adjusts his jacket a bit pettishly, she touche his face. In the middle of the duet, he discards his jacket, she takes off her point shoes, and then they do pretty much the same thing as before. He holds her in front of him, legs and arms wide, and rocks her. He runs his hand possessively along the side of her body. From behind, she presses her hands against his eyes and sinks to the floor as if the contact melts her. For the third section, everyone's in black evening clothes. The couples rushed together, then off. Two men, Darren Spowart and Glenn Murray, have a stiffly precise, intricately dovetailed duet that's almost doll-like in its precision. Four women swirl around like demure little girls in their nightgowns. Six men line up, hands in pockets, like the romantic gangsters of your dreams, moving with sharp knee jerks, little stamps, twists, with footwork that's tight and hard. Six women joined them and the dancing bursts with leaps, lifts, and twirls to the floor. From the ramp, the men dive to the stage in arabesque, roll over, and the women, also in arabesque, plunge forward, leaning on the men's upthrust hands. It all culminates in a long swooping, reeling cresendo.
At City Center, 131 West 55th Street, 246-8999, May 24 through June 5.
Simone Forti and four dancers rendered into movement aspects of a landscape with its geology, cartography, and bits of history in Green Mountain, a place developed in situ, in Vermont in a workshop in a performance with K.J. Holmes, David Zambrano, David Rosenmiller, Lauri Nagel, and Forti. Calm, and oddly literal, with the dancers falling into or delineating shapes, or acting out images as they they describe them, the piece piece was curiously neutral, unsensual, and submissive, as if its performers/creators were afraid to break the meditative spell. Reflecting their observations, they rarely managed to transcend the exposition.
Green Mountain was the kind of essay that, interesting enough to show among friends and sympathetic colleagues - frankly, I enjoyed many parts of it - but in which, on the whole, imagination doesn't seem to be operating in a lively way. The directness, the nakedness of their method, is disarming; there are no tricks, no mannerisms, no exaggerations. Contrarily, for example, their flat renderings of the textural episodes, are too monotone, too affectless to be natural. The dancers locate themselves in a rural scene that seems special and particular to them, but which seems generalized and overly benevolent. I see their portrait as a product of the city dweller escaping to an undemanding paradise that delicately thrills the senses with the pristine romance of snow crystals of collapsing at the onset of spring, clear, rushing melt waters, and young green shoots.
There are some moments of special vividness; Forti, crouched down, talking about fresh water running off an embankment, sucks the tips of her fingers with the utmost delight. Holmes whooshes a bare branch several times through the air. Then, she cruelly snaps off some of its twigs, then breaks all of them so what remains is a whip. Nagel talks of losing her too-big boots in the snow, while trying to walk through a snarl of friendly rolling bodies and hands grabbing at her feet. David Zambrano - as some animal I can't identify, but believe in completely- hops neatly, shifting his arms daintily in front of his chest, and occasionally emits a strange bark, while the others very gradually close in on him. He jumps, and in an instant, his body hangs limp over Rosenmiller's shoulder. Two black-and-white videos of rushing streams are played on monitors which are move around in pitch darkness. (Technology, even this basic, is a bit of a shock.) Then, in very faint light, three dancers, lying down one after another, form a kind of conveyor belt, slowly tumble one monitor with its flooding images down the line, like a real creak over its rocky bed.
With the help of an old stuffed doll, Manheim the Rabbit, Forti turned her improvised solo News Animation awry, because " the level of into it I've been getting is thinner and thinner." Instead, she tried to interview someone from the audience and attempted to translate parts of the conversation in to movement, but couldn't get focused. She seemed to be waiting for some material to crop up that she could dig into, but she kept wandering. Because she's so unaffected and innocently wise, the audience was amazingly patient, though they became absurdly grateful for the tiniest crumb. It was rather satisfying to remain so exposed, trying to make something work that just wouldn't, and not bury herself in anxiety. I wonder, however, how this differs, if at all from what Johnny Carson does almost every night.
At Dance Theater Workshop. April 26 to May 17.
Wild Thing
June 21
William Forsythe is gleeful, nutty nervous, with the kind of mind that zips around. He wants to know everything. He's just seen John Kelly. He's been floored by the way Trisha Brown organizes every particle of movement. Tell him about the strange hybrid theater he's been hearing about. What about Martha Clarke? And who's doing pure movement? He's seen hundreds of homeless people out on the street here and in San Francisco and wants to know what the hell is wrong with us. Even though an expatriate, he's ashamed. Also, he missed his cup of coffee and is grateful for a couple of sips of the pipi de chat.
One of Europe's most admired choreographers, 39-year-old American-born Forsythe has been director of the Frankfurt Ballet - at City Center this week - since 1984. After training with the Joffrey, he joined the Stuttgart in 1973 and, since then, has made his career largely in Europe. At City Center, he's doing his own stuff, including the popular Love Songs which he won't do in Frankfurt ("I've retired it, thank you."), and a piece by company member Amanda Miller who's American too, and comes out of North Carolina's School of the Arts.
"I'm excited about that. It's important to be able to foster somebody. Peter Martins is doing that too, trying to find people in the company who want to choreograph. They know the language. Why not look for them there? "It's a big relief to have found someone you feel you can rely on. You know what big mono enterprises these companies become. One person doing most everything. It's not good for the psychic state of the company. It becomes too obsessive." Having other people from the company make dances helps to break down the hierarchy, and the director becomes less the father.
"Yeah, I'm going through that right now," says Forsythe. "It's been projected on me so heavily for so long that I'm going, 'No, uh uh, cut it out.' If you don't break the pattern, it gets crazy. Actually, my co-director, Martin Steinhoff, is from marketing and is well-versed in all this group dynamics stuff and he gives me the latest German psychological rundown. It's good to think it's not entirely me. I just say, 'Yeah, uh, excuse me' and back off - no one likes that. It hasn't made me too popular. When it makes me too nervous, I go do something else elsewhere, like City Ballet or the Paris Opera."
Forsythe has been connected with Frankfurt since 1980 and did a big piece in 1983 "that sort of bonded me to the company, and in '84 they asked me to take over. I brought in Stephen Petronio, Daniel Larrieu, Amanda, Mark Haim to choreograph. There's another guy in my company I'm trying to push. People ask me, in Europe, do you know any choreographers? I say, of course I do. I say, 'Tony, you're going to do your first ballet in Florence. Get on out there.' Trying to push them. That's what happened to me. Dive in and go! "
"I knew I wanted to be a choreographer. Somebody else yelled at me, 'You can't be a choreographer until you're a dancer!' So I just shut up and told no one. I'd get my girlfriends to try this, try that. I did a pas de deux for Stuttgart in 1976. Macia Haydee saw it, she walked in, and the next day she said, 'You're now the choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet.' She's kind of impulsive. I started crying. Waaaah, I'm scared, something along those lines. 'And, your next ballet - I'm in your next ballet, me and Ricky (Cragun), and we're taking it to the Met.' She'd seen one ballet. And that was too much pressure at the beginning. I'm just getting over that now."
"Eventually, I started doing stuff that Marcia didn't like. It was normal, like being 13, and she said 'Naah, it's too crazy, you'll have to change it.' And we battled. I get along great with her now. It was sort of a teen episode. But I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Those things were really important. The one she got really pissed off about was in an abandoned tunnel, and we did this production with audiences stretched out for a quarter of a mile. For me, it was real progress, but they didn't understand why I would want to do something like that."
Forsythe is disciplined, reckless, and curious as a kitten. "I invited 15 choreographers to work on a piece called Pizza Girl. It consisted of 90 one-minute pieces. I wish everyone had taken advantage of the fact that it was only one minute and you could do whatever you fucking well pleased. You can't make a statement, thank god. People tried, unfortunately. I thought it was just the perfect occasion to - come on! just get crazy, but instead people tried to show what they could do in that one minute. That was 1985. It was great. If my company wants to bug me, they do magic moments from Pizza Girl. People just sat there like stones. The hard thing was deciding the order, random didn't work, we tried that. We tried letting machines decide, people decide, strangers decide."
"There's the opportunity to realize certain visions. The last piece has the entire company turned into Catholic school girls. Thirty-five Catholic girls doing a giant Constructivist Zulu dance. People had a good time. But there's not endless money. It's not the paradise of subsidized theater." Still, he's not spending his time drumming up money. Paul Taylor has complained that he’s always a beggar. Forsythe doesn't have to do that. "But we have to negotiate every time for what is supposedly our rightful budget. It's a bit of a pain. Dance is still considered second class."
"I feel like a complete innocent talking to my colleagues about this sort of stuff. I was really curious how they operate in this system, and they were curious about how my thing operates. I can only expand at a certain rate. If I needed more dancers, I couldn't get them until the next big contract. I've asked for a certain amount of money and it's set. For three years I'm stuck with the situation. But I don't feel that sort of wolf-at-the-door thing."
He often works with his company in a structured improvisational form. "When I had a knee operation in 1971 - people now have tiny, tiny microsurgery, this was the good old days, so I was laid up for about eight weeks - and I came across Rudolf von Laban's Space Harmony. It was almost an equivalent of Schoenberg's theories. It's about perceiving dance through a body oriented in this axial room as a pure text that requires no context. What I began to do was imagine a kind of serial movement and, maintaining certain arm positions from ballet. I can train people to move through this model or reorganize this model through their knowledge of ballet, wHile keeping a certain form in their bodies. I can produce endless streams of movement - not pure classical ballet, but movement that is in its form intrinsically and essentially ballet, though the organization is completely different."
"And then Same Old Story, which we're bringing to City Center, is organized on this model. You move and you analyze, so you move and you correct off the movement itself. You have a model in your mind about where to go. It's not just moving around and this has made sense to ballet dancers whenever I've shown them. In Behind the China Dogs, at NYCB, everybody does their own musical timings. It works out because the music is constructed to make that kind of organized dance look like it's organized. But there are no counts."
"I started using computers when I got tired of my own decisions. I have about 30 or 40 different operations I can perform on any one thing. I use the computer when I've developed the actual material. Then, what's really nice is I can see the dancers. If it's set choreography, you always see the dancers through that filter of choreographer. You're assessing the accomplishment of the task. And it's so nice when they're performing this other stuff: they read the computer text and interpret the text as they wish, therefore I see the dancer first. And I need that in the company because they reimagine themselves, and it brings up some wonderful movement. But it also distracted them from the fact that they're performing. Some people like to perform, and some people don't like to dance. And I know this from myself being one of those people. You're so busy reflecting on what you're doing, analyzing it, you don't dare think about something else. You sort of have to dream it.”
Where do his ideas come from? From messing around? Does the muse come to him in his sleep? "I don't have such a theatrical life. I do my work, and I have three kids, and the studio is next to the house. My ideas come from Go, Dog, Go! or Green Eggs and Ham. "I read, I turn the tv on, sometimes watch music videos to see what ideas are being trashed, what not to use. There's some good stuff. Umm. Ahh. A lot of music that I work with is by composers who are alive, and hopefully well. We sit around a lot and eat. During dinner a lot gets done."
William Forsythe is gleeful, nutty nervous, with the kind of mind that zips around. He wants to know everything. He's just seen John Kelly. He's been floored by the way Trisha Brown organizes every particle of movement. Tell him about the strange hybrid theater he's been hearing about. What about Martha Clarke? And who's doing pure movement? He's seen hundreds of homeless people out on the street here and in San Francisco and wants to know what the hell is wrong with us. Even though an expatriate, he's ashamed. Also, he missed his cup of coffee and is grateful for a couple of sips of the pipi de chat.
One of Europe's most admired choreographers, 39-year-old American-born Forsythe has been director of the Frankfurt Ballet - at City Center this week - since 1984. After training with the Joffrey, he joined the Stuttgart in 1973 and, since then, has made his career largely in Europe. At City Center, he's doing his own stuff, including the popular Love Songs which he won't do in Frankfurt ("I've retired it, thank you."), and a piece by company member Amanda Miller who's American too, and comes out of North Carolina's School of the Arts.
"I'm excited about that. It's important to be able to foster somebody. Peter Martins is doing that too, trying to find people in the company who want to choreograph. They know the language. Why not look for them there? "It's a big relief to have found someone you feel you can rely on. You know what big mono enterprises these companies become. One person doing most everything. It's not good for the psychic state of the company. It becomes too obsessive." Having other people from the company make dances helps to break down the hierarchy, and the director becomes less the father.
"Yeah, I'm going through that right now," says Forsythe. "It's been projected on me so heavily for so long that I'm going, 'No, uh uh, cut it out.' If you don't break the pattern, it gets crazy. Actually, my co-director, Martin Steinhoff, is from marketing and is well-versed in all this group dynamics stuff and he gives me the latest German psychological rundown. It's good to think it's not entirely me. I just say, 'Yeah, uh, excuse me' and back off - no one likes that. It hasn't made me too popular. When it makes me too nervous, I go do something else elsewhere, like City Ballet or the Paris Opera."
Forsythe has been connected with Frankfurt since 1980 and did a big piece in 1983 "that sort of bonded me to the company, and in '84 they asked me to take over. I brought in Stephen Petronio, Daniel Larrieu, Amanda, Mark Haim to choreograph. There's another guy in my company I'm trying to push. People ask me, in Europe, do you know any choreographers? I say, of course I do. I say, 'Tony, you're going to do your first ballet in Florence. Get on out there.' Trying to push them. That's what happened to me. Dive in and go! "
"I knew I wanted to be a choreographer. Somebody else yelled at me, 'You can't be a choreographer until you're a dancer!' So I just shut up and told no one. I'd get my girlfriends to try this, try that. I did a pas de deux for Stuttgart in 1976. Macia Haydee saw it, she walked in, and the next day she said, 'You're now the choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet.' She's kind of impulsive. I started crying. Waaaah, I'm scared, something along those lines. 'And, your next ballet - I'm in your next ballet, me and Ricky (Cragun), and we're taking it to the Met.' She'd seen one ballet. And that was too much pressure at the beginning. I'm just getting over that now."
"Eventually, I started doing stuff that Marcia didn't like. It was normal, like being 13, and she said 'Naah, it's too crazy, you'll have to change it.' And we battled. I get along great with her now. It was sort of a teen episode. But I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Those things were really important. The one she got really pissed off about was in an abandoned tunnel, and we did this production with audiences stretched out for a quarter of a mile. For me, it was real progress, but they didn't understand why I would want to do something like that."
Forsythe is disciplined, reckless, and curious as a kitten. "I invited 15 choreographers to work on a piece called Pizza Girl. It consisted of 90 one-minute pieces. I wish everyone had taken advantage of the fact that it was only one minute and you could do whatever you fucking well pleased. You can't make a statement, thank god. People tried, unfortunately. I thought it was just the perfect occasion to - come on! just get crazy, but instead people tried to show what they could do in that one minute. That was 1985. It was great. If my company wants to bug me, they do magic moments from Pizza Girl. People just sat there like stones. The hard thing was deciding the order, random didn't work, we tried that. We tried letting machines decide, people decide, strangers decide."
"There's the opportunity to realize certain visions. The last piece has the entire company turned into Catholic school girls. Thirty-five Catholic girls doing a giant Constructivist Zulu dance. People had a good time. But there's not endless money. It's not the paradise of subsidized theater." Still, he's not spending his time drumming up money. Paul Taylor has complained that he’s always a beggar. Forsythe doesn't have to do that. "But we have to negotiate every time for what is supposedly our rightful budget. It's a bit of a pain. Dance is still considered second class."
"I feel like a complete innocent talking to my colleagues about this sort of stuff. I was really curious how they operate in this system, and they were curious about how my thing operates. I can only expand at a certain rate. If I needed more dancers, I couldn't get them until the next big contract. I've asked for a certain amount of money and it's set. For three years I'm stuck with the situation. But I don't feel that sort of wolf-at-the-door thing."
He often works with his company in a structured improvisational form. "When I had a knee operation in 1971 - people now have tiny, tiny microsurgery, this was the good old days, so I was laid up for about eight weeks - and I came across Rudolf von Laban's Space Harmony. It was almost an equivalent of Schoenberg's theories. It's about perceiving dance through a body oriented in this axial room as a pure text that requires no context. What I began to do was imagine a kind of serial movement and, maintaining certain arm positions from ballet. I can train people to move through this model or reorganize this model through their knowledge of ballet, wHile keeping a certain form in their bodies. I can produce endless streams of movement - not pure classical ballet, but movement that is in its form intrinsically and essentially ballet, though the organization is completely different."
"And then Same Old Story, which we're bringing to City Center, is organized on this model. You move and you analyze, so you move and you correct off the movement itself. You have a model in your mind about where to go. It's not just moving around and this has made sense to ballet dancers whenever I've shown them. In Behind the China Dogs, at NYCB, everybody does their own musical timings. It works out because the music is constructed to make that kind of organized dance look like it's organized. But there are no counts."
"I started using computers when I got tired of my own decisions. I have about 30 or 40 different operations I can perform on any one thing. I use the computer when I've developed the actual material. Then, what's really nice is I can see the dancers. If it's set choreography, you always see the dancers through that filter of choreographer. You're assessing the accomplishment of the task. And it's so nice when they're performing this other stuff: they read the computer text and interpret the text as they wish, therefore I see the dancer first. And I need that in the company because they reimagine themselves, and it brings up some wonderful movement. But it also distracted them from the fact that they're performing. Some people like to perform, and some people don't like to dance. And I know this from myself being one of those people. You're so busy reflecting on what you're doing, analyzing it, you don't dare think about something else. You sort of have to dream it.”
Where do his ideas come from? From messing around? Does the muse come to him in his sleep? "I don't have such a theatrical life. I do my work, and I have three kids, and the studio is next to the house. My ideas come from Go, Dog, Go! or Green Eggs and Ham. "I read, I turn the tv on, sometimes watch music videos to see what ideas are being trashed, what not to use. There's some good stuff. Umm. Ahh. A lot of music that I work with is by composers who are alive, and hopefully well. We sit around a lot and eat. During dinner a lot gets done."
Wo Wo Wo Feelings
April 26
Jennifer Muller’s company has a lot going for it. Her choreography spits out eloquent phrases, her dancers plunge headlong in a popular ecstatic mode and whip themselves into seductively rococo shapes. The eleven members of her company are excellent and so gorgeous any susceptible person would want to be them, or have them. So why is her work so profoundly depressing?
Because it’s so dumb. With the arching and twisting of the torso, the ornate, curving thrusts of the arms, Muller creates a passionate aura. She loves the dramatic opposition of bodies that spread out swiftly in lavish abandon, then retract and pull in. She can keep her human pinwheels zizzing around the stage. It’s the kind of work unsophisticated audiences love; pretty, lush, exciting, unambiguous, emotional without demanding any involvement on the part of the viewer. It’s not difficult or taxing to the audience – you can leave your brain at home. And dancers must love to dance these pieces, because they’re done so full-out and larded with a satisfying expressive oomph.
Though Muller has elaborated her vocabulary since the days of Tub and other early pieces, she is unwittingly pretentious, willfully naïve, and humorous as ever, and she still hasn’t learned to make a dance that doesn’t end 14 times before it’s over. John Brooks wearing white boxer shorts dresses for success out of a small suitcase in The Enigma (analytical/experimental), from 1986, a schematic piece that juxtaposes two stereotypes: five dancers in business outfits, who march and trot about in straight aggressive lines and four other, wearing fancy exotic flesh-colored underwear that features the women’s belly buttons, who crawl on stage like voluptuous spiders and lie back in flat arched poses as if only half-awake, awaiting the first dreamy screw of the day. They do a lot of curving, leaning, fondling, mushy stuff. They press their heads so far back in rapture that by rights they should get Excedrin headaches, but they don’t so their hearts must be pure. The rat-racers do get headaches; they’re choleric, urgent, worried, stressed; they rub their necks, bite their nails, and twitch.
Anyway, Brooks spies Angeline Wolf, one of the underwear people sleeping. He touches her. She wakes! but keeps slithering out of his arms. He grabs her possessively, won’t let her escape his demands. When eventually she gets back to her people, she’s plumb wore out. Then the pushy people attack Brooks and dump him. Wolf returns to him (I guess women do like to be treated like objects) but at first he won’t be consoled and then he gets bossy again. He slips a gray dress over her and gold jewelry, and she walks with him, numbly. I thought vaguely of Wordsworth – you know, trailing clouds of glory; here’s this innocent ex-nymph shoved into the “real world.” She doesn’t like hurrying in straight lines, she wants out, but he drags her. Finally she throws his suitcase at him, rips off the dress, goes back to hang out with the other free spirits. He’s pretty wretched all alone, but, tant pis. He can’t go join her because as we know, he’s wearing the wrong underwear.
City to a score by David Van Tieghem that tocks and chimes rhythmically over quasi-industrial chugging and whirring, is apparently the major premiere of Muller’s season and it is endless. The backdrop shows an Art Deco sort of factory in construction; on one wing a cartoon building is cracking apart from the bottom (Décor by Anton van Dalen). People wearing black come suddenly into too-close proximity, getting slightly in one another’s way. There’s hostility, tough-guy brusqueness. Bodies wind quickly into twisted poses. The light lights bang into new shades whenever the music shifts from one phrase to the next. Christopher Pilafian in a fedora and dark jacket with a bright pink lining is forceful in a silky, dangerous way. And everybody wearing jackets with bright linings (costumes are by William Katz) that flash around their waist as they jump or whirl or bounce tightly with hard shrugging steps. Wolf slips around in red high heels, and two men flop heavily onstage as if bummed out by summer’s sullen heat.
Even in the pressured group sections, somewhat reminiscent of the workouts in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (largely because Van Tieghem is the composer in both cases), Muller doesn’t build any tension. Her City is a vague, restless cliché – utterly generic. You’d think she never lived in one. Occasional Encounters, an oblique descendant of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering might more properly have been titled Frequent Rejections. A moody, lyric piece dotted with trivial meetings, it’s the most sensible work on the program, but it’s still loaded with gratuitous melodrama, emotions that come and go nowhere. Dealings—pretend feelings—are in fact, the grease that keeps the mechanisms of Muller’s dances working.
There’s lovely dancing nevertheless. I particularly liked a playfully giddy leaping solo for Sylvia Logan that culminates in a demure hop into the arms of a reluctant John Brooks. The gloomy edge of Brooks’s strong objective dancing gives it an intriguing maturity. I admired Ron Brown’s juicy vitality, William Adair’s straightforward thrust, Christopher Pilafian’s fitness and intensity. The women—Lana Carroll, Jennifer Brilliant, Alison Diftler—are fine too but less distinctive characters. Nabil Nahan’s backdrop of gold and black rectangles with a bunch of pink splotches and some messy white vertical lines, is handsome indeed, Paul Halley’s piano music is agreeable but the solid color costumes by Belle McIntyre are a zero.
At the Joyce Theater (April 12 through 24).
Jennifer Muller’s company has a lot going for it. Her choreography spits out eloquent phrases, her dancers plunge headlong in a popular ecstatic mode and whip themselves into seductively rococo shapes. The eleven members of her company are excellent and so gorgeous any susceptible person would want to be them, or have them. So why is her work so profoundly depressing?
Because it’s so dumb. With the arching and twisting of the torso, the ornate, curving thrusts of the arms, Muller creates a passionate aura. She loves the dramatic opposition of bodies that spread out swiftly in lavish abandon, then retract and pull in. She can keep her human pinwheels zizzing around the stage. It’s the kind of work unsophisticated audiences love; pretty, lush, exciting, unambiguous, emotional without demanding any involvement on the part of the viewer. It’s not difficult or taxing to the audience – you can leave your brain at home. And dancers must love to dance these pieces, because they’re done so full-out and larded with a satisfying expressive oomph.
Though Muller has elaborated her vocabulary since the days of Tub and other early pieces, she is unwittingly pretentious, willfully naïve, and humorous as ever, and she still hasn’t learned to make a dance that doesn’t end 14 times before it’s over. John Brooks wearing white boxer shorts dresses for success out of a small suitcase in The Enigma (analytical/experimental), from 1986, a schematic piece that juxtaposes two stereotypes: five dancers in business outfits, who march and trot about in straight aggressive lines and four other, wearing fancy exotic flesh-colored underwear that features the women’s belly buttons, who crawl on stage like voluptuous spiders and lie back in flat arched poses as if only half-awake, awaiting the first dreamy screw of the day. They do a lot of curving, leaning, fondling, mushy stuff. They press their heads so far back in rapture that by rights they should get Excedrin headaches, but they don’t so their hearts must be pure. The rat-racers do get headaches; they’re choleric, urgent, worried, stressed; they rub their necks, bite their nails, and twitch.
Anyway, Brooks spies Angeline Wolf, one of the underwear people sleeping. He touches her. She wakes! but keeps slithering out of his arms. He grabs her possessively, won’t let her escape his demands. When eventually she gets back to her people, she’s plumb wore out. Then the pushy people attack Brooks and dump him. Wolf returns to him (I guess women do like to be treated like objects) but at first he won’t be consoled and then he gets bossy again. He slips a gray dress over her and gold jewelry, and she walks with him, numbly. I thought vaguely of Wordsworth – you know, trailing clouds of glory; here’s this innocent ex-nymph shoved into the “real world.” She doesn’t like hurrying in straight lines, she wants out, but he drags her. Finally she throws his suitcase at him, rips off the dress, goes back to hang out with the other free spirits. He’s pretty wretched all alone, but, tant pis. He can’t go join her because as we know, he’s wearing the wrong underwear.
City to a score by David Van Tieghem that tocks and chimes rhythmically over quasi-industrial chugging and whirring, is apparently the major premiere of Muller’s season and it is endless. The backdrop shows an Art Deco sort of factory in construction; on one wing a cartoon building is cracking apart from the bottom (Décor by Anton van Dalen). People wearing black come suddenly into too-close proximity, getting slightly in one another’s way. There’s hostility, tough-guy brusqueness. Bodies wind quickly into twisted poses. The light lights bang into new shades whenever the music shifts from one phrase to the next. Christopher Pilafian in a fedora and dark jacket with a bright pink lining is forceful in a silky, dangerous way. And everybody wearing jackets with bright linings (costumes are by William Katz) that flash around their waist as they jump or whirl or bounce tightly with hard shrugging steps. Wolf slips around in red high heels, and two men flop heavily onstage as if bummed out by summer’s sullen heat.
Even in the pressured group sections, somewhat reminiscent of the workouts in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (largely because Van Tieghem is the composer in both cases), Muller doesn’t build any tension. Her City is a vague, restless cliché – utterly generic. You’d think she never lived in one. Occasional Encounters, an oblique descendant of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering might more properly have been titled Frequent Rejections. A moody, lyric piece dotted with trivial meetings, it’s the most sensible work on the program, but it’s still loaded with gratuitous melodrama, emotions that come and go nowhere. Dealings—pretend feelings—are in fact, the grease that keeps the mechanisms of Muller’s dances working.
There’s lovely dancing nevertheless. I particularly liked a playfully giddy leaping solo for Sylvia Logan that culminates in a demure hop into the arms of a reluctant John Brooks. The gloomy edge of Brooks’s strong objective dancing gives it an intriguing maturity. I admired Ron Brown’s juicy vitality, William Adair’s straightforward thrust, Christopher Pilafian’s fitness and intensity. The women—Lana Carroll, Jennifer Brilliant, Alison Diftler—are fine too but less distinctive characters. Nabil Nahan’s backdrop of gold and black rectangles with a bunch of pink splotches and some messy white vertical lines, is handsome indeed, Paul Halley’s piano music is agreeable but the solid color costumes by Belle McIntyre are a zero.
At the Joyce Theater (April 12 through 24).
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
December 13
Dudley Williams has been dancing with the Alvin Ailey company, now marking its 30th anniversary at City Center, longer than anybody - since 1964. “There were only nine of us and we were indeed a family.” That family included James Truitte, William Louther, Lucinda Ransome, Joyce Trisler, and Kelvin Botardier. “My first tour, we went to Paris for two weeks and London was supposed to be for two weeks at the Shaftsbury Theater, but they kept us over for seven. We were a repertory company even at that time - we had pieces by Talley Beatty. That’s how I got the job. Somebody dropped out. I knew Talley’s work and Alvin needed a dancer who knew them.
And Williams stuck. That first year in Paris, Ailey gave him one of his own solos, Reflections in D, to perform, just as Ailey shared Hermit Songs with Bill Louther. “Twelve years ago he did a solo, Love Songs, for me, and I’m still doing it. It’s special to me. Nobody else gets a chance to do it, which is even nicer. He did it for me, and that’s a wonderful present."
“Alvin always wanted a large company, and kept adding dancers, two or three a year. Now we’re 29 or so, an institution rather than an intimate company. The style has changed, partly because the dancers are younger. In the ‘60s there wasn’t much black dance or black theater around. We always had to prove we were capable of performing or choreographing, and it was very, very difficult. Alvin was just starting out. I worked nights at Macy’s to make ends meet. Now, teenagers are paid to come to rehearsal, paid to take class, and it comes easy. There’s no struggle.”
Training’s different too. “I had [Antony] Tudor, [Alfredo] Corvino, the Graham company, May O’Donnell, Eleo Pomare, High School of Performng Arts, Juilliard - before I joined Alvin. I came with a vast knowledge of dance, music history, etcetera. A lot of younger dancers are missing out. They get into companies and they don’t know which end is up. Everything is clean - there’re clean lines, clean feet, nicely pointed feet, high legs, and that’s it. No soul. No, that’s too strong. But it can leave me cold. “Now it’s up to me to help these young dancers give a little more of themselves. And that’s the difficult part about dancing. You feel ugly when you have to go out of your face to cry or really laugh. When you’re angry, you’re not pretty. People are afraid to let their emotions show onstage, and that’s what I want to try to help younger dancers to do. I find it difficult myself.”
“Renee Robinson, Deborah Chase, Apri Berry, Elizabeth Roxas, and...I see her face, I see her face,” he mutters, shutting his eyes, “Ruthlyn Salomons! They’re young and they’re eager to lean. And Desmond Richardson. I am the worst with names. I call everybody ‘darling.’ This year we’re gonna try and push them a little further."
“This is my new lease on life, “he { } responsibility. “I want to coach younger dancers, though I’m still performing. Give the company more of my time.” Up till now, Williams hasn’t minded teaching, he’s considered it another job. “You have to give 100 per cent to it, and I still have the aching to dance. It’s going to come soon enough. Why look for it?”
Life in the Ailey company is lived out of a suitcase. Of the company’s 38 work weeks, only six or seven are spent rehearsing. In 1961 the State Department sent them on a five-month tour of Southeast Asia. They did gigs in Paris, London three months in Australia, in 1965, European festivals, the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, the USSR in 1971, where they were the first contemporary dance company seen since Isadora Duncan. It was only in the late ‘60s, having racked up credentials abroad, that the company began to play the States regularly.
“This company’s easy to get along with,” says Williams. “We enjoy each other on the road. That’s the test, living, working together, and seeing each other constantly for four months at a stretch. Half the time you’re closer with the other dancers than with your own personal relationships. If one of us gets sick, we all get sick, and pass around the aspirin to each other."
“Also, Alvin has changed, he lets a lot { } changing, it’s the choreography He’s always been on e to let you make the choreography your own, so through the years his choreography has had minor alterations. There are plenty of things I’ve changed in Revelations in the 25 years I’ve been in the company. Alvin even to some extent encourages it, to involve you more deeply in his works. If other choreographers want their pieces done exactly, he honors that. But he’s more lenient about his own work. He always wants you to take chances. He expects you to put yourself into it. In fact, he insists: ‘Be black or white, but don’t be gray.’”
"Something happens here in the U.S. When you’re 35 or 40 you’re suddenly old. When people hear of me dancing at 50 - omigod!” he cringes. Im not here because Alvin took pity on me. I’ve had my share of other companies, and this is the one I’ve enjoyed being with. There’s no reason I should stop dancing because of a number."
“I’m still nervous for every performance, even Revelations. Maybe more so in Revelations because I’ve got a reputation for my part in “I Want To Be Ready.” I'm not here to be a big star, whatever that means. I love what I’m doing, so what more is there? I’m dancing, I’m able to dance, and I’m enjoying it more than I did years ago because now I know what I’m doing { } “
Dudley Williams has been dancing with the Alvin Ailey company, now marking its 30th anniversary at City Center, longer than anybody - since 1964. “There were only nine of us and we were indeed a family.” That family included James Truitte, William Louther, Lucinda Ransome, Joyce Trisler, and Kelvin Botardier. “My first tour, we went to Paris for two weeks and London was supposed to be for two weeks at the Shaftsbury Theater, but they kept us over for seven. We were a repertory company even at that time - we had pieces by Talley Beatty. That’s how I got the job. Somebody dropped out. I knew Talley’s work and Alvin needed a dancer who knew them.
And Williams stuck. That first year in Paris, Ailey gave him one of his own solos, Reflections in D, to perform, just as Ailey shared Hermit Songs with Bill Louther. “Twelve years ago he did a solo, Love Songs, for me, and I’m still doing it. It’s special to me. Nobody else gets a chance to do it, which is even nicer. He did it for me, and that’s a wonderful present."
“Alvin always wanted a large company, and kept adding dancers, two or three a year. Now we’re 29 or so, an institution rather than an intimate company. The style has changed, partly because the dancers are younger. In the ‘60s there wasn’t much black dance or black theater around. We always had to prove we were capable of performing or choreographing, and it was very, very difficult. Alvin was just starting out. I worked nights at Macy’s to make ends meet. Now, teenagers are paid to come to rehearsal, paid to take class, and it comes easy. There’s no struggle.”
Training’s different too. “I had [Antony] Tudor, [Alfredo] Corvino, the Graham company, May O’Donnell, Eleo Pomare, High School of Performng Arts, Juilliard - before I joined Alvin. I came with a vast knowledge of dance, music history, etcetera. A lot of younger dancers are missing out. They get into companies and they don’t know which end is up. Everything is clean - there’re clean lines, clean feet, nicely pointed feet, high legs, and that’s it. No soul. No, that’s too strong. But it can leave me cold. “Now it’s up to me to help these young dancers give a little more of themselves. And that’s the difficult part about dancing. You feel ugly when you have to go out of your face to cry or really laugh. When you’re angry, you’re not pretty. People are afraid to let their emotions show onstage, and that’s what I want to try to help younger dancers to do. I find it difficult myself.”
“Renee Robinson, Deborah Chase, Apri Berry, Elizabeth Roxas, and...I see her face, I see her face,” he mutters, shutting his eyes, “Ruthlyn Salomons! They’re young and they’re eager to lean. And Desmond Richardson. I am the worst with names. I call everybody ‘darling.’ This year we’re gonna try and push them a little further."
“This is my new lease on life, “he { } responsibility. “I want to coach younger dancers, though I’m still performing. Give the company more of my time.” Up till now, Williams hasn’t minded teaching, he’s considered it another job. “You have to give 100 per cent to it, and I still have the aching to dance. It’s going to come soon enough. Why look for it?”
Life in the Ailey company is lived out of a suitcase. Of the company’s 38 work weeks, only six or seven are spent rehearsing. In 1961 the State Department sent them on a five-month tour of Southeast Asia. They did gigs in Paris, London three months in Australia, in 1965, European festivals, the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, the USSR in 1971, where they were the first contemporary dance company seen since Isadora Duncan. It was only in the late ‘60s, having racked up credentials abroad, that the company began to play the States regularly.
“This company’s easy to get along with,” says Williams. “We enjoy each other on the road. That’s the test, living, working together, and seeing each other constantly for four months at a stretch. Half the time you’re closer with the other dancers than with your own personal relationships. If one of us gets sick, we all get sick, and pass around the aspirin to each other."
“Also, Alvin has changed, he lets a lot { } changing, it’s the choreography He’s always been on e to let you make the choreography your own, so through the years his choreography has had minor alterations. There are plenty of things I’ve changed in Revelations in the 25 years I’ve been in the company. Alvin even to some extent encourages it, to involve you more deeply in his works. If other choreographers want their pieces done exactly, he honors that. But he’s more lenient about his own work. He always wants you to take chances. He expects you to put yourself into it. In fact, he insists: ‘Be black or white, but don’t be gray.’”
"Something happens here in the U.S. When you’re 35 or 40 you’re suddenly old. When people hear of me dancing at 50 - omigod!” he cringes. Im not here because Alvin took pity on me. I’ve had my share of other companies, and this is the one I’ve enjoyed being with. There’s no reason I should stop dancing because of a number."
“I’m still nervous for every performance, even Revelations. Maybe more so in Revelations because I’ve got a reputation for my part in “I Want To Be Ready.” I'm not here to be a big star, whatever that means. I love what I’m doing, so what more is there? I’m dancing, I’m able to dance, and I’m enjoying it more than I did years ago because now I know what I’m doing { } “